The Dalles — Their Legend edit
Klale the ardent, Gubbins the punchy, Antipodes the lubberly, had not stampeded far in their panic when the great pine-tree torch fell crashing through the woods. Fudnun easily recovered them by the light of dawn, — three horses well fed and well rested, three sinewy nags, by no means likely to be scant of breath through Falstaffian fatness, but yet stanch, and able to travel the last thirty or forty miles of my journey, before nightfall.
Prayerful for sunrise and sun-born ardors in that dull dawn were horses and men. Cold is a bitter foe of courage; hot blood is the only brave blood. All five of us, the grazers three, the snorer one, and the one drowsy watcher, still trembled with the penetrating chill of drizzle on the bleak mountain-top. We might not have the instinctive cheerfulness, child and nursling of sunshine, but we soon, by way of substitute, made an inspiriting discovery, — the trail. Like many an exit from life’s labyrinths, it was hidden only for want of searching with more light. We pounced upon its first faint indications, and went at such full speed as a night of damp and cramp permitted, with as much tirra lirra in our matin song of march as might ring through the vocal pipes of knights-errant carrying colds in their heads.
“Nika klap; find um,” Fudnun had shouted, with a triumphant burst of laughter, when he caught sight of the trail, lurking serpentine in the grass; and now, having recovered his reputation as a path-finder, he would not lose it again. With single minded accuracy he kept this one object in view. He fairly shamed my powers of observation, by his quick, unerring glance. Shrewd detective, he was. never at fault wherever that eluding-path dodged artfully, and became but a shattered clew of escape. If ever the hooihut disappeared totally, like a rivulet sinking under ground, Fudnun, as if he bore a witch-hazel divining-rod, made straight for the spot of its reappearance. Sometimes for a mile there would be no visible way, and I, seeing my guide still galloping on confidently under the pines, over the dry brown carpet of their fallen leaves, would call him, and say, “Halo mitlite hooihut; here’s no trail.”
“Nawitka, closche nika nanitch; yes, I see it well,” Fudnun would reply, pointing where a root had been scraped by a hoof, or a tuft of moss kicked up, or the brown pine-leaves trodden to a yellower tint; and presently, in softer ground, the path would again declare itself distinctly, like a pleasant association reawakening in moments of tenderness. Thus we hastened on through the open pine woods, gaining distance merely. We fled on between tedious ranks of yellow pines, with a raw wind chasing us and growing icier, as we rode out upon the bare, shelterless slopes of the lower regions.
And by and by, as the trail disentangled itself from forest and mountain, lo, in houseless wilds, a house! an architectural log cabin.
“Whose house, Fudnun? What outpost sentry-box of Boston camps to come?”
It is the house of Skloo, Telamon of the Yakimaks, as Owhhigh is their Diomed, the horse-thief, and Kamaiakan their great-hearted Agamemnon; no advanced post of Boston men, but a refuge of the siwashes, between two fires of pale-faces advancing westward and eastward.
The cabin was deserted. Skloo and the braves of Skloo were gone over moor and fell, gone by cañon and prairie, gone after salmon, grasshoppers, berries, kamas, — after all Indian luxuries and wants, including pillage of pasaiooks and foes of their own color, when to be had without peril. The cabin of Telamon Skloo stood, lonely and deserted, in a spot where the world looked large, and yellow prairies rushed out of the forest, billowing broadly southward, toward the desolate ranges, walls of the Columbia. As well, perhaps, that Skloo was an absentee and his house shut; Skloo, with a house on his back and a roof over his head, would have been totally neutralized as a nomad chief. He would have lost Skloo the Klickatat rover, with whatever interest or value he had in that relation, and have been precipitated to the level of any Snooks in Christendom, dweller in villa or box.
