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Continuing his graphic description of this wonderful natural phenomenon in Douglas County, Mr. Brown says:
There is a wagon road from Coulee City to the Columbia river that is forty miles long and is as level as a floor. When it reaches the river it finds itself 300 feet above the water and 1 ,000 feet below the general level of the country. This road alters the Grand Coulee, where the east wall is lacking, and winds its way in a general northeast direction through the canyon to a point near the Columbia, where it is left literally 'up in the air.' The traveler must either descend to water level or climb to the surface of the ground. By this road those who live in the bottom of the Coulee find their way to the railroad at Coulee City, to the river at Barry, or to the justly celebrated Ridge country that lies between the Central Washington railroad and the Columbia whose postoffices are Tipso, Lincoln, Hasseltine, Sherman, Layton and Clark. A word here about this ridge may not be amiss. The chief towns and shipping points for this part of the Big Bend country are Almira, Hartline, Govan, Wilbur, and Creston, on the Central Washington branch of the Northern Pacific. These are flourishing towns because of the fine wheat producing country back of them. The future of this portion of the Big Bend, which is in the northwest quarter of Lincoln, and the northeast corner of Douglas county, is easy to predict. There is no valid reason why towns to compare favorably with Almira or Wilbur should not spring up along the line of any competing common carrier of rapid transit ready to convey the produce of this country to the northwest coast or to Spokane and the east. Let the freight trains and the steamboats come and the 'Ridge' will be there with the goods. Let him who doubts this stand on one of the highest points of this ridge near the postoffice of Tipso in the spring or in the harvest time, and these doubts will be dispelled. Let him in the spring attempt to measure with his eye the vastness of the billowy green carpet; let him in the harvest time attempt to count the number of threshing machines at work in the wheat, the oats and the barley. Let him reckon up all he can hear, all he can see and all he can guess at. He will not guess wrong, guided by the smoke, and steam and dust. * * *.
Harking back to the Coulee road, a trip along it will disclose the bottom of the Grand Coulee, from end to end of the 40-mile section from Coulee City to the Columbia, covered with well tilled and productive farms. Many of these are irrigated and are object lessons showing what the once despised 'ashes' that com- pose the lava soil will do when it comes into seasonable contact with water.
The first comers naturally chose out for settlement the land where water was found on the surface, and the appearance of their farms today amply justifies their choice. It is true that irrigation is not now conducted in the Coulee on anything like a large scale. That will come when the engineering problem presented by the condition found is solved, and water is brought in, either from the Spokane or the Columbia. But just now the numerous large springs scattered over the Coulee bottom give water copious enough in flow to supply orchards and gardens, and in some instances, even hay and wheat fields. It is true, also, that some of the Coulee bottom has been taken up under the desert claim law and is now held under the conditions laid down by that law. But this does not prove anything against the fertility of the coulee bottom—the which you can easily verify by undertaking to buy a farm there.
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And again, it is true that many poor houses are found, particularly in the northern end. These are the 'shacks' of the bachelor homesteader, who is a comparatively late comer. What will these same shacks grow to in a short time? It may be taken for granted that every bachelor in the coulee—and for that matter in the whole of the Big Bend—looks forward to a cosy, comfortable home, and a 'queen of the fireside' with whom to patriotically carry out the injunction of the president in whom is the virility of the west, and see to it that this nation does not decay for lack of native citizens, and incidentally, old age. And this is the present bachelor's Ultima Thule, and is as it should be. Only, he goes a step farther, and proposes that his future happy state will also be a prosperous one.
