of the junction of that river with the Columbia. Seen from its water
approach, Portland is a picturesque city, with a near surrounding of
hills, wooded with pines and firs, that make a superb sky-line setting
to the town, and to the five grand snow-peaks, of which clear days
give a sight. These dark forests and spear-top fringes are a more
distinctive feature in the beauty of Portland's site than even its
fine waters and islands. It is to be hoped that the Portland people
will appreciate their value, and never let their near hills be shorn
of trees. Not one tree more should be cut. Already there are breaks in
the forest horizons, which mar the picture greatly; and it would take
but a few days of ruthless wood choppers' work to rob the city forever
of its backgrounds, turning them into unsightly barrens. The city is
on both sides of the river, and is called East and West Portland. With
the usual perversity in such cases, the higher ground and the sunny
eastern frontage belong to the less popular part of the city, the west
town having most of the business and all of the fine houses. Yet in
times of freshet its lower streets are always under water; and the
setting-up of back-water into drains, cellars, and empty lots is a
yearly source of much illness. When we arrived, two of the principal
hotels were surrounded by water; from one of them there was no going
out or coming in except by planks laid on trestle-work in the piazzas,
and the air in the lower part of the town was foul with bad smells
from the stagnant water.
Portland is only thirty years old, and its population is not over
twenty-five thousand; yet it is said to have more wealth per head than
any other city in the United States except New Haven. Wheat and lumber
and salmon have made it rich. Oregon wheat brings such prices in
England that ships can afford to cross the ocean to get it; and last
year one hundred and thirty-four vessels sailed out of Portland
harbor, loaded solely with wheat or flour.
The city reminds one strongly of some of the rural towns in New
England. The houses are unpretentious, wooden, either white or of
light colors, and uniformly surrounded by pleasant grounds, in which
trees, shrubs, and flowers grow freely, without any attempt at formal
or decorative culture. One of the most delightful things about the
town is its surrounding of wild and wooded country. In an hour,
driving up on the hills to the west, one finds himself in wildernesses
of woods: spruce, maple, cedar, and pine; dogwood, wild syringa,
honeysuckle, ferns and brakes fitting in for undergrowth; and below
all, white clover matting the ground. By the roadsides are Linnæa, red
clover, yarrow, May-weed, and dandelion, looking to New England eyes
strangely familiar and unfamiliar at once. Never in New England woods
and roadsides do they have such a luxurious diet of water and rich
soil, and such comfortable warm winters. The white clover especially
has an air of spendthrifty indulgence about it which is delicious. It
riots through the woods, even in their densest, darkest depths, making
luxuriant pasturage where one would least look for it. On these wooded
heights are scores of dairy farms, which have no clearings except of
the space needful for the house and outbuildings. The cows, each with
a bell at her neck, go roaming and browsing all day in the forests.
Out of thickets scarcely penetrable to the eye come everywhere along
the road the contented notes of these bells' slow tinkling at the
cows' leisure. The milk, cream, and butter from these dairy farms are
of the excellent quality to be expected, and we wondered at not seeing
"white clover butter" advertised as well as "white clover honey." Land
in these wooded wilds brings from forty to eighty dollars an acre;
cleared, it is admirable farm land. Here and there we saw orchards of
cherry and apple trees, which were loaded with fruit; the cherry trees
so full that they showed red at a distance.
