I have never known, nor seen any person who did know, why Portland, the
metropolis of Oregon, was founded on the Willamette River. I am unaware
why the accent is on the penult, and not on the ultimate of Willamette.
These thoughts perplexed me more than a well man would have suffered
them, all the way from the Callapooya Mountains to Portland. I had been
laid up in the backwoods of Oregon, in a district known as the Long-Tom
Country,--(and certainly a longer or more tedious Tom never existed
since the days of him additionally hight Aquinas,)--by a violent attack
of pneumonia, which came near terminating my earthly with my Oregon
pilgrimage. I had been saved by the indefatigable nursing of the best
friend I ever travelled with,--by wet compresses, and the impossibility
of sending for any doctor in the region. I had lived to pay
San-Francisco hotel-prices for squatter-cabin accommodations in the
rural residence of an Oregon landholder, whose tender mercies I fell
into from my saddle when the disease had reached its height, and who
explained his unusual charges on the ground that his wife had felt for
me like a mother. In the Long-Tom Country maternal tenderness is a
highly estimated virtue. It cost Bierstadt and myself sixty dollars,
besides the reasonable charge for five days' board and attendance to a
man who ate nothing and was not waited on, with the same amount against
his well companion. We had suffered enough extortion before that to
exhaust all our native grumblery. So we paid the bill, and entered on
our notebooks the following
_Mem._ "In stopping with anybody in the Long-Tom Country, make a special
contract for maternal tenderness, as it will invariably be included in
the bill."
I had ridden on a straw-bed in the wagon of the man whose wife
cultivated the maternal virtues, until I was once more able to go along
by myself,--paying, you may be sure, maternal-virtue fare for my
carriage. During the period that I jolted on the straw, I diversified
the intervals between pulmonary spasms with a sick glance at the pages
of Bulwer's "Devereux" and Lever's "Day's Ride." The nature of these
works did not fail to attract the attention of my driver. It aroused in
him serious concern for my spiritual welfare. He addressed me with
gentle firmness,--
"D' ye think it's exackly the way for an immortal creatur' to be
spendin' his time, to read them _novels_?"
"Why is it particularly out of the way for an immortal creature?"
"Because his higher interests don't give him no time for sich follies."
"How can an immortal creature be pressed for time?"
"Wal, you'll find out some day. G' lang, Jennie."
I thought I had left this excellent man in a metaphysical bog. But he
had not discharged his duty, so he scrambled out and took new ground.
"Now say,--d' _you_ think it's exackly a Christian way of spendin' time,
yourself?"
"I know a worse way."
"Eh? What's that?"
"In the house of a Long-Tom settler who charges five dollars a day extra
because his wife feels like a mother."
He did not continue the conversation. I myself did not close it in
anger, but solely to avoid an extra charge, which in the light of
experience seemed imminent, for concern about my spiritual welfare. On
the maternal-tenderness scale of prices, an indulgence in this luxury
would have cleaned out Bierstadt and myself before we effected junction
with our drawers of exchange, and I was discourteous as a matter of
economy.
We had enjoyed, from the summit of a hill twenty miles south of Salem,
one of the most magnificent views in all earthly scenery. Within a
single sweep of vision were seven snow-peaks, the Three Sisters, Mount
Jefferson, Mount Hood, Mount Adams, and Mount St. Helen's, with the dim
suggestion of an eighth colossal mass, which might be Rainier. All these
rose along an arc of not quite half the horizon, measured between ten
and eighteen thousand feet in height, were nearly conical, and
absolutely covered with snow from base to pinnacle. The Three Sisters, a
triplet of sharp, close-set needles, and the grand masses of Hood and
Jefferson, showed mountainesque and earthly; it was at least possible to
imagine them of us and anchored to the ground we trod on. Not so with
the others. They were beautiful, yet awful ghosts,--spirits of dead
mountains buried in old-world cataclysms, returning to make on the
brilliant azure of noonday blots of still more brilliant white. I cannot
express their vague, yet vast and intense splendor, by any other word
than incandescence. It was as if the sky had suddenly grown white-hot in
patches. When we first looked, we thought St. Helen's an illusion,--an
aurora, or a purer kind of cloud. Presently we detected the luminous
chromatic border,--a band of refracted light with a predominant
orange-tint, which outlines the higher snow-peaks seen at long
range,--traced it down, and grasped the entire conception of the mighty
cone. No man of enthusiasm, who reflects what this whole sight must have
been, will wonder that my friend and I clasped each other's hands before
it, and thanked God we had lived to this day.