And so he goes literally into the bowels of the earth, makes claim there to the dead ashes of an extinct volcano, strikes for living waters—and, by the way, finds them—and makes the desert to grow green with young, vigorous life. He builds his home, or the beginning thereof, near to running water, or a likely place to dig for it. He keeps away from the crumbling coulee wall, for this precaution is necessary from the nature of the rock, which disintegrates quickly under the action of heat, cold, sun, wind and rain, and is continually falling in small fragments. Occasionally—which means that an old residenter can cite a few instances—a huge chunk comes hurling down to the base of the wall, and the homesteader is grateful to exclaim, 'Never touched me!' As you ride through the chasm you can hear the constant drip, as it were, of the stone, and the effect of the echoes from wall to wall is very similar to the reverberations of drip water in a great cave. Similarly, too, these sounds, perhaps because peculiar to so strange a place, one always associates in memory with any act or phase of the coulee. It is the same with all other sounds there. They take on a strangeness of their own, and all those evidences of life, the lowing of cattle, the call of wild fowl, the shout of men, the throb of threshing machines assume a weird fantastic quality entirely in keeping with their apparently unnatural surroundings. It is impossible to locate any sound. It is curious to watch a man, for instance nailing boards on a barn and at some distance from you. The sounds of the hammer will come any direction other than the barn, and they will be multiplied to your mystification.
These are some of the things that leave ineffaceable impressions with the traveler in the coulee. It is an ideal place to experience that auricular illusion caused by a dying echo. A shot, say from a rifle, echoes and re-echoes, and seems to travel miles away from up the coulee, zigzagging from wall to wall until it gets so far away you can't hear it. You can follow it in imagination until it goes out the other end. This is your impression, and it must be confessed 'tis a strong one and hard to shake off. The coulee walls are, of course, lava. You can plainly see on their thousand foot depth of face, how thick were the successive flows of molten volcanic rock and how many. How long ago the first of these flows occurred is for geology to say. What time elapsed between each successive flow is a question belonging to geology, also. What made this gap gigantic in the earth, anyhow, is a question too big to discuss here. The coloring of the walls is something worth going a long journey to see. Not that the work itself is anything but black. That is the natural color, if color it can be called, of basaltic lava. It is the moss, the lichens, the weather stains, the sage brush, the wild currants, the grease wood, the small pines, firs and mountain ash, covering the whole face of the coulee wall and growing in every crack and crevice, that give the color. Modified, all, by distance and the rarity and purity of the air. Glorious color it is, blended in all hues, of all shades and gradations. Contrasts and harmonies there are. Contrasts as
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gorgeous and glaring as the headgear of the southern negro woman. Harmonies as soothing to the eye as any caught and fixed upon perishable canvas. Here be 'atmosphere' for the artistic in plenty and 'breadth' in unlimited quantities. Though the painted desert of Nevada and New Mexico may be beyond compare, yet here are found fragments of it, caught, enclosed, ready framed between walls more ornamental than any moulding of plaster of Paris and wood, waiting to be examined, analyzed and admired, seen, known and loved.
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| STEAMBOAT ROCK, GRAND COULEE, DOUGLAS COUNTY |
Steamboat Rock is productive of a strange optical illusion. There are distant mountain peaks overcapping the rock, and glimpses of them may be caught as you attempt to walk rapidly along the sides of the sculptured fabric; but the faster you walk the more rapidly appears this stone ship to move. Of course this is a case of "misplaced optics," but the illusion is perfect. One can scarcely compel himself to believe that the stone ship is really anchored at the bottom of Grand Coulee. And there are many farms nestling at its base. From a distance the rock appears to be surrounded by water. This illusion is more pronounced if you approach it by way of the Bell Trail down into the coulee. It is caused by alkali lakes, destitute of water, but dazzling, snow-white beds of soda. During the winter season they become lakes of real water. However, compared to the wide extent of fertile, arable land, these alkali "blight spots" are insignificant.
In the marshy sedges of the real lakes, and there are several in the coulee, ducks, brant, swans, and cranes come in flocks of thousands. Especially true is this of Devil's Lake, called by some Tule Lake. In hunting these birds a retriever is absolutely necessary. To shoot winged game from the coulee walls is a piece of inanity. It may be rare sport to see the wounded bird drop a thousand feet into the boson of the earth, but it is decidedly unprofitable. Neither man nor dog can retrieve it; it might as well have gone a mile up into the heavens.
