land, such as the Fannie Troup, Salem, Manzanillo, Traveler, Lurline, G. W.
Shaver, and local craft. One of the most indefatigable of our independent navi-
gators is Capt. U. B. Scott, with his two telephones, the first of which was
destroyed by fire ; river racers equal to anything of which the world has record.
Another very solid company is that of Joseph Kellogg & Son, having two good
steamboats, the Joseph Kellogg and Toledo, and making a specialty of naviga-
tion upon small streams, particularly the Cowlitz.
THE OREGON STEAM NAVIGATION COMPANY.
This great steamboat monopoly, which dominated the commerce of the Co- lumbia river, and dictated all the conditions of the growth and development of eastern Oregon and Washington for nearly twenty years, makes such an im- portant chapter in the growth of this city as to require a full account of its origin and principal financial operations. In his statement given above, Judge Strong refers to the hostility which was manifested against the company in the state of Washington, and as might be expected, as the attorney of the com- pany, seeks to placate the judgment of posterity. And to understand how a single corporation could get possession of and hold the transportation of the great Columbia river for nearly a generation, and charge such prices for its services as to make all of its owners millionaires, and hold back or advance the development of three great states, it will be necessary to consider the topo- graphical features of the country which enabled this corporation to acquire, hold and exercise such absolute powers over a great region.
THE BRIDGE OF THE GODS.
A very interesting and readable novel has been written on this subject, and the great majority of readers conclude that it is nothing more than an ingenious fabrication of a fertile brain. This, however, is a very great mistake. The Indian legend, that there was once, a vast time ago, so long that Indian legends can scarcely preserve the facts, a real stone bridge across the mighty Columbia river at the point where the river has cut its channel through the Cascade moun- tains, and now called the "Cascades," is undoubtedly founded upon a geological fact.
The reasons for this belief are to be found in the geology of the country — the testimony of the rocks. Rock deposits show, as is well established by Prof. Condon's "Two Islands," that an arm of the Pacific ocean once extended in- land beyond the Cascades, probably forty miles, in the far distant past. The shells of various extinct forms of marine shell fish are found in the rocks east of the Cascade mountains to prove this fact. Great areas of a fertile country, once covered with tropical trees and vegetation and inhabited by the great mastodon elephant, three-toed horse, sabre-toothed tigers, and other extinct forms of animal life have, in distant past ages, been overlaid with vast out- flows of lava thrown out by volcanoes in the Cascade range, now long since extinct. Chief among these great builders of mountains and plains are the two mountains — Hood and Adams. These two great mountain peaks, dominating the Cascade range for hundreds of miles and furnishing great safety valve dis- charges from fiery fluid contents of the interior of our globe, are equi-distant from the Columbia river, and about sixty miles distant from each other. Both sides of the Columbia between these mountains furnish the indisputable evi- dence in rock formations that a great field of lava rock was poured out over a landscape of sand detritus and surface soil. And when in active operation, these great volcanic vents discharged such contents of molten rock that, overspreading the whole region, the lava flood from one mountain would meet a like flood from its opposite mountain at a halfway point between the two volcanoes. These slow moving rivers of lava, carrying on their frontal margin a d