We had followed down the beautiful valley of the Willamette to Portland,
finding everywhere glimpses of autumnal scenery as delicious as the
hills and meadows of the Housatonic. Putting up in Portland at the
Dennison House, we found the comforts of civilization for the first time
since leaving Sisson's, and a great many kind friends warmly interested
in furthering our enterprise. I have said that I do not know why
Portland was built on the Willamette. The point of the promontory
between the Willamette and the Columbia seems the proper place for the
chief commercial city of the State; and Portland is a dozen miles south
of this, up the tributary stream. But Portland does very well as it
is,--growing rapidly in business-importance, and destined, when the
proper railway-communications are established, to be a sort of Glasgow
to the London of San Francisco. When we were there, there was crying
need of a telegraph to the latter place. That need has now been
supplied, and the construction of the no less desirable railroad must
follow speedily. The country between Shasta Peak and Salem is at present
virtually without an outlet to market. No richer fruit and grain region
exists on the Pacific slope of the continent. No one who has not
travelled through it can imagine the exhaustless fertility which will be
stimulated and the results which will be brought forth, when a
continuous line of railroad unites Sacramento or even Tehama with the
metropolis of Oregon.
Among the friends who welcomed us to Portland were Messrs. Ainsworth and
Thompson, of the Oregon Steamship Company. By their courtesy we were
afforded a trip up the Columbia River, in the pleasantest quarters and
under the most favorable circumstances.
We left Portland the evening before their steamer sailed, taking a boat
belonging to a different line, that we might pass a night at Fort
Vancouver, and board the Company's boat when it touched at that place
the next morning. We recognized our return from rudimentary society to
civilized surroundings and a cultivated interest in art and literature,
when the captain of the little steamer Vancouver refused to let either
of us buy a ticket, because he had seen Bierstadt on the upper deck at
work with his sketch-book, and me by his side engaged with my journal.
The banks of the Willamette below Portland are low and cut up by small
tributaries or communicating lagoons which divide them into islands. The
largest of these, measuring its longest border, has an extent of twenty
miles, and is called Sauveur's. Another, called "Nigger Tom's," was
famous as the seigniory of a blind African nobleman so named, living in
great affluence of salmon and whiskey with three or four devoted Indian
wives, who had with equal fervor embraced the doctrine of Mormonism and
the profession of day's-washing to keep their liege in luxury due his
rank. The land along the shore of the river was usually well timbered,
and in the level openings looked as fertile as might be expected of an
alluvial first-bottom frequently overflowed. At its junction with the
Columbia the Willamette is about three-quarters of a mile in width, and
the Columbia may be half a mile wider, though at first sight the
difference seems more than that from the tributary's entering the main
river at an acute angle and giving a diagonal view to the opposite
shore. Before we passed into the Columbia, we had from the upper deck a
magnificent glimpse to the eastward of Hood's spotless snow-cone rosied
with the reflection of the dying sunset. Short and hurried as it was,
this view of Mount Hood was unsurpassed for beauty by any which we got
in its closer vicinity and afterward, though nearness added rugged
grandeur to the sight.
Six miles' sail between low and uninteresting shores brought us from the
mouth of the Willamette to Fort Vancouver, on the Washington-Territory
side of the river. Here we debarked for the night, making our way, in an
ambulance sent for us from the post, a distance of two minutes' ride, to
the quarters of General Alvord, the commandant. Under his hospitable
roof we experienced, for the first time in several months and many
hundred miles, the delicious sensation of a family-dinner, with a
refined lady at the head of the table and well-bred children about the
sides. A very interesting guest of General Alvord's was Major Lugenbeel,
who had spent his life in the topographical service of the United
States, and combined the culture of a student with an amount of
information concerning the wildest portions of our continent which I
have never seen surpassed nor heard communicated in style more
fascinating. He had lately come from the John-Day, Boise, and
Snake-River Mines, where the Government was surveying routes of
emigration, and pronounced the wealth of the region exhaustless.
After a pleasant evening and a good night's rest, we took the Oregon
Company's steamer, Wilson G. Hunt, and proceeded up the river, leaving
Fort Vancouver about seven A.M. To our surprise, the Hunt proved an old
acquaintance. She will be remembered by most people who during the last
twelve years have been familiar with the steamers hailing from New York
Bay. Though originally built for river-service such as now employs her,
she came around from the Hudson to the Columbia by way of Cape Horn. By
lessening her top-hamper and getting new stanchions for her perilous
voyage, she performed it without accident.
Such a vivid souvenir of the Hudson reminded me of an assertion I had
often heard, that the Columbia resembles it. There is some ground for
the comparison. Each of the rivers breaks through a noble
mountain-system in its passage to the sea, and the walls of its avenue
are correspondingly grand. In point of variety the banks of the Hudson
far surpass those of the Columbia,--trap, sandstone, granite, limestone,
and slate succeeding each other with a rapidity which presents ever new
outlines to the eye of the tourist. The scenery of the Columbia, between
Fort Vancouver and the Dalles, is a sublime monotone. Its banks are
basaltic crags or mist-wrapt domes, averaging below the cataract from
twelve to fifteen hundred feet in height, and thence decreasing to the
Dalles, where the escarpments, washed by the river, are low trap bluffs
on a level with the steamer's walking-beam, and the mountains have
retired, bare and brown, like those of the great continental basin
farther south, toward Mount Hood in that direction, and Mount Adams on
the north. If the Palisades were quintupled in height, domed instead of
level on their upper surfaces, extended up the whole navigable course of
the Hudson, and were thickly clad with evergreens wherever they were not
absolutely precipitous, the Hudson would much more closely resemble the
Columbia.
