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 special 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. 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 ménage, 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 gramma 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, 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 entrepôt 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, Boisé, and numerous other tracts both in Washington and Idaho Territories draw most of their supplies from this entrepôt, 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. I do not lay particular stress upon the mines of Washington and Idaho as sources of profit to the Pacific Railroad. This is 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 entrepôt. Outfit merchants, blacksmiths, printingoffice (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 balldresses, dress-coats, white kids, and elaborate hair, who entered the parlor to wait for further accessions |