I did not envy Skloo his stationary property of house; certain mobile chattels of his I did envy him greatly. A band of his horses were feeding in this spot of the unfenced world. They did not heed our roadster passage as we draggled by, much the worse for wearing travel. They noticed us no more than a wary old grouse notices a gunless man. Antipodes felt the thoughtless dolt stir again within him; he forgot how be had been taught who was his master, and, with packs flapping like rapid pinions, he bolted, to join that free cavalcade. Fudnun instantly educated him severely back into line.
Just then, over a swell of the ripe, yellow prairie, came at full speed, on a coal-black horse, a young Indian, with his long hair uncovered and streaming in the wind as he galloped. On he rode, — a cavalier free and bold, without saddle or stirrups, whirling his lasso with arm outstretched. He made straight for the band of grazing horses, and the unwarning blast blew from them toward him, as they stood curiously watching our slow tramp along the trail. So the untamed horses of Skloo’s prairie did not sniff or see or hear the new-comer until he was close upon them and the whiz of his whirling lasso sang in their ears. Then they tossed their proud heads, shook their plumage of mane, and, with a snort of disgust at their unwatchfulness, sprang into full speed of flight. They bent toward us, and crossed the trail not a hundred yards before us. Their pursuer was riding almost parallel with them. As they dashed by, he flung his lasso at a noble black, galloping with head elate and streaming mane and tail.
The loop of the lasso, preserving its circle with geometrical accuracy, seemed to hang an instant in the air, waiting for its certain captive.
Will he be taken? Must he be enthralled?
Not so. A glorious escape! While the loop of the lasso hung poised, the black had sprung through it unerringly — straight through its open circle, — touching it only to spurn with his hindmost hoof, and then with the excitement of his success he burst forward, and took the lead of all that wild throng, dashing on like the wind.
But not at all for this failure and overcast did the speed of the headlong chaser lessen. He did not even turn for my applause at the circuslike “act of horsemanship” he had afforded me in this spacious amphitheatre. His powerful coalblack horse still sped on fleet as before, close upon the particolored regiment, and the rider had his lasso quickly in hand, and coiled for a fresh cast, more cautious. Far as we could see over the undulations of the tawny plain, so beautifully boundless, the herd was stretching on, rather in joyous escapade than coward flight; and just apart from them, their pursuer still held tireless and inevitable gallop, — his right arm raised and whirling with imperceptible motion the lasso, now invisible in the distance.
My good-will was with the dappled herd of runaways, rather than with the bronze horseman in chase. The capture of any wild stampeder would begin or renew his history of maltreatment, as some of them already knew from past experience, and were flying now with remembrance of abuse as well as for the instinct of freedom. There are no absolutely wild horses in the Northwest. All the cavalier Indians have their numerous bands of horses, broken and unbroken, and wild enough, following the nomad movements of the tribe. It is a rough, punchy, hardy stock, utterly unkempt and untaught, but capable of taking care of itself, and capable also, according to the law of barbarism, of producing chance individuals of size, strength, and beauty. Bucephalus is the exception; Rosinante the rule. Bucephalus is worth a first-class squaw, or possibly two of those vexatious luxuries of a cheaper grade. Rosinantes go about five to the squaw. Papa gets the price; not as in civilization, where, when a squaw sells herself for a Bucephalus, a brougham, and a black coachman, she keeps and uses the equivalent. And now that I am on the tariff for squaws, — dry goods buy them in Siwashdom as sometimes in Christendom. The conventional price is expressed in blankets. Blankets paid to papa, buy: five, a cheap and unclean article, a drudge; ten, a tolerable article, a cook and basket-maker; twenty, a fine article of squaw, learned in the kamas-beds, and with skull flat as a shingle; fifty, a very superior article, ruddy with vermilion and skilled in embroidering buckskin with porcupine-quills; and one hundred blankets, a princess, with the beauty and accomplishments of her rank. Mothers in civilization will be pleased to compare these with their current rates.
Skloo’s prairie and the region thereabouts merits tenants more numerous than stray bands of mustangs. Succulent bunch-grass grows there in plenty for legions of graminivora to fatten on as they take gentle, wholesome exercise over the hillocks. It was by far the most propitious country I had seen this side the mountains, and will make a valuable cattle range.