The alternation of these farms with long tracts of forest, where
spruces and pines stand a hundred and fifty feet high, and myriads of
wild things have grown in generations of tangle, gives to the country
around Portland a charm and flavor peculiarly its own; even into the
city itself extends something of the same charm of contrast and
antithesis; meandering footpaths, or narrow plank sidewalks with
grassy rims, running within stone's-throw of solid brick blocks and
business thoroughfares. One of the most interesting places in the town
is the Bureau of Immigration of the Northern Pacific Railroad. In the
centre of the room stands a tall case, made of the native Oregon
woods. It journeyed to the Paris and the Philadelphia Expositions,
but nowhere can it have given eloquent mute answer to so many
questions as it does in its present place. It now holds jars of all
the grains raised in Oregon and Washington Territory; also sheaves of
superb stalks of the same grains, arranged in circles,--wheat six feet
high, oats ten, red clover over six, and timothy grass eight. To see
Swedes, Norwegians, Germans, Irish, come in, stand wonderingly before
this case, and then begin to ask their jargon of questions, was an
experience which did more in an hour to make one realize what the
present tide of immigration to the New Northwest really is than
reading of statistics could do in a year. These immigrants are pouring
in, it is estimated, at the rate of at least a hundred and fifty a
day,--one hundred by way of San Francisco and Portland, twenty-five by
the Puget Sound ports, and another twenty-five overland by wagons; no
two with the same aim, no two alike in quality or capacity. To listen
to their inquiries and their narratives, to give them advice and help,
requires almost preternatural patience and sagacity. It might be
doubted, perhaps, whether this requisite combination could be found in
an American; certainly no one of any nationality could fill the office
better than it is filled by the tireless Norwegian who occupies the
post at present. It was touching to see the brightened faces of his
countrymen, as their broken English was answered by him in the
familiar words of their own tongue. He could tell well which parts of
the new country would best suit the Hardanger men, and the men from
Eide. It must have been hard for them to believe his statements, even
when indorsed by the home speech. To the ordinary Scandinavian
peasant, accustomed to measuring cultivable ground by hand-breadths,
and making gardens in pockets in rocks, tales of hundreds of unbroken
miles of wheat country, where crops average from thirty-five to
forty-five bushels an acre, must sound incredible; and spite of their
faith in their countryman, they are no doubt surprised when their
first harvest in the Willamette or Umpqua valley proves that his
statements were under, rather than over, the truth.
The Columbia River steamers set off from Portland at dawn, or
thereabouts. Wise travellers go on board the night before, and their
first morning consciousness is a wonder at finding themselves
afloat,--afloat on a sea; for it hardly seems like river voyaging when
shores are miles apart, and, in many broad vistas, water is all that
can be seen. These vistas, in times of high water, when the Columbia
may be said to be fairly "seas over," are grand. They shine and
flicker for miles, right and left, with green feathery fringes of
tree-tops, and queer brown stippled points and ridges, which are house
gables and roof-trees, not quite gone under. One almost forgets, in
the interest of the spectacle, what misery it means to the owners of
the gables and roof-trees.
At Washougal Landing, on the morning when we went up the river, all
that was to be seen of the warehouse on the wharf at which we should
have made landing was the narrow ridge-line of its roof; and this was
at least a third of a mile out from shore. The boat stopped, and the
passengers were rowed out in boats and canoes, steering around among
tree-tops and houses as best they might.
The true shore-line of the river we never once saw; but it cannot be
so beautiful as was the freshet's shore of upper banks and
terraces,--dark forests at top, shifting shades of blue in every rift
between the hills, iridescent rainbow colors on the slopes, and gray
clouds, white-edged, piled up in masses above them, all floating apace
with us, and changing tone and tint oftener than we changed course.
