In the very ancient far-away times the sole and only inhabitants of the
world were fiends, and very highly uncivilized fiends at that. The
whole Northwest was then one of the centres of volcanic action. The
craters of the Cascades were fire breathers and fountains of liquid
flame. It was an extremely fiendish country, and naturally the
inhabitants fought like devils. Where the great plains of the Upper
Columbia now spread was a vast inland sea, which beat against a rampart
of hills to the east of The Dalles. And the great weapon of the fiends
in warfare was their tails, which were of prodigious size and terrible
strength. Now, the wisest, strongest, and most subtle fiend of the
entire crew was one fiend called the "Devil." He was a thoughtful
person and viewed with alarm the ever increasing tendency among his
neighbors toward fighting and general wickedness. The whole tribe met
every summer to have a tournament after their fashion, and at one of
these reunions the Devil arose and made a pacific speech. He took
occasion to enlarge on the evils of constant warfare, and suggested
that a general reconciliation take place and that they all live in
peace. The astonished fiends could not understand any such unwarlike
procedure from _him_, and with one accord, suspecting treachery, made
straight at the intended reformer, who, of course, took to his heels.
The fiends pressed him hard as he sped over the plains of The Dalles,
and as he neared the defile he struck a Titanic blow with his tail on
the pavement--and a chasm opened up through the valley, and down rushed
the waters of the inland sea. But a battalion of the fiends still
pursued him, and again he smote with his tail and more strongly, and a
vaster cleft went up and down the valley, and a more terrific torrent
swept along. The leading fiends took the leap, but many fell into the
chasm--and still the Devil was sorely pursued. He had just time to rap
once more and with all the vigor of a despairing tail. And this time he
was safe. A third crevice, twice the width of the second, split the
rocks, riving a deeper cleft in the mountain that held back the inland
sea, making a gorge through the majestic chain of the Cascades and
opening a way for the torrent oceanward. It was the crack of doom for
the fiends. Essaying the leap, they fell far short of the edge, where
the Devil lay panting. Down they fell and were swept away by the flood;
so the whole race of fiends perished from the face of the earth. But
the Devil was in sorry case. His tail was unutterably dislocated by his
last blow; so, leaping across the chasm he had made, he went home to
rear his family thoughtfully. There were no more antagonists; so,
perhaps, after all, tails were useless. Every year he brought his
children to The Dalles and told them the terrible history of his
escape. And after a time the fires of the Cascades burned away; the
inland sea was drained and its bed became a fair and habitable land,
and still the waters gushed through the narrow crevices roaring
seaward. But the Devil had one sorrow. All his children born before the
catastrophe were crabbed, unregenerate, stiff-tailed fiends. After that
event every new-born imp wore a flaccid, invertebrate, despondent
tail--the very last insignium of ignobility. So runs the legend of The
Dalles--a shining lesson to reformers.
Leaving The Dalles in the morning, a splendid panorama begins to unfold
on this lordly stream--"Achilles of rivers," as Winthrop called it. It
is difficult to describe the charm of this trip. Residents of the East
pronounce it superior to the Hudson, and travelers assert there is
nothing like it in the Old World. It is simply delicious to those
escaped from the heat and dust of their far-off homes to embark on this
noble stream and steam smoothly down past frowning headlands and "rocks
with carven imageries," bluffs lined with pine trees, vivid green, past
islands and falls, and distant views of snowy peaks. There is no trip
like it on the coast, and for a river excursion there is not its equal
in the United States.