At present, exercise, and not grazing, was the business of my cattle. We must hold to our unflagging march for a few hours more. But prostration after my night watch, and straining of mind and body for many days, was overcoming me. I was still wet, cold, and weary, hardly capable of observation, the most instinctive of healthy human faculties. It was now eleven o’clock of the thirty-first of August. The sky began to clear with tumultuous power. Massive black battalions of cloud came rushing by from the reserves of storm that still were encamped upon the mountain strongholds westward. Every gloomy cloud trailed a blast, chilling as Sarsar, the icy wind of death. Between these moments of torture, the sun of August came forth through vistas of blinding white vapor, and fevered me. I grew suddenly sick with a despair like death. Fudnun was descending a slope some distance before me, driving Antipodes laboriously along. I essayed to shout to him, but my voice choked with a sneering, fiendish rattle, as if contempt of my soul at its mean jailer, My poor failing, dying body. I clutched vainly at the coil of my lariat by my saddle horn, and fell senseless.
I slept through a brief death to a blissful resurrection. Awaking slowly, I doubted at first whether I were not now released from earthly trammels, for tireless toil in a life immortal. First, I perceived that I was conscious; therefore I still was in being. Quickly the tremulous blood, in every fibre and cell, told me that I was still an organized being, possessed of members like those old familiar ones, my agents in winning undying thoughts. Next, my eyes unclosed, and I saw the fair sky. With my senses newborn, my first discovery of external facts was the illimitable heaven, bright with evanescent wreaths of clouds, white and virginal. Whether, then, this were a new world where I had awakened, or the world of my ancient tenancy, I knew that the well-known laws of beauty reigned, and I need not here apostatize from old loves and old faiths. Life went on slowly reviving, drawing vigor from the air, and action, the token of life, became a necessity. I stirred feebly, like a child. The rustle of my first movement called out a sympathetic stir. Another organization in the outer world took note of me. I felt a warm puff upon my cheek, and the nose of Klale the Trusty bent over me inquisitively.
The situation was now systematically explained. I was my old self, on the old earth wholly satisfactory, whether desirable or not. Let us at least know where we stand, — what are our facts; then, if there is anything to be done with ourselves, or made of our facts, we can make the attempt.
Something toward self-restoration may be done even by a passive, supine weakling, lying among bunch-grass, on a solitary prairie, leagues away from a house,— an unpromising set of circumstances. I was at present a very valueless worldling. But the world that takes us and mars us has also to make us again. Unless our breakage is voluntary, determined, and habitual, we shall mend. Not behind corpulent bottles, purple, crimson, and blue, in a shop where there is a putty-faced youth with a pestle and a redolence of rhubarb, are kept the great agents of Nature, — our mother, father, — who as mother gives us life, and as father warns, flogs, cures, and guides us with severe tenderness. Air, light, and water are the trinity of simple remedies, not sold in the shops, for making a marred man new and whole again. These three medicines were liberally provided near my fainting fit on the prairie.
The first thing I had to do, to be changed from a limp object to a robust man, was only passive action. I was to breathe and to bask. And when I had sufficiently suffered the influence of air and light, Nature’s next potent remedy was awaiting me. I heard the welcome trickle of water near at hand, — delicious, winsome sound, hardly less articulate than the tones of a beloved voice calling me to a presence that should be refreshment and full renovation. I could not walk, but I dragged myself along toward the source of sound, Klale following, an uncontrolled friend.
Sweet water-music guided me to a neighbor rivulet. It came singing along the bosomy swells of prairie, fondling its long, graceful fringes of grass, curving and returning, that it might not lose, with too much urgency, the self-possessed delight of motion along the elastic softness of its cushioned bed. If there were anywhere above in this brook’s career turmoil and turbulence, it suffered no worse consequence than that it must carry along a reminiscence of riot, quickly soothed, in files of bright bubbles, with their skulls fuller than they could bear of microscopic images of all the outer world. Each bubble was so crowded with reflections from the zenith, that it must share its bursting sympathy, and marry with every bubble it overtook and touched, until it became so full of fantasies that it must merrily explode and be resolved into a drop and a sunbeam.