As we approached the Cascade Mountains, the scenery grew grander with
every mile. The river cuts through this range in a winding cañon,
whose sides for a space of four or five miles are from three to four
thousand feet high. But the charm of this pass is not so much in the
height and grandeur as in the beauty of its walls. They vary in color
and angle, and light and shadow, each second,--perpendicular rock
fronts, mossy brown; shelves of velvety greenness and ledges of
glistening red or black stone thrown across; great basaltic columns
fluted as by a chisel; jutting tables of rock carpeted with yellow and
brown lichen; turrets standing out with firs growing on them; bosky
points of cottonwood trees; yellow and white blossoms and curtains of
ferns, waving out, hanging over; and towering above all these, peaks
and summits wrapped in fleecy clouds. Looking ahead, we could see
sometimes only castellated mountain lines, meeting across the river,
like walls; as we advanced they retreated, and opened with new vistas
at each opening. Shining threads of water spun down in the highest
places, sometimes falling sheer to the river, sometimes sinking out of
sight in forest depths midway down, like the famed fosses of the
Norway fjords. Long sky-lines of pines and firs, which we knew to be
from one hundred to three hundred feet tall, looked in the aerial
perspective no more than a mossy border along the wall. A little girl,
looking up at them, gave by one artless exclamation a true idea of
this effect. "Oh," she cried, "they look just as if you could pick a
little bunch of them." At intervals along the right-hand shore were to
be seen the white-tented encampments of the Chinese laborers on the
road which the Northern Pacific Railroad Company is building to link
St. Paul with Puget Sound. A force of three thousand Chinamen and two
thousand whites is at work on this river division, and the road is
being pushed forward with great rapidity. The track looked in places
as if it were not one inch out of the water, though it was twenty
feet; and tunnels which were a hundred and thirty feet high looked
only like oven mouths. It has been a hard road to build, costing in
some parts sixty-five thousand dollars a mile. One spot was pointed
out to us where twenty tons of powder had been put in, in seven
drifts, and one hundred and forty cubic yards of rock and soil blown
at one blast into the river. It is an odd thing that huge blasts like
this make little noise, only a slight puff; whereas small blasts make
the hills ring and echo with their racket.
Between the lower cascades and the upper cascades is a portage of six
miles, past fierce waters, in which a boat could scarcely live. Here
we took cars; they were overfull, and we felt ourselves much aggrieved
at being obliged to make the short journey standing on one of the
crowded platforms. It proved to be only another instance of the good
things caught on chances. Next to me stood an old couple, the man's
neck so burnt and wrinkled it looked like fiery red alligator's skin;
his clothes, evidently his best, donned for a journey, were of a
fashion so long gone by that they had a quaint dignity. The woman wore
a checked calico sun-bonnet, and a green merino gown of as quaint a
fashion as her husband's coat. With them was a veritable Leather
Stocking,--an old farmer, whose flannel shirt, tied loosely at the
throat with a bit of twine, fell open, and showed a broad hairy breast
of which a gladiator might have been proud.
The cars jolted heavily, making it hard to keep one's footing; and the
old man came near being shaken off the step. Recovering himself, he
said, laughing, to his friend,--
"Anyhow, it's easier'n a buckin' Cayuse horse."
"Yes," assented the other. "'T ain't much like '49, is it?"
"Were you here in '49?" I asked eagerly.
"'49!" he repeated scornfully. "I was here in '47. I was seven months
comin' across from Iowa to Oregon City in an ox team; an' we're livin'
on that same section we took up then; an' I reckon there hain't nobody
got a lien on to it yet. We've raised nine children, an' the youngest
on em's twenty-one. My woman's been sick for two or three years; this
is the first time I've got her out. Thought we'd go down to Columbus,
an' get a little pleasure, if we can. We used to come up to this
portage in boats, an' then pack everything on horses an' ride across."
"We wore buckskin clo'es in those days," interrupted Leather Stocking,
"and spurs with bells; needn't do more 'n jingle the bells, 'n' the
horse'd start. I'd like to see them times back agen, too. I vow I'm
put to 't now to know where to go. This civilyzation," with an
indescribably sarcastic emphasis on the third syllable, "is too much
for me. I don't want to live where I can't go out 'n' kill a deer
before breakfast any mornin' I take a notion to."
"Were there many Indians here in those days?" I asked.
"Many Injuns?" he retorted; "why, 'twas all Injuns. All this country
'long here was jest full on 'em."
"How did you find them?"
"Jest 's civil 's any people in the world; never had no trouble with
'em. Nobody never did have any thet treated 'em fair. I tell ye, it's
jest with them 's 't is with cattle. Now there 'll be one man raise
cattle, an' be real mean with 'em; an' they'll all hook, an' kick, an'
break fences, an' run away. An' there 'll be another, an' his cattle
'll all be kind, an' come ter yer when you call 'em. I don't never
want to know anythin' more about a man than the way his stock acts. I
hain't got a critter that won't come up by its name an' lick my hand.