I was reminded of another Eastern river, which I had never heard
mentioned, in the same company. As we ascended toward the cataract, the
Columbia water assumed a green tint as deep and positive as that of the
Niagara between the Falls and Lake Ontario. Save that its surface was
not so perturbed with eddies and marbled with foam, it resembled the
Niagara perfectly.
We boarded the Hunt in a dense fog, and went immediately to breakfast.
With our last cup of coffee the fog cleared away and showed us a sunny
vista up the river, bordered by the columnar and mural trap formations
above mentioned, with an occasional bold promontory jutting out beyond
the general face of the precipice, its shaggy fell of pines and firs all
aflood with sunshine to the very crown. The finest of these promontories
was called Cape Horn, the river bending around it to the northeast. The
channel kept mid-stream with considerable uniformity,--but now and then,
as in the highland region of the Hudson, made a _detour_ to avoid some
bare, rocky island. Several of these islands were quite columnar,--being
evidently the emerged capitals of basaltic prisms, like the other
uplifts on the banks. A fine instance of this formation was the stately
and perpendicular "Rooster Rock" on the Oregon side, but not far from
Cape Horn. Still another was called "Lone Rock," and rose from the
middle of the river. These came upon our view within the first hour
after breakfast, in company with a slender, but graceful stream, which
fell into the river over a sheer wall of basalt seven hundred feet in
height. This little cascade reminded us of Po-ho-no, or The Bridal Veil,
near the lower entrance of the Great Yo-Semite.
As the steamer rounded a point into each new stretch of silent, green,
and sunny river, we sent a flock of geese or ducks hurrying cloudward or
shoreward. Here, too, for the first time in a state of absolute Nature,
I saw that royal bird, the swan, escorting his mate and cygnets on an
airing or a luncheon-tour. It was a beautiful sight, though I must
confess that his Majesty and all the royal family are improved by
civilization. One of the great benefits of civilization is, that it
restricts its subjects to doing what they can do best. Park-swans seldom
fly,--and flying is something that swans should never attempt, unless
they wish to be taken for geese. I felt actually _desillusionne_, when a
princely _cortege_, which had been rippling their snowy necks in the
sunshine, clumsily lifted themselves out of the water and slanted into
the clouds, stretching those necks straight as a gun-barrel. Every line
of grace seemed wire-drawn out of them in a moment. Song is as little
their forte as flight,--barring the poetic license open to moribund
members of their family,--and I must confess, that, if this privilege
indicate approaching dissolution, the most intimate friends of the
specimens we heard have no cause for apprehension. An Adirondack loon
fortifying his utterance by a cracked fish-horn is the nearest approach
to a healthy swan-song. On the whole, the wild swan cannot afford to
"pause in his cloud" for all the encomiums of Mr. Tennyson, and had
better come down immediately to the dreamy water-level where he floats
dream within dream, like a stable vapor in a tangible sky. Anywhere else
he seems a court-beauty wandering into metaphysics.
Alternating with these swimmers came occasional flocks of shag, a bird
belonging to the cormorant tribe, and here and there a gull, though
these last grew rarer as we increased our distance from the sea. I was
surprised to notice a fine seal playing in the channel, twenty miles
above Fort Vancouver, but learned that it was not unusual for these
animals to ascend nearly to the cataract. Both the whites and Indians
scattered along the river-banks kill them for their skin and
blubber,--going out in boats for the purpose. My informant's boat had on
one occasion taken an old seal nursing her calf. When the dam was towed
to shore, the young one followed her, occasionally putting its
fore-flippers on the gunwale to rest, like a Newfoundland dog, and
behaving with such innocent familiarity that malice was disarmed. It
came ashore with the boat's-crew and the body of its parent; no one had
the heart to drive it away; so it stayed and was a pet of the camp from
that time forward. After a while the party moved its position a
distance of several miles while Jack was away in the river on a
fishing-excursion, but there was no eluding him. The morning after the
shift he came wagging into camp, a faithful and much-overjoyed, but
exceedingly battered and used-up seal. He had evidently sought his
friends by rock and flood the entire night preceding.
Occasionally the lonely river-stretches caught a sudden human interest
in some gracefully modelled canoe gliding out with a crew of Chinook
Indians from the shadow of a giant promontory, propelled by a square
sail learned of the whites. Knowing the natural, ingrained laziness of
Indians, one can imagine the delight with which they comprehended that
substitute for the paddle. After all, this may perhaps be an ill-natured
thing to say. Who does like to drudge when he can help it? Is not this
very Wilson G. Hunt a triumph of human laziness, vindicating its claim
to be the lord of matter by an ingenuity doing labor's utmost without
sweat? After all, nobody but a fool drudges for other reason than that
he may presently stop drudging.
At short intervals along the narrow strip of shore under the more
gradual steeps, on the lower ledges of the basaltic precipices, and on
little rock-islands in the river, appeared rude-looking stacks and
scaffoldings where the Indians had packed their salmon. They left it in
the open air without guard, as fearless of robbers as if the fish did
not constitute their almost entire subsistence for the winter. And
within their own tribes they have justification for this fearlessness.