The countless charm of water, so sweetly shining forth its quality of refreshment, revived me even before I could stoop and taste. I sank and lapped. I bathed away the fever from my brow, and let the warm, healthy sunshine cherish me.
In eldest days, had I drooped by a Hippocrene like this, a nymph had surely emerged from among the ripples and laid her cooling hand upon me gently, giving me for all my mortal days a guardian vision of immortality. In younger time, then, had I perchance been blessed with healing at the hands of some maiden leech, a Una, unerringly errant hither upon a milkwhite palfrey, hither where a knight was sore bestead. Now, Nature nursed me, and I grew strong again.
But let us bethink ourselves, Klale, “my trusty frère.” We were five; we are two. Where are the three? Where is Fudnun, the Incorruptible, the Path-finder, the Merry? Where Antipodes? Where Gubbins?
Where? Here! Here, pelting down the slope, overjoyed, comes Fudnun, with whinnying nags. He had advanced sleepily, giving his whole mind to driving Antipodes, until that reluctant steed, pretending to grow unhappy that Klale and I were missing, bolted to the rear; whereupon Fudnun perceived my absence, and turned to recover me, dead or alive.
“Nika kulapi; I wheel about,” said he, “halo nanitch; see naught. Cultus nika tum tum; feeble grows my heart. Pose mika, memloose; perhaps you dead. Nika mamook stick copa k’Gubns; I ply stick on Gubbins,” — and he continued to describe how he had found the spot of my fall, and my gun lying there, and had followed my trail through the long grass. Not, I am sure, with hopes of my scalp and my plunder without a battle. Fudnun was honest, and, finding me safe, he relieved himself by uproarious laughter.
There is magnetism in society, even a Fudnun’s. Strength came quicker to my flaccid tissues. I thought of my journey’s end, not far off, and toiled up that dread ascent into my saddle. Klale trudged along, and soon perceiving that I swayed about no more, and, instead of, clinging with both hands to my saddle, sat upright and held the bridle, he paced gradually into his cradling lope.
By the hearty aid of noon, the Cascades put their shoulders to the clouds, lifted them and cut them to pieces with their peaks, so that the wind could come in, like a charge of cavalry, and annihilate the broken phalanxes. Mount Adams, Tacoma the Less, was the first object to cleave the darkness. I looked westward, and saw a sunlit mass of white, high up among the black clouds, and baseless but for them. It would have seemed itself a cloud, but, while the dark volumes were heaving and shifting about it, this was permanent. While I looked, the mountain and the sun became evident victors; the glooms fell away, were scattered and scourged into nothingness, and the snow-peak stood forth majestic, the sole arbiter of this realm. The yellow prairies rolled up where the piny Cascades, dwarfed by distance, were a dark ridge upon the horizon, and the overtopping bulk of Tacoma rose directly from them, a silver mountain from a golden sea. No tameness of thought is possible here, even if prairie-land lies dead level for leagues, when on its edge the untamed forces of Nature have set up these stately monuments. More than a hundred miles away on the transcontinental journey, more than a hundred miles away on the sea, these noble isolated snow-peaks are to a traveller memorials of the land he has left, or beacons, firmer than a pillar of cloud, of a land whither he goes.
Again I thought of the influence of this most impressive scenery upon its future pupils among men. The shape of the world has controlled or guided men’s growth; the look of the world has hardly yet begun to have its effect upon spiritual progress. Multitudes of agents have always been at work to poison and dwarf poets and artists in those inspiring regions of earth where nature means they shall grow as naturally as water-lilies by a lake, or palms above the thicks of tropic woods. Civilized mankind has never yet had a fresh chance of developing itself under grand and stirring influences so large as in the Northwest.
