TILE MOUNTAINS AND VALLEYS OF TIIE PACIFIC COAST. The features to which reference is here made belong to three States, California, Oregon, and Washington. They will he best understood if it is observed that a single lofty range, the Sierra Nevada, forms the eastern border of Cali fornia, and that it extends, under the name of the Cascade Range, northward through central Oregon and Washington. Its culminating point, in California, is seemingly Mount Whitney (14.500 15,000 feet), which may also be the culminating point of the entire United States south of Alaska. Bordering the sea are lower and younger moun tains, constituting also a prolonged range. but variously named, as the Coast Range in Cali fornia, the Klamath Mountains in Oregon, and the Olympic Mountains in Washington. (See SIERRA NEVADA; CASCADE RANGE, etc.) Between these parallel ranges are lowland valleys of the importance in the development of the region. In California there is the great valley drained by the Sacramento and Joaquin rivers, the centre of the fruit and grain culture of the State. In Oregon the Willamette Valley is anal ogous in origin and in human importance to this, as still farther north there is the Puget Sound Valley in the State of Washington. In asso ciation with these mountain ranges, reference should be Made to the giant and minor volcanic cones which line their trend, and many of whose well-formed summits rise high into the snow line (Shasta, flood, Rainier. Baker). The coast line of the Pacific is not nearly so great as that of the Atlantic coast, because it is less indented. It has, howeve•, a few of the choicest bodies of inland or protected waters to be found on any shore. Such are San Francisco Bay rind Puget Sound, while the deep, tidal Columbia and Willamette rivers offer similar advantages to northern Oregon. It is thus seen that the Co• dilleran system is made up of several parallel ranges of mountains, separated in turn by inter montane areas of lofty plateau, or, nearer Pacific Ocean, by broad and fertile lowlands.
UYDROGRAPHy. The drainage of the United States may be classed as Atlantic and Pacific. As with the entire continent, and with South America, the smaller ocean receives by far the greater contribution of fresh water from the lands now under review. The Atlantic streams may be considered as belonging to the Hudson Bay, the Gulf, or to open sea drainage. With unimportant exceptions farther west. the Red River of the North carries the contribution of the 'United States area to Hudson Bay waters. The open sea streams are all of moderate length and volume except the Saint Lawrence, which should he viewed as rising in Minnesota, al though locally expanded into lakes of exceptional size. (For details concerning these bodies of water, the reader is referred to the article GREAT LAKES.) All the streams which enter the lakes from the 'United States are relatively small. Their courses are short, which is equal to saying that the line of water partings between the Laurentian and Mississippi basins is close to the lakes. The divide is also nearly everywhere quite inconspicuous. The streams have thus small capacity for transporting land waste into the lakes. Such waste as reaches the lakes rests in them, a condition from which results the ex ceeding clearness of Niagara, or of the Saint Lawrence waters that pass the Thousand Islands.
The open Atlantic streams, draining that part of the country which is historically oldest, and being often tidal, have a fame and a commercial value out of all proportion to their size. To begin with the rivers of New England. its Con spicuous streams, the Penobscot, Kennebec, Merrimac, Connecticut, and Housatonic, are most of them entered by the tides for many miles. The Merrimac and Connecticut, above tide water, are types of many New England rivers which are interrupted by rapids due to glacial blockade, thus furnishing a great store of water power.