Chapter 10

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, Boisé, 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 _détour_ 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-nó, 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 _désillusionné_, when a princely _cortége_, 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 _cañon_ 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 _châlet_ 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 _cañon_,--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.