“Yah wah, enetee,” said Fudnun, pointing to a great surging hill a thousand feet high, “mitlite skookoom tsuk, k’Lumby tsuk; there, across, is the mighty water, Columbia River.”
One more charge up this Titanic bastion, and I could fairly shout, Victory! and Time beaten in the race by a length! Up, then, my squad of cavalry. Clamber up the grassy slope, Klale the untiring. Stumble forward, k’Gubns, on thy last legs. Plod on, Antipodes, in the despairing sulks. If ye are weary, am I not wearier? Have I not died once to-day? Beyond this mighty earthwork is a waste and desolate valley; if I am to perish, let me die on the edge of appropriate, infernal scenery, such as I know of beyond that hill. And that great river, briefest of the master streams of earth, if it be not Styx to us, shall be Lethe. Klale, my jolly imp, k’Gubns, my honest servitor, Antipodes, my recalcitrant Caliban, Lethe is at hand. Across that current an Elysium awaits us, as good an Elysium as the materials permit, and there whatever can be found of asphodel or horse-fodder shall be your meed, and ye shall repose until ye start again.
Such a harangue roused the drooping quadrupeds. We travelled up the steep, right in the teeth of hot blasts, baked in the rocky cells of the valley beyond, and pouring over to meet us like puffs from deadly batteries upon the summit. We climbed for a laborious hour, and paused at last upon the crest.
Behind was the vast, monotonous plain of my morning’s march. Distant behind were the rude, difficult mountains I had crossed so painfully; and more distant westward were the main Cascades, with their snow-peaks calm and solemnly radiant. Of all this I was too desperately worn out to take much appreciative notice. The scene before me was in closer sympathy with my mood.
Before me was a region like the Valley of Death, rugged, bleak, and severe. A tragical valley, where the fiery forces of Nature, impotent to attain majestic combination, and build monuments of peace, had fallen into despairs and ugly warfare. A valley of anarchy, — a confession that harmony of the elements was hopeless here, and that the toil of Nature for cycles working a world out of chaos, had failed, and achieved only a relapse into ruin, drearier than chaos.
Racked and battered crags stood disorderly over all that rough waste. There were no trees, nor any masses of vegetation to soften the severities of the landscape. All was harsh and desolate, even with the rich sun of an August afternoon doing what it might to empurple the scathed fronts of rock, to gild the ruinous piles with summer glories, and throw long shadows veiling dreariness. I looked upon the scene with the eyes of a sick and weary man, unable to give that steady thought to mastering its scope and detail without which any attempt at artistic description becomes vague generalization.
My heart sank within me as the landscape compelled me to be gloomy like itself. It was not the first time I had perused the region under desolating auspices. In a log barrack I could just discern far beyond the river, I had that very summer suffered from a villain malady, the smallpox. And now, as then, Nature harmonized discordantly, with my feelings, and even forced her nobler aspects to grow sternly ominous. Mount Hood, full before me across the valley, became a cruel reminder of the unattainable. It was brilliantly near, and yet coldly, far away, like some mocking bliss never to be mine, though it might insult me forever by its scornful presence.
The Dalles of the Columbia, upon which I was now looking, must be studied by the Yankee Dante, whenever he comes, for imagery to construct his Purgatory, if not his Inferno. At Walla Walah two great rivers, Clark’s Fork and the Snake, drainers of the continent north and South, unite to form the Columbia. It flows furiously for a hundred and twenty miles westward. When it reaches the dreary region I was now studying, where the outlying ridges of the Cascade chain commence, it finds a great, low surface paved with enormous polished sheets of basaltic rock. These plates, Gallice dalles, give the spot its name. Canadian voyageurs in the Hudson’s Bay service had a share in the nomenclature of Oregon. The great river, a mile wide not far above, finds but a narrow rift in this pavement for its passage. The rift gradually draws its sides closer, and at the spot now called the Dalles, subdivides into three mere slits in the sharp-edged rock. At the highest water there are other minor channels, but generally this continental flood is cribbed and compressed within its three chasms suddenly opening in the level floor, each chasm hardly wider than a leap a hunted fiend might take.