Their standard of honor is in most respects curiously adjustable,--but
here virtue is defended by the necessities of life.
In the immediate vicinity of the cured article (I say "cured," though
the process is a mere drying without smoke or salt) maybe seen the
apparatus contrived for getting it in the fresh state. This is the
scaffolding from which the salmon are caught. It is a horizontal
platform shaped like a capital A, erected upon a similarly framed, but
perpendicular set of braces, with a projection of several feet over the
river-brink at a place where the water runs rapidly close in-shore. If
practicable, the constructor modifies his current artificially, banking
it inward with large stones, so as to form a sort of sluice in which
passing fish will be more completely at his mercy. At the season of
their periodic ascent, salmon swarm in all the rivers of our Pacific
coast; the Columbia and Willamette are alive with them for a long
distance above the cascades of the one and the Oregon-City fall of the
other. The fisherman stands, nearly or quite naked, at the edge of his
scaffolding, armed with a net extended at the end of a long pole, and so
ingeniously contrived that the weight of the salmon and a little
dexterous management draw its mouth shut on the captive like a purse as
soon as he has entered. A helper stands behind the fisherman to assist
in raising the haul,--to give the fish a tap on the nose, which kills
him instantly,--and finally to carry him ashore to be split and dried,
without any danger of his throwing himself back into the water from the
hands of his captors, as might easily happen by omitting the
_coup-de-grace_. Another method of catching salmon, much in vogue among
the Sacramento and Pitt-River tribes, but apparently less employed by
the Indians of the Columbia, is harpooning with a very clever instrument
constructed after this wise. A hard-wood shaft is neatly, but not
tightly, fitted into the socket of a sharp-barbed spear-head carved from
bone. Through a hole drilled in the spear-head a stout cord of
deer-sinew is fastened by one end, its other being secured to the shaft
near its insertion. The salmon is struck by this weapon in the manner of
the ordinary fish-spear; the head slips off the shaft as soon as the
barbs lodge, and the harpoon virtually becomes a fishing-rod, with the
sinew for a line. This arrangement is much more manageable than the
common spear, as it greatly diminishes the chances of losing fish and
breaking shafts.
There can scarcely be a more sculpturesque sight than that of a finely
formed, well-grown young Indian struggling on his scaffold with an
unusually powerful fish. Every muscle of his wiry frame stands out in
its turn in unveiled relief, and you see in him attitudes of grace and
power which will not let you regret the Apollo Belvedere or the
Gladiator. The only pity is that this ideal Indian is a rare being. The
Indians of this coast and river are divided into two broad classes,--the
Fish Indians, and the Meat Indians. The latter, _ceteris paribus_, are
much the finer race, derive the greater portion of their subsistence
from the chase, and possess the athletic mind and body which result from
active methods of winning a livelihood. The former are, to a great
extent, victims of that generic and hereditary _tabes mesenterica_ which
produces the peculiar pot-bellied and spindle-shanked type of savage;
their manners are milder; their virtues and vices are done in
water-color, as comports with their source of supply. There are some
tribes which partake of the habits of both classes, living in
mountain-fastnesses part of the year by the bow and arrow, but coming
down to the river in the salmon-season for an addition to their winter
bill-of-fare. Anywhere rather than among the pure Fish Indians is the
place to look for savage beauty. Still these tribes have fortified their
feebleness by such a cultivation of their ingenuity as surprises one
seeing for the first time their well-adapted tools, comfortable lodges,
and, in some cases, really beautiful canoes. In the last respect,
however, the Indians nearer the coast surpass those up the
Columbia,--some of their carved and painted canoes equalling the
"crackest" of shell-boats in elegance of line and beauty of ornament.
In a former article devoted to the Great Yo-Semite I had occasion to
remark that Indian legend, like all ancient poetry, often contains a
scientific truth embalmed in the spices of metaphor,--or, to vary the
figure, that Mudjekeewis stands holding the lantern for Agassiz and Dana
to dig by.
Coming to the Falls of the Columbia, we find a case in point. Nearly
equidistant from the longitudes of Fort Vancouver and Mount Hood, the
entire Columbia River falls twenty feet over a perpendicular wall of
basalt, extending, with minor deviations from the right angle, entirely
between-shores, a breadth of about a mile. The height of Niagara and the
close compression of its vast volume make it a grander sight than the
Falls of the Columbia,--but no other cataract known to me on this
continent rivals it for an instant. The great American Falls of Snake
are much loftier and more savage than either, but their volume is so
much less as to counterbalance those advantages. Taking the Falls of the
Columbia all in all,--including their upper and lower rapids,--it must
be confessed that they exhibit every phase of tormented water in its
beauty of color or grace of form, its wrath or its whim.
The Indians have a tradition that the river once followed a uniform
level from the Dalles to the sea. This tradition states that Mounts Hood
and St. Helen's are husband and wife,--whereby is intended that their
tutelar divinities stand in that mutual relation; that in comparatively
recent times there existed a rocky bridge across the Columbia at the
present site of the cataract, and that across this bridge Hood and St.