Of the far famed Pilot Rock, one more of Douglas county's geological freaks, Mr. Harry
Jefferson Brown writes:
Pilot Rock, Washington, stands on the west wall of the Grand Coulee, eight miles from Coulee City, Douglas county, and is the
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finger post marking the gateway to the Big Bend country and pointing the way to the fertile plains lying within the embrace of the greatest river of the great northwest. Long before you get into the Big Bend proper, and while you are puzzling out the intricacies of the scab rock country beyond Davenport, you will see that rock silhouetted against the horizon, and you will know that it stands on the only spot where it is practicable to cross the Grand Coulee, at any point within a length of sixty miles, with a wagon. And if you are a wise man you will know that this is the point you should aim for, since beyond lies the land for the homemaker. Later you will see that rock outlined against the snowy summits of the Cascade mountains, with Glacier peak glistening like a day star over Lake Chelan.
But this is only when you have climbed the long hill to Pilot Rock from Coulee City that's in the bottom of the Grand Coulee. The climb is made for eight miles in an involved series of loops, slants and switchboards, Haystack Rock, the old settlers call it. Likely they, being from the east, made the same mistake as the tenderfoot did lately, who riding through the Big Bend, remarked on the quantity of hay they raised in that country and the huge stacks they made.
"Where?" said the guide.
"Why, right over there in that field," said the tenderfoot, pointing to Haystack, or Pilot Rock.
"Them's rocks," said the guide sententiously.
But nothing would satisfy that tenderfoot but a personal investigation, and nothing would do but that he should go 'right over there,' which proved to be a three mile hike, and stand and gaze before a grim 60 feet of lava that, pilot to the Inland Empire as it was, yet bore an exact resemblance to the weather blackened haystacks of the Mississippi and Ohio valleys. Great indeed was this tenderfoot's surprise and warm his imagination when he was shown the true 'wheat hay' of the land, all bright, 'green and gold.'
"I never saw the like before," said the tenderfoot. And he hadn't.
"How do they produce that exquisite coloring?" he asks again, for he is here to learn.
"Grow it," said the guide. And it is sufficient to know but this. But later when it was learned that hay was sold for $18 a ton, a roseate hue was added to its other tints for the tenderfoot.
But haystack or rock be it taken for, it is a safe pilot for those west of the coulee seeking through that great fissure the overland route to Spokane; and to those from the east it is a landmark to be seen from afar, guiding the way to the wheat country in the Columbia plateau and to the fruit country of the Columbia benches.
To one who is seeking a taste of the old romance of the stage coaching days, Coulee City offers an excellent opportunity to find it. There is more than a romantic flavor about the sight of the stage from Bridgeport, and the Okanogan, swinging down the winding, doubling, twisting road from Pilot Rock on the top of the wall to Coulee City at the bottom, the four ponies at their natural gait, the lope, the driver interpelating a few choice remarks in stage driver language, punctuated with frequent sharp cracks of the whip, and the passengers hanging on for dear life, in enjoyment or fear, as suits each temperament. They swing into sight a mere speck at the top of the hill, heralded, if it is summer, by a cloud of dust. Every team on the hill, and there are many in the harvest time, seeks a safe siding to give a clear road to Uncle Sam's mail train. This is no easy task, to get out of the way; but those who know keep but of the 'chutes,' that short circuit, the loops and turns. The novice or the tenderfoot teamster is very apt to plant himself squarely in the middle of the right of way, and when the meeting comes, as inevitably it must, that particular locality is a good place to be
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absent from for those whose ears are easily shocked, and those of the passengers who escape unscathed are treated to a warmth of colloquy equaled only by the glow of the local color, and a flow of language whose picturesqueness is only rivaled by that of the surrounding scenery. And only in the great northwest, and only where it comes in touch again with the palmy days of the old stage coach, could such things be found. It is indeed an inspiring scene, and that 'tis duly appreciated is shown in the fact that all Coulee City is out to see and get the news from Okanogan and the north. For Coulee City, at the bottom of the canyon, is interested in what takes place in the north. Her people want keenly to know just where and when that railroad from Bellingham, of the new birth, is coming through the Cascades, and what feeders and feelers it will throw out, and where. They wish to learn, too, as soon as may be, what foundation there is for the talk of the Canadian roads coming down into Washington and just where they will come and when. For although Coulee City has a direct outlet now through Adrain to the Pacific coast, yet much of the wheat shipped from there must be hauled overland distances as great as 30 miles or more. And particularly is there a desire to learn whether these roads, even though they may pass to Spokane far to the north, will, by tapping the rich Methow valley, and the Colville Reservation country soon to be opened for settlement, induce the Central Washington to extend its line over the Coulee wall, past St. Andrews, and so on to Waterville, to connect again with the main line to the coast at Wenatchee. These are matters of bigimport to the people of the Grand Coulee bottom of the Big Bend.