In fact, the legend of this infernal spot asserts a diabolical origin for these channels in the Dalles. I give this weird and grotesque attempt at explaining strange facts in Nature, translating it into more modern form.
The Legend of the Dalles edit
The world has been long cycles in educating itself to be a fit abode for men. Man, for his part, has been long ages in growing upward through lower grades of being, to become whatever he now may be. The globe was once nebulous, was chaotic, was anarchic, and is at last become somewhat cosmical. Formerly rude and convulsionary forces were actively at work, to compel chaos into anarchy and anarchy into order. The mighty ministries of the elements warred with each other, each subduing and each subdued. There were earthquakes, deluges, primeval storms, and furious volcanic outbursts. In this passionate, uncontrolled period of the world’s history, man was a fiend, a highly uncivilized, cruel, passionate fiend.
The Northwest was then one of the centres of volcanic action. The craters of the Cascades were fire-breathers, fountains of liquid flame, catapults of red-hot stones. Day was lurid, night was ghastly with this terrible light. Men exposed to such dread influences could not be other than fiends, as they were, and they warred together cruelly, as the elements were doing.
Where the great plains of the Upper Columbia now spread, along the Umatillah, in the lovely valley of the Grande Ronde, between the walls of the Grande Coulee, was an enormous inland sea, filling the vast interior of the continent, and beating forever against a rampart of hills, to the east of the desolate plain of the Dalles.
Every winter there were convulsions along the Cascades, and gushes of lava came from each fiery Tacoma, to spread new desolation over desolation, pouring out a melted surface, which, as it cooled in summer, became a fresh layer of sheeny, fire-hardened dalles.
Now as the fiends of that epoch and region had giant power to harm each other, they must have of course giant weapons of defence. Their mightiest weapon of offence and defence was their tail; in this they resembled the iguanodons and other “mud pythons” of that period, but no animal ever had such force of tail as these terrible, monster fiend-men who warred together over all the Northwest.
As ages went on, and the fires of the Cascades began to accomplish their duty of expanding the world, earthquakes and eruptions diminished in virulence. A winter came when there was none. By and by there was an interval of two years, then again of three years, without rumble or shock, without floods of fire or showers of red-hot stones. Earth seemed to be subsiding into an era of peace. But the fiends would not take the hint to be peaceable; they warred as furiously as ever.
Stoutest in heart and tail of all the hostile tribes of that scathed region was a wise fiend, the Devil. He had observed the cessation in convulsions of Nature, and had begun to think out its lesson. It was a custom of the fiends, so soon as the Dalles plain became agreeably cool after an eruption, to meet there every summer and have a grand tournament after their fashion. Then they feasted riotously, and fought again until they were weary.
Although the eruptions of the Tacomas had ceased now for three years, as each summer came round this festival was renewed. The Devil had absented himself from the last two, and when, on the third summer after his long retirement, he reappeared among his race on the field of tourney, he became an object of respectful attention. Every fiend knew that against his strength there was no defence; he could slay so long as the fit was on. Yet the idea of combined resistance to so dread a foe had never hatched itself in any fiendish head; and besides, the Devil, though he was feared, was not especially hated. He had never won the jealousy of his peers by rising above them in morality. So now as he approached, with brave tail vibrating proudly, all admired and many feared him.
The Devil drew near, and took the initiative in war, by making a peace speech.
“Princes, potentates, and powers of these infernal realms,” said he, “the eruptions and earthquakes are ceasing. The elements are settling into peacefulness. Can we not learn of them? Let us give up war and cannibalism, and live in milder fiendishness and growing love.”
Then went up a howl from deviltry. “He would lull us into crafty peace, that he may kill and eat safely. Death! death to the traitor!”
And all the legions of fiends, acting with a rare unanimity, made straight at their intended Reformer.