Helen's were wont to pass for interchange of visits; that, while this
bridge existed, there was a free subterraneous passage under it for the
river and the canoes of the tribes (indeed, this tradition is so
universally credited as to stagger the skeptic by a mere calculation of
chances); that, on a certain occasion, the mountainous pair, like others
not mountainous, came to high words, and during their altercation broke
the bridge down; falling into the river, this colossal Rialto became a
dam, and ever since that day the upper river has been backed to its
present level, submerging vast tracts of country far above its original
bed.
I notice that excellent geological authorities are willing to treat this
legend respectfully, as containing in symbols the probable key to the
natural phenomena. Whether the original course of the Columbia at this
place was through a narrow _canyon_ or under an actual roof of rock, the
adjacent material has been at no very remote date toppled into it to
make the cataract and alter the bed to its present level. Both Hood and
St. Helen's are volcanic cones. The latter has been seen to smoke within
the last twelve years. It is not unlikely that during the last few
centuries some intestine disturbance may have occurred along the axis
between the two, sufficient to account for the precipitation of that
mass of rock which now forms the dam. That we cannot refer the cataclysm
to a very ancient date seems to be argued by the state of preservation
in which we still find the stumps of the celebrated "submerged forest,"
extending a long distance up the river above the Falls.
At the foot of the cataract we landed from the steamer on the Washington
side of the river, and found a railroad-train waiting to do our portage.
It was a strange feeling, that of whirling along by steam where so few
years before the Indian and the trader had toiled through the virgin
forest, bending under the weight of their canoes. And this is one of the
characteristic surprises of American scenery everywhere. You cannot
isolate yourself from the national civilization. In a Swiss _chalet_ you
may escape from all memories of Geneva; among the Grampians you find an
entirely different set of ideas from those of Edinburgh: but the same
enterprise which makes itself felt in New York and Boston starts up for
your astonishment out of all the fastnesses of the continent. Virgin
Nature wooes our civilization to wed her, and no obstacles can conquer
the American fascination. In our journey through the wildest parts of
this country, we were perpetually finding patent washing-machines among
the _chaparral_,--canned fruit in the desert,--Voigtlander's
field-glasses on the snow-peak,--lemon-soda in the _canyon_,--men who
were sure a railroad would be run by their cabin within ten years, in
every spot where such a surprise was most remarkable.
The portage-road is six miles in length, leading nearly all the way
close along the edge of the North Bluff, which, owing to a recession of
the mountains, seems here only from fifty to eighty feet in height. From
the windows of the train we enjoyed an almost uninterrupted view of the
rapids, which are only less grand and forceful in their impression than
those above Niagara. They are broken up into narrow channels by numerous
bold and naked islands of trap. Through these the water roars, boils,
and, striking projections, spouts upward in jets whose plumy top blows
off in sheets of spray. It is tormented into whirlpools; it is combed
into fine threads, and strays whitely over a rugged ledge like old men's
hair; it takes all curves of grace and arrow-flights of force; it is
water doing all that water can do or be made to do. The painter who
spent a year in making studies of it would not throw his time away; when
he had finished, he could not misrepresent water under any phases.
At the upper end of the portage-road we found another and smaller
steamer awaiting us, with equally kind provision for our comfort made by
the Company and the captain. In both steamers we were accorded
excellent opportunities for drawing and observation, getting seats in
the pilot-house.
Above the rapids the river-banks were bold and rocky. The stream changed
from its recent Niagara green to a brown like that of the Hudson; and
under its waters, as we hugged the Oregon side, could be seen a
submerged alluvial plateau, studded thick with drowned stumps, here and
there lifting their splintered tops above the water, and measuring from
the diameter of a sapling to that of a trunk which might once have been
one hundred feet high.
Between Fort Vancouver and the cataract the banks of the river seem
nearly as wild as on the day they were discovered by the whites. On
neither the Oregon nor the Washington side is there any settlement
visible,--a small wood-wharf, or the temporary hut of a salmon-fisher,
being the only sign of human possession. At the Falls we noticed a
single white house standing in a commanding position high up on the
wooded ledges of the Oregon shore; and the taste shown in placing and
constructing it was worthy of a Hudson-River landholder. This is,
perhaps, the first attempt at a distinct country-residence made in
Oregon, and belongs to a Mr. Olmstead, who was one of the earliest
settlers and projectors of public improvements in the State. He was
actively engaged in the building of the first portage-railroad, which
ran on the Oregon side. The entire interests of both have, I believe,
been concentrated in the newer one, and the Oregon road, after building
itself by feats of business-energy and ingenuity known only to American
pioneer enterprise, has fallen into entire or comparative disuse.
Above the Falls we found as unsettled a river-margin as below.
Occasionally, some bright spot of color attracted us, relieved against
the walls of trap or glacis of evergreen, and this upon nearer approach
or by the glass was resolved into a group of river Indians,--part with
the curiously compressed foreheads of the Flat-head tribe, their serene
nakedness draped with blankets of every variety of hue, from fresh
flaming red to weather-beaten army-blue, and adorned as to their cheeks
with smutches of the cinnabar-rouge which from time immemorial has been
a prime article of import among the fashionable native circles of the
Columbia,--the other part round-headed, and (I have no doubt it appears
a perfect _sequitur_ to the Flat-head conservatives) therefore slaves.
