The Columbia River’s Wildest Visitor
A young boy in White Bluffs learns the hard way that the wilderness is closer than it looks.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Eastern bathers whose pastime is threatened by man-eating sharks have nothing on us, at that. While the Arrowsmith boys and a son of J. P. Richmond were disporting themselves in the waters of the Columbia one day last week, a boy-biting coyote rushed out from behind a bush near and bit the Richmond boy quite severely before it could be frightened away by that youth’s companions. No, the effete East has nothing on us.
“Eastern bathers whose pastime is threatened by man-eating sharks have nothing on us, at that.”
In 1916, White Bluffs residents defined themselves against the 'effete East,' finding a rugged, sometimes dangerous, humor in the wild nature of the Columbia River. Today, the river has been transformed by massive dams and irrigation projects, leaving that untamed frontier a distant memory beneath the surface of the landscape.
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