There is what seems to be an abortive attempt to extend this road over the Coulee wall. You can see the grade making about up the hill, coiling and doubling back upon itself, but scale-less—naked—devoid of ties or rails. There is also the gradeway of a rival road, though it does not climb so high; and it shows signs of violent and abrupt disintegration in spots, not due entirely to the natural disruptive forces of gravitation on the steep hillsides. People say that these grades were built fourteen years ago, more for the sake of circumventing and forestalling the fellow that owned the other road than through any serious attempt to reach the Columbia plateau beyond. And the people are anxious to see the road go over the hills in earnest, and would wish nothing better than that any of the proposed roads from the north penetrating the Inland Empire will prove the loadstone that will draw the Northern Pacific over the Coulee wall.
The view from the top of Pilot Rock on a clear day—and all the days in summer in the Big Bend are clear—is very extensive. If 'distance lends enchantment to the view,' then it's most enchanting, for the distance at which you can see the prominent natural features of central Washington are great. The Blue Mountains of historic Wallowa are too far under the horizon to discover, but Steptoe Butte, down in Whitman county, can be seen if looked for in the right place. This butte is named as a memorial of the fight Colonel Steptoe had with the Indians back in the '50s. Almost due east Mica Peak, 'Old Mike Peak,' pricks out a point against the blue of the Coeur d'Alenes that form the sky line; and all between is color—gorgeous color. The purple plain spreads, apparently unlimited, to the north, east and south, and merges almost undistinguishably into the blue of the sky. You see no definition to the prairie except the landmarks named. Right under you, a quarter of a mile down and eight miles away, lies Coulee City, looking like a bunch of sardine, oyster and tomato cans just swept out of a back door, with here and there an abandoned 'growler,' looming up to represent the public school house, the largest hotel and the railroad warehouses. Or, to make a more pleasing comparison, the city resembles from this height and distance a handful of
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brightly colored toys scattered and forgotten by a sleepy child tired of its playthings. A dozen miles further east you can see Hartline, lying on the purple prairie like an artist's palette, conspicuous only by a few dots of bright colors. And stretching away clear across Lincoln county to the east and to the south are rows of many towns and villages, mere specks on the plain, but spots hazy with the smoke of industry. Material evidence they are of the westward march of enterprise. To the east and a little north you catch glimpses of Mount Carleton's bald head—'Old Baldy'—as the Spokane people love to call him. Farther south are the Summit mountains, and these are the ones you see as you journey west from the city of Spokane, and that persist in racing west- ward with you, getting ahead of you until you'd swear they were voyaging down on the swift current of the Columbia. Mitre Rock, at Spokane rapids, is hidden by the bluff in the elbow formed by the quick turn of the Columbia's course from south to west. These bluffs extend from the rock to Hellgate, above the mouth of the Sans Poil river. Here, at Hellgate, is the proposed crossing of the railroad from Bellingham Bay to Spokane.As one travels on cars or steamboats he sees little or none of the beauties of the fertile prairie country of Douglas county. These