An' it's jest so with folks. Ef a man's mean to you, yer goin' to be
mean to him, every time. The great thing with Injuns is, never to tell
'em a yarn. If yer deceive 'em once, they won't ever trust yer again,
's long's yer live, an' you can't trust them either. Oh, I know
Injuns, I tell you. I've been among 'em here more 'n thirty year, an'
I never had the first trouble yet. There's been troubles, but I wa'n't
in 'em. It's been the white people's fault every time."
"Did you ever know Chief Joseph?" I asked.
"What, old Jo! You bet I knew him. He's an A No. 1 Injun, he is. He's
real honorable. Why, I got lost once, an' I came right on his camp
before I knowed it, an' the Injuns they grabbed me; 't was night, 'n'
I was kind o' creepin' along cautious, an' the first thing I knew
there was an Injun had me on each side, an' they jest marched me up to
Jo's tent, to know what they should do with me. I wa'n't a mite
afraid; I jest looked him right square in the eye. That's another
thing with Injuns; you've got to look 'em in the eye, or they won't
trust ye. Well, Jo, he took up a torch, a pine knot he had burnin',
and he held it close't up to my face, and looked me up an' down, an'
down an' up; an' I never flinched; I jest looked him up an' down's
good's he did me; 'n' then he set the knot down, 'n' told the men it
was all right,--I was 'tum tum;' that meant I was good heart; 'n' they
gave me all I could eat, 'n' a guide to show me my way, next day, 'n'
I couldn't make Jo nor any of 'em take one cent. I had a kind o'
comforter o' red yarn, I wore round my neck; an' at last I got Jo to
take that, jest as a kind o' momento."
The old man was greatly indignant to hear that Chief Joseph was in
Indian Territory. He had been out of the State at the time of the Nez
Percé war, and had not heard of Joseph's fate.
"Well, that was a dirty mean trick!" he exclaimed,--"a dirty mean
trick! I don't care who done it."
Then he told me of another Indian chief he had known well,--"Ercutch"
by name. This chief was always a warm friend of the whites; again and
again he had warned them of danger from hostile Indians. "Why, when he
died, there wa'n't a white woman in all this country that didn't mourn
's if she'd lost a friend; they felt safe's long's he was round. When
he knew he was dyin' he jest bade all his friends good-by. Said he,
'Good-by! I'm goin' to the Great Spirit;' an' then he named over each
friend he had, Injuns an' whites, each one by name, and said good-by
after each name."
It was a strange half-hour, rocking and jolting on this crowded car
platform, the splendid tossing and foaming river with its rocks and
islands on one hand, high cliffs and fir forests on the other; these
three weather-beaten, eager, aged faces by my side, with their shrewd
old voices telling such reminiscences, and rising shrill above the din
of the cars.
From the upper cascades to the Dalles, by boat again; a splendid forty
miles' run, through the mountain-pass, its walls now gradually
lowering, and, on the Washington Territory side of the river, terraces
and slopes of cleared lands and occasional settlements. Great numbers
of drift-logs passed us here, coming down apace, from the rush of the
Dalles above. Every now and then one would get tangled in the bushes
and roots on the shore, swing in, and lodge tight to await the next
freshet.
The "log" of one of these driftwood voyages would be interesting; a
tree trunk may be ten years getting down to the sea, or it may swirl
down in a week. It is one of the businesses along the river to catch
them, and pull them in to shore, and much money is made at it. One
lucky fisher of logs, on the Snake River Fork, once drew ashore six
hundred cords in a single year. Sometimes a whole boom gets loose from
its moorings, and comes down stream, without breaking up. This is a
godsend to anybody who can head it off and tow it in shore; for by the
law of the river he is entitled to one half the value of the logs.
At the Dalles is another short portage of twelve miles, past a portion
of the river which, though less grand than its plunge through the
Cascade Mountains, is far more unique and wonderful. The waters here
are stripped and shred into countless zigzagging torrents, boiling
along through labyrinths of black lava rocks and slabs. There is
nothing in all Nature so gloomy, so weird, as volcanic slag; and the
piles, ridges, walls, palisades of it thrown up at this point look
like the roof-trees, chimneys, turrets of a half-engulfed Pandemonium.
