WILDERNESS RIVER
The Willamette is one of the few American rivers of any volume flowing north. It is the largest river contained wholly within the state of Oregon.
"Lying like a cupped leaf dropped on the map of Oregon, with its veins the tributaries and its stem the main artery, wrote Verne Bright, the Oregon poet, in 1941, “the Willamette drains twelve thousand square miles of territory. Precisely confined by the snow-tipped Cascade Range, the ancient Clalapooyas, and the newer elevations of the Coast Range, it gathers moisture from the east, south and west, and in one tremendous north-flowing stream, pours it toward the Columbia. From the stem of the leaf where the Willamette enters the Columbia to the distant tip where the least faint stream fades in a mountain-side trickle, the veins are numerous and varied. Some, like the Tualatin, the Pudding, and the Long Tom are deceptively sluggish much of the year. . . Other branches, like the Clackamas, the Santiam, the Molalla, and the McKenzie are as unruly as the sound of their names. . ."
From the mountainous region at the head of the valley, the Willamette emerges as three forks. The Coast Fork bubbles from a mountain spring in a deeply forested wilderness. The Middle Fork flows from the base of Emigrant Butte, which towers over the pioneer road that threads through the Calapooyas. These two streams join in the valley's upper reaches. At a second point, not many miles below and to the north, the third fork, the McKenzie, joins the other two. To this fountain-head stream, in 1812, came Donald McKenzie, of Astor's Pacific Fur Company, exploring the river's possibilities as a source of beaver skins; but not for at least fifteen years more was it given his name. The courageous Scotsman did not guess the origin of the swift waters, though he must have glimpsed the white crests of the Three Sisters, from whose base they rise, to the east- ward in the Cascades.
The Willamette River had not one, but several discoverers, for no single man first saw more than a portion of its