The captive in battle seems more economically treated among these
savages than is common anywhere else in the Indian regions we traversed,
(though I suppose slavery is to some extent universal throughout the
tribes,)--the captors properly arguing, that, so long as they can make a
man fish and boil pot for them, it is a very foolish waste of material
to kill him.
At intervals above the Falls we passed several small islands of especial
interest as being the cemeteries of river-tribes. The principal, called
"Mimitus," was sacred as the resting-place of a very noted chief. I have
forgotten his name, but I doubt whether his friends see the "Atlantic"
regularly; so that oversight is of less consequence. The deceased is
entombed like a person of quality, in a wooden mausoleum having
something the appearance of a log-cabin upon which pains have been
expended, and containing, with the human remains, robes, weapons,
baskets, canoes, and all the furniture of Indian _menage_, to an extent
which among the tribes amounts to a fortune. This sepulchral idea is a
clear-headed one, and worthy of Eastern adoption. Old ladies with lace
and nieces, old gentlemen with cellars and nephews, might be certain
that the solace which they received in life's decline was purely
disinterested, if about middle age they should announce that their Point
and their Port were going to Mount Auburn with them.
The river grew narrower, its banks becoming low, perpendicular walls of
basalt, water-worn at the base, squarely cut and castellated at the top,
and bare everywhere as any pile of masonry. The hills beyond became
naked, or covered only with short grass of the _grama_ kind and
dusty-gray sage-brush. Simultaneously they lost some of their previous
basaltic characteristics, running into more convex outlines, which
receded from the river. We could not fail to recognize the fact that we
had crossed one of the great thresholds of the continent,--were once
more east of the Sierra-Nevada axis, and in the great central plateau
which a few months previous, and several hundred miles farther south, we
had crossed amid so many pains and perils by the Desert route to Washoe.
From the grizzly mountains before us to the sources of the Snake Fork
stretched an almost uninterrupted wilderness of sage. The change in
passing to this region from the fertile and timbered tracts of the
Cascades and the coast is more abrupt than can be imagined by one
familiar with our delicately modulated Eastern scenery. This sharpness
of definition seems to characterize the entire border of the plateau.
Five hours of travel between Washoe and Sacramento carry one out of the
nakedest stone heap into the grandest forest of the continent.
As we emerged from the confinement of the nearer ranges, Mount Hood,
hitherto visible only through occasional rifts, loomed broadly into
sight almost from base to peak, covered with a mantle of perennial snow
scarcely less complete to our near inspection than it had seemed from
our observatory south of Salem. Only here and there toward its lower rim
a tatter in it revealed the giant's rugged brown muscle of volcanic
rock. The top of the mountain, like that of Shasta, in direct sunlight
is an opal. So far above the line of thaw, the snow seems to have
accumulated until by its own weight it has condensed into a more
compactly crystalline structure than ice itself, and the reflections
from it, as I stated of Shasta, seem rather emanations from some
interior source of light. The look is distinctly opaline, or, as a poet
has called the opal, like "a pearl with a soul in it."
About five o'clock in the afternoon we reached the Oregon town and
mining-depot of Dalles City. A glance at any good War-Department map of
Oregon and Washington Territories will explain the importance of this
place, where considerably previous to the foundation of the present
large and growing settlement there existed a fort and trading-post of
the same name. It stands, as we have said, at the entrance to the great
pass by which the Columbia breaks through the mountains to the sea. Just
west of it occurs an interruption to the navigation of the river,
practically as formidable as the first cataract. This is the upper
rapids and "the Dalles" proper,--presently to be described in detail.
The position of the town, at one end of a principal portage, and at the
easiest door to the Pacific, renders it a natural entrepot between the
latter and the great central plateau of the continent. This it must have
been in any case for fur-traders and emigrants, but its business has
been vastly increased by the discovery of that immense mining-area
distributed along the Snake River and its tributaries as far east as the
Rocky Mountains. The John-Day, Boise, and numerous other tracts both in
Washington and Idaho Territories draw most of their supplies from this
entrepot, and their gold comes down to it either for direct use in the
outfit-market, or to be passed down the river to Portland and the
San-Francisco mint.
In a late article upon the Pacific Railroad, I laid no particular stress
upon the mines of Washington and Idaho as sources of profit to the
enterprise. This was for the reason that the Snake River seems the
proper outlet to much of the auriferous region, and this route may be
susceptible of improvement by an alternation of portages, roads, and
water-levels, which for a long time to come will form a means of
communication more economical and rapid than a branch to the Pacific
Road. The northern mines east of the Rocky range will find themselves
occupying somewhat similar relations to the Missouri River, which
rises, as one might almost say, out of the same spring as the
Snake,--certainly out of the same ridge of the Rocky Mountains.