Dark slaty and gray tints spread over the whole shore, also; it is all
volcanic matter, oozed or boiled over, and hardened into rigid shapes
of death and destruction. The place is terrible to see. Fitting in
well with the desolateness of the region was a group of half-naked
Indians crouching on the rocks, gaunt and wretched, fishing for
salmon; the hollows in the rocks about them filled with the bright
vermilion-colored salmon spawn, spread out to dry. The twilight was
nearly over as we sped by, and the deepening darkness added momently
to the gloom of the scene.
At Celilo, just above the Dalles, we took boat again for Umatilla, one
hundred miles farther up the river.
Next morning we were still among lava beds: on the Washington
Territory side, low, rolling shores, or slanting slopes with terraces,
and tufty brown surfaces broken by ridges and points of the black
slag; on the Oregon side, high brown cliffs mottled with red and
yellow lichens, and great beaches and dunes of sand, which had blown
into windrows and curving hillock lines as on the sea-shore. This sand
is a terrible enemy for a railroad to fight. In a few hours,
sometimes, rods of the track are buried by it as deep as by snow in
the fiercest winter storms.
The first picture I saw from my state-room windows, this morning, was
an Indian standing on a narrow plank shelf that was let down by ropes
over a perpendicular rock front, some fifty feet high. There he stood,
as composed as if he were on _terra firma_, bending over towards the
water, and flinging in his salmon net. On the rocks above him sat the
women of his family, spreading the salmon to dry. We were within so
short a distance of the banks that friendly smiles could be distinctly
seen; and one of the younger squaws, laughing back at the lookers-on
on deck, picked up a salmon, and waving it in her right hand ran
swiftly along towards an outjutting point. She was a gay creature,
with scarlet fringed leggings, a pale green blanket, and on her head a
twisted handkerchief of a fine old Dürer red. As she poised herself,
and braced backwards to throw the salmon on deck, she was a superb
figure against the sky; she did not throw straight, and the fish fell
a few inches short of reaching the boat. As it struck the water she
made a petulant little gesture of disappointment, like a child, threw
up her hands, turned, and ran back to her work.
At Umatilla, being forced again to "make option which of two," we
reluctantly turned back, leaving the beautiful Walla Walla region
unvisited, for the sake of seeing Puget Sound. The Walla Walla region
is said to be the finest stretch of wheat country in the world. Lava
slag, when decomposed, makes the richest of soil,--deep and seemingly
of inexhaustible fertility. A failure of harvests is said never to
have been known in that country; the average yield of wheat is
thirty-five to forty bushels an acre, and oats have yielded a hundred
bushels. Apples and peaches thrive, and are of a superior quality. The
country is well watered, and has fine rolling plateaus from fifteen
hundred to three thousand feet high, giving a climate neither too cold
in winter nor too hot in summer, and of a bracing quality not found
nearer the sea. Hearing all the unquestionable tributes to the beauty
and value of this Walla Walla region, I could not but recall some of
Chief Joseph's pleas that a small share of it should be left in the
possession of those who once owned it all.
From our pilot, on the way down, I heard an Indian story, too touching
to be forgotten, though too long to tell here except in briefest
outline. As we were passing a little village, half under water, he
exclaimed, looking earnestly at a small building to whose window-sills
the water nearly reached: "Well, I declare, Lucy's been driven out of
her house this time. I was wondering why I didn't see her handkerchief
a-waving. She always waves to me when I go by." Then he told me Lucy's
story.
She was a California Indian, probably of the Tulares, and migrated to
Oregon with her family thirty years ago. She was then a young girl,
and said to be the handsomest squaw ever seen in Oregon. In those days
white men in wildernesses thought it small shame, if any, to take
Indian women to live with them as wives, and Lucy was much sought and
wooed. But she seems to have had uncommon virtue or coldness, for she
resisted all such approaches for a long time.