THE PORT of the COLUMBIA
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How the People of the Pacific Northwest Are Battling to Connect an Inland Empire With the Panama Canal
By RANDALL R. HOWARD
A WAR is raging on the Pacific Coast. Recently a senator from Oregon appealed to Congress to set aside a million-and-a-half dollars for the construction, under the supervision of the War Department, of a new kind of sea-going dreadnaught. The new fighting machine is to be bigger, more spectacular, than any craft of the kind that has ever floated the Stars and Stripes. It is to be designed especially for patrol duty at the mouth of the Columbia river and its construction is to take no particular account of the three American forts supplemented by bristling land batteries and numerous submarine mines and the several companies of soldiers now guarding the mouth of this mighty international river.
In the meantime, during the coming summer—for this war is not to be called off for many a long day—should you be curiously inclined to view its operations, you will find at the mouth of the Columbia one of the Nation's sea-going craft which helped to make history during the Spanish American war—the U. S. Army transport "Grant." The hulking war transport will be acting strangely, apparently amusing itself by drifting back and forth across the ocean swells that mark the Columbia river bar. Yet, in reality, the "Grant" is very busy, only she is no longer the "Grant" of our Spanish war days but remade, if you please, into the giant sand dredger, "Chinook."
For such is the war in which these new fighting craft are needed, this spirited and organized struggle on the part of Uncle Sam and the states of the Pacific Northwest against the perverseness of one of the great rivers of the American continent. By all the pet terms of the lexicographer this is war: a violent strife, an active state of hostility, an armed conflict with a planned definite end. It is not less a war because the opposing forces are man and nature.
It is war because destinies are involved. The immediate future of a territory as large as the German Empire is in the balance.
Would you have a bird's-eye picture of the whole field of this battle? From the position of your scouting aeroplane, just east of the Cascade mountains, trace the 1400-mile thread of the Columbia. To the east and the north, your vision will be carried past reclaimed deserts, now orchards and rolling wheat fields, past grazing lands, timbered and mineralized mountains, unfettered waterfalls. Follow to its source and you will have traversed six hundred and fifty miles across the Canadian line. And before you have traced the threads of the various streams that join the Upper Columbia river you will have viewed nearly all of Oregon, Washington