To the north, and almost in a line with the pole. Mount Bonaparte, 'Old Boney,' looms up, overtopping the bunch grass hills of the Okanogan and Colville country and indicating the northern limit of United States territory. Farther to the west, and a little more distant, are Mounts Chapaca and Palmer, in Okanogan county, the latter the scene of the recent phenomenal gold find. Between you and these lies the valley of the Okanogan, surely destined for speedy development by the penetration of railroads from the north and from the coast. Conconully, the county seat, lies in the line of sight, but shows no sign form your view point. To the west a little farther are the Okanogan mountains, and west of these again you can see the ultramarine of the Methow range showing clear against the purity of the snow capped Cascades. There is a white point of mountain top, barely discernable, showing between the peaks of the Cascades in the northwest. This point must be the summit of either Mount Baker in Whatcom county, or Mount Shuksan, the watershed of the Hokullam river, one of the branches of the Skagit. Interest centers in the headwaters of the Skagit, for here are to be found the only feasible routes for railroads from the west through the Cascade range, the great dividing line between the coast country and the Inland Empire. Glacier Peak will catch your eye, undoubtedly, if the sun is right, and then you will be looking across the full length of Lake Chelan. Lucky you are if the weather is right and Chelan does not obscure the 'eye of the Cascades' with her rising mists. Away to the west and south, to complete the circuit, are Mount Howard, at Stevens Pass, Mount Stuart, with its three peaks, resembling the Three Sisters in Vermont, just beyond Wenatchee of the rosy apples. But for the Badger Mountains, a low range extending from a point on the Columbia river southwest of Waterville, Douglas county, to the Columbia again, at the mouth of Moses Coulee, you might catch a glimpse of Mount Rainier, or Tah-co-mah, as the Indians love to call it. A peak as perfect in form as famed Fujiyama, in Japan, and the delight and pride of the people of the city of Tacoma on Admiralty inlet.
And so with one last look around to feast the eyes on color and to fix in the mind a grander panorama than even the classic Alps can afford, you climb down from Pilot Rock with sincere regret, and with a determination to renew acquaintance with these great things of the northwest, that undoubtedly have left their impress upon the character of her people, and are typical of her future greatness.
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conventional lines of travel he must leave and go out and up and over it, when an agreeable surprise awaits the investigator. Here and there most attractive homes accentuate the possibilities for him who will possess himself of a few acres of this productive land, and improve the opportunities which lie at his feet. To the eastern man the quality of the soil will prove a revelation. He has been accustomed to the black loam or sandy soil so common in the east or middle west. Here the soil is neither. It is a light gray color, termed by geologists volcanic ash. It has been formed by the corroding and disintegration of the lava rock with which the soil is underlaid. And it as fertile as the famous river valleys of the east; it has the excellent quality of never washing nor baking should it be worked when too damp. Another important quality is its wonderful retention of moisture. Properly prepared a good crop of spring wheat may be secured without a drop of rain between spring time and harvest. In many instances this wonderful soil is sixty feet in depth. A well-known traveler who tarried for awhile in Douglas county wrote as follows to an eastern journal:
This is the great wheat producing region of Central Washington and for which it has become noted all over the world. A yield of thirty bushels per acre is usual, while forty to fifty bushels of wheat is not an uncommon yield. To make the greatest success, wheat is sown on land that has been summer fallowed the preceding year and but one-half bushel per acre is required for seed. Oats, barley and other cereals succeed equally with wheat, while all garden vegetables and root crops are grown with success and satisfaction. While the Big Bend country has never claimed to be a fruit growing region, it is not because fruit cannot be grown there. A sight of the many fine orchards would soon overcome that idea. Apples, pears, prunes, cherries and all the smaller varieties of hardy fruits and berries are grown with success, but not so much for profit as an accompaniment of the well-established home. With better facilities for market, fruit growing will become a money making proposition in the Big Bend country.
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