"The Dalles" is a town of one street, built close along the edge of a
bluff of trap thirty or forty feet high, perfectly perpendicular, level
on the top as if it had been graded for a city, and with depth of water
at its base for the heaviest draught boats on the river. In fact, the
whole water-front is a natural quay,--which wants nothing but time to
make it alive with steam-elevators, warehouses, and derricks. To
Portland and the Columbia it stands much as St. Louis to New Orleans and
the Mississippi. There is no reason why it should not some day have a
corresponding business, for whose wharfage-accommodation it has even
greater natural advantages.
Architecturally, the Dalles cannot be said to lean very heavily on the
side of beauty. The houses are mostly two-story structures of wood,
occupied by all the trades and professions which flock to a new
mining-entrepot. Outfit-merchants, blacksmiths, printing-office, (for
there is really a very well-conducted daily at the Dalles,) are cheek by
jowl with doctors, tailors, and Cheap Johns,--the latter being only less
merry and thrifty over their incredible sacrifices in everything, from
pins to corduroy, than that predominant class of all, the bar-keepers
themselves. The town was in a state of bustle when our steamer touched
the wharf; it bustled more and more from there to the Umatilla House,
where we stopped; the hotel was one organized bustle in bar and
dining-room; and bed-time brought no hush. The Dalles, like the
Irishman, seemed sitting up all night to be fresh for an early start in
the morning.
We found everybody interested in gold. Crowds of listeners, with looks
of incredulity or enthusiasm, were gathered around the party in the
bar-room which had last come in from the newest of the new mines, and a
man who had seen the late Fort-Hall discoveries was "treated" to that
extent that he might have become intoxicated a dozen times without
expense to himself. The charms of the interior were still further
suggested by placards posted on every wall, offering rewards for the
capture of a person who on the great gold route had lately committed
some of the grimmest murders and most talented robberies known in any
branch of Newgate enterprise. I had for supper a very good omelet,
(considering its distance from the culinary centres of the universe,)
and a Dalles editorial debating the claims of several noted cut-throats
to the credit of the operations ascribed to them,--feeling that in the
_ensemble_ I was enjoying both the exotic and the indigenous luxuries of
our virgin soil.
After supper and a stroll I returned to the ladies' parlor of the
Umatilla House, rubbed my eyes in vain to dispel the illusion of a piano
and a carpet at this jumping-off place of civilization, and sat down at
a handsome centre-table to write up my journal. I had reviewed my way
from Portland as far as Fort Vancouver, when another illusion happened
to me in the shape of a party of gentlemen and ladies, in ball-dresses,
dress-coats, white kids, and elaborate hair, who entered the parlor to
wait for further accessions from the hotel. They were on their way with
a band of music to give some popular citizen a surprise-party. The
popular citizen never got the fine edge of that surprise. I took it off
for him. If it were not too much like a little Cockney on Vancouver's
Island who used the phrase on all occasions, from stubbing his toe to
the death of a Cabinet Lord, I should say, "I never was more astonished
in me life!"
None of them had ever seen me before,--and with my books and maps about
me, I may have looked like some public, yet mysterious character. I felt
a pleasant sensation of having interest taken in me, and, wishing to
make an ingenuous return, looked up with a casual smile at one of the
party. Again to my surprise, this proved to be a very charming young
lady, and I timidly became aware that the others were equally pretty in
their several styles. Not knowing what else to do under the
circumstances, I smiled again, still more casually. An equal uncertainty
as to alternative set the ladies smiling quite across the row, and then,
to my relief, the gentlemen joined them, making it pleasant for us all.
A moment later we were engaged in general conversation,--starting from
the bold hypothesis, thrown out by one of the gentlemen, that perhaps I
was going to Boise, and proceeding, by a process of elimination, to the
accurate knowledge of what I was going to do, if it wasn't that. I
enjoyed one of the most cheerful bits of social relaxation I had found
since crossing the Missouri, and nothing but my duty to my journal
prevented me, when my surprise-party left, from accompanying them, by
invitation, under the brevet title of Professor, to the house of the
popular citizen, who, I was assured, would be glad to see me. I
certainly should have been glad to see him, if he was anything like
those guests of his who had so ingenuously cultivated me in a far land
of strangers, where a man might have been glad to form the acquaintance
of his mother-in-law. This is not the way people form acquaintances in
New York; but if I had wanted that, why not have stayed there? As a
cosmopolite, and on general principles of being, I prefer the Dalles
way. I have no doubt I should have found in that circle of spontaneous
recognitions quite as many people who stood wear and improved on
intimacy as were ever vouchsafed to me by social indorsement from
somebody else. We are perpetually blaming our heads of Government
Bureaus for their poor knowledge of character,--their subordinates, we
say, are never pegs in the right holes. If we understood our civilized
system of introductions, we could not rationally expect anything else.
The great mass of polite mankind are trained _not_ to know character,
but to take somebody else's voucher for it. Their acquaintances, most of
their friendships, come to them through a succession of indorsers, none
of whom may have known anything of the goodness of the paper. A sensible
man, conventionally introduced to his fellow, must always wonder why the
latter does not turn him around to look for signatures in chalk down the
back of his coat; for he knows that Brown indorsed him over to Jones,
and Jones negotiated him with Robinson, through a succession in which
perhaps two out of a hundred took pains to know whether he represented
metal. You do not find the people of new countries making mistakes in
character. Every man is his own guaranty,--and if he has no just cause
to suspect himself bogus, there will be true pleasure in a frank opening
of himself to the examination and his eyes for the study of others. Not
to be accused of intruding radical reform under the guise of
belles-lettres, let me say that I have no intention of introducing this
innovation at the East.
