The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest Read Free

writerly inspiration. He found all of that, and more. His book was a song to the infant Northwest, and it was prophetic.
    Winthrop arrived in the Oregon Territory in the early summer and quickly caught smallpox, the scourge of the native population. While convalescing in a fort above the Columbia River, he fell in love with the land. He felt as if he were living in a painting, one of those rich, pre-Impressionist oil renderings that had so gloried the Hudson River Valley. Stricken with the pox, he missed an early caravan back east. Rather than brood, he decided on a quick adventure—north of the Columbia. Late in the summer of 1853, he sailed to Victoria, then a handful of homes and a trading post on the large island which the British were trying to remake into an outpost of old England and had named for George Vancouver, a chubby, iron-willed explorer whose cartographic legacy is everywhere in these parts. It was on the southern tip of Vancouver Island that Winthrop began his journey back south and then east. That adventure is the story of The Canoe and the Saddle .
    The trip of 320 miles took him by canoe down Puget Sound, by horseback around the north and east flanks of Mount Rainier, across the Cascades into the dry, fertile valley country around Yakima and then down to The Dalles, a desert cleave in the Cascades where the ColumbiaRiver has carved out the magnificent gorge. At the time, there were less than four thousand whites living north of the river, in what is now Washington State and British Columbia, visited annually by 20 million people. Today, they come to see what Winthrop saw: the ice cone of Mount Baker rising off the horizon of the San Juan Islands; the whales playing in clear water surrounding the islands; the unbelievable bulk of Rainier, with its thirty-five square miles of eternal ice; the thousand-year-old evergreens thriving on Pacific storms that pummel the wet side of the Cascades; the desert flowers growing in rain shadow east of the crest, now orchard and wine country; the Columbia River, last great hope for a Northwest Passage, called the River of the West; the snowfields of Mount Hood, the juniper-tree high country surrounding Oregon’s sawed-off volcanoes, and the sublime violence of that state’s coastline.
    Opening his book, I find that Winthrop, contrary to my perception of his Puritan breeding, is a renegade with the language—an unhoned Twain set loose in a country where no one can challenge him. His writing is undisciplined, given to flowery flights of description and sweeping racial denigration of the Coastal Salish Indians, who were then fast dying from the smallpox epidemic. He has little time for the characters he meets, hardscrabble prospectors, drunken explorers and natives who stink of body odor and campfires; he prefers the company of forests and creekbeds and durable horses.
    Even so, he makes a few good points that are still pertinent nearly a century and a half later. Near the end of his journey, he concludes that a new human order can rise in the wilderness, a civilization ennobled by the wild, leaving behind the rusted thought and social patterns of the East, which he views as an America not yet a hundred years old but already showing signs of enfeeblement. In the Northwest, where the mountains meet the Pacific, Winthrop prophesied that a special breed would predominate, one infused with the spirit of the land; he hoped that the American character would mature at last in the far corner of the country.
    He wrote:
Our race has never yet come into contact with great mountains as companions of daily life, nor felt that daily development of the finer and more comprehensive senses which these signal facts of nature compel. That is an influence of the future. These Oregon people, in a climate where being is bliss—where every breath is a draught of vivid life—these Oregon people, carrying to a newer and grander New England of the West a full growth of the American