After a night's rest, Bierstadt spent nearly the entire morning in
making studies of Hood from an admirable post of observation at the top
of one of the highest foot-hills,--a point several miles southwest of
the town, which he reached under guidance of an old Indian interpreter
and trapper. His work upon this mountain was in some respects the best
he ever accomplished, being done with a loving faithfulness hardly
called out by Hood's only rival, the Peak of Shasta. The result of his
Hood studies, as seen in the nearly completed painting, has a
superiority corresponding to that of the studies themselves, possessing
excellences not included even in the well-known "Lander's Peak."
In the afternoon, we were provided, by the courtesy of the Company, with
a special train on the portage-railroad connecting Dalles City with a
station known as Celilo. This road had but recently come into full
operation, and was now doing an immense freight-business between the two
river-levels separated by the intervening "Dalles." It seemed somewhat
longer than the road around the Falls. Its exact length has escaped me,
but I think it about eight or nine miles.
With several officers of the road, who vied in giving us opportunities
of comfort and information, we set out, about three P.M., from a station
on the water-front below the town, whence we trundled through the long
main street, and were presently shot forth upon a wilderness of sand. An
occasional trap uplift rose on our right, but, as we were on the same
bluff-level as Dalles City, we met no lofty precipices. We were
constantly in view of the river, separated from its Oregon brink at the
farthest by about half a mile of the dreariest dunes of shifting sand
ever seen by an amateur in deserts. The most arid tracts along the
Platte could not rival this. The wind was violent when we left Dalles
City, and possessed the novel faculty of blowing simultaneously from all
points of the compass. It increased with every mile of advance, both in
force and faculty, until at Celilo we found it a hurricane. The
gentlemen of the Company who attended us told us, as seemed very
credible, that the highest winds blowing here (compared with which the
present might be styled a zephyr) banked the track so completely out of
sight with sand that a large force of men had to be steadily employed in
shovelling out trains that had been brought to a dead halt, and clearing
a way for the slow advance of others. I observed that the sides of some
of the worst sand-cuts had been planked over to prevent their sliding
down upon the road. Occasionally, the sand blew in such tempests as to
sift through every cranny of the cars, and hide the river-glimpses like
a momentary fog. But this discomfort was abundantly compensated by the
wonderfully interesting scenery on the Columbia side of our train.
The river for the whole distance of the portage is a succession of
magnificent rapids, low cataracts, and narrow, sinuous channels,--the
last known to the old French traders as "_Dales_" or "Troughs," and to
us by the very natural corruption of "Dalles." The alternation between
these phases is wonderfully abrupt. At one point, about half-way between
Dalles City and Celilo, the entire volume of the Columbia River (and how
vast that is may be better understood by following up on the map the
river itself and all its tributaries) is crowded over upon the Oregon
shore through a passage not more than fifty yards in width, between
perfectly naked and perpendicular precipices of basalt. Just beyond this
mighty mill-race, where one of the grandest floods of the continent is
sliding in olive-green light and umber shadow, smoothly and resistlessly
as time, the river is a mile wide, and plunges over a ragged wall of
trap blocks, reaching, as at the lower cataract, from shore to shore. In
other neighboring places it attains even a greater width, but up to
Celilo is never out of torment from the obstructions of its bed. Not
even the rapids of Niagara can vie with these in their impression of
power, and only the Columbia itself can describe the lines of grace made
by its water, rasped to spray, churned to froth, tired into languid
sheets that flow like sliding glass, or shot up in fountains frayed away
to rainbows on their edges, as it strikes some basalt hexagon rising in
mid-stream. The Dalles and the Upper Cataracts are still another region
where the artist might stay for a year's University-course in
water-painting.
At Celilo we found several steamers, in register resembling our second
of the day previous. They measured on the average about three hundred
tons. One of them had just got down from Walla Walla, with a large party
of miners from gold-tracts still farther off, taking down five hundred
thousand dollars in dust to Portland and San Francisco. We were very
anxious to accept the Company's extended invitation, and push our
investigations to or even up the Snake River. But the expectation that
the San-Francisco steamer would reach Portland in a day or two, and that
we should immediately return by her to California, turned us most
reluctantly down the river after Bierstadt and I had made the fullest
notes and sketches attainable. Bad weather on the coast falsified our
expectations. For a week we were rain-bound in Portland, unable to leave
our hotel for an hour at a time without being drenched by the floods
which just now set in for the winter season, and regretting the lack of
that prescience which would have enabled us to accomplish one of the
most interesting side-trips in our whole plan of travel. While this
pleasure still awaited us, and none in particular of any kind seemed
present, save the in-door courtesies of our Portland friends, it was
still among the memories of a lifetime to have seen the Columbia in its
Cataracts and its Dalles.