The Devil pursued a Fabian policy, and took to his heels. If he could divide their forces, he could conquer in detail. Yet as he ran his heart was heavy. He was bitterly grieved at this great failure, his first experience in the difficulties of Reform. He flagged sadly as he sped over the Dalles, toward the defiles near the great inland sea, whose roaring waves he could hear beating against their bulwark. Could he but reach some craggy strait among the passes, he could take position and defy attack.
But the foremost fiends were close upon him. Without stopping, he smote powerfully upon the rock with his tail. The pavement yielded to that Titanic blow. A chasm opened and went riving up the valley, piercing through the bulwark hills. Down rushed the waters of the inland sea, churning boulders to dust along the narrow trough.
The main body of the fiends shrunk back terror-stricken; but a battalion of the van sprang across and made one bound toward the heart-sick and fainting Devil. He smote again with his tail, and more strongly. Another vaster cleft went up and down the valley, with an earth-quaking roar, and a vaster torrent swept along.
Still the leading fiends were not appalled. They took the leap without craning. Many fell short, or were crowded into the roaring gulf, but enough were left, and those of the chiefest braves, to martyr their chase in one instant, if they overtook him. The Devil had just time enough to tap once more, and with all the vigor of a despairing tail.
He was safe. A third crevice, twice the width of the second, split the rocks. This way and that it went, wavering like lightning eastward and westward, riving a deeper cleft in the mountains that held back the inland sea, riving a vaster gorge through the majestic chain of the Cascades, and opening a way for the torrent to gush oceanward. It was the crack of doom for the fiends. A few essayed the leap. They fell far short of the stern edge, where the Devil had sunk panting. They alighted on the water, but whirlpools tripped them up, tossed them, bowled them along among floating boulders, until the buffeted wretches were borne to the broader calms below, where they sunk. Meanwhile, those who had not dared the final leap attempted a backward one, but wanting the impetus of pursuit; and shuddering at the fate of their comrades, every one of them failed and fell short; and they too were swept away, horribly sprawling in the flood.
As to the fiends who had stopped at the first crevice, they ran in a body down the river to look for the mangled remains of their brethren, and, the undermined bank giving way under their weight, every, fiend of them was carried away and drowned.
So perished the whole race of fiends.
As to the Devil, he had learnt a still deeper lesson. His tail also, the ensign of deviltry, was irremediably dislocated by his last life-saving blow. In fact, it had ceased to be any longer a needful weapon! its antagonists were all gone; never a tail remained to be brandished at it, in deadly encounter.
So, after due repose, the Devil sprang lightly across the chasms he had so successfully engineered, and went home to rear his family thoughtfully. Every year he brought his children down to the Dalles, and told them the terrible history of his escape. The fires of the Cascades burned away; the inland sea was drained, and its bed became fair prairie, and still the waters gushed along the narrow crevices he had opened. He had, in fact, been the instrument in changing a vast region from a barren sea into habitable land.
One great trial, however, remained with him, and made his life one of grave responsibility. All his children born before the catastrophe were cannibal, stiff-tailed fiends. After that great event, every new-born imp of his was like himself in character and person, and wore but a flaccid tail, the last insignium of ignobility. Quarrels between these two factions imbittered his day’s and impeded civilization. Still it did advance, and long before his death he saw the tails disappear forever.
Such is the Legend of the Dalles, — a legend not without a moral.
So in this summer afternoon I rested awhile looking over the brown desolateness of the valley where the Devil baffled the fiends, and then slowly and wearily I wound along down the enormous hill-side by crumbling paths, and then between scarped cliffs of fired rock or shattered conglomerate down to the desert below. The Columbia was still two or three cruel miles away, but at last, turning to the right, away from the pavement and channels of the Dalles, I came to the cliffs over the river.
Over against me, across the unfordable whirls of gray water, still furious after its compression in the rifts above, was the outermost post of Occidental civilization. My countrymen were backing from the Pacific across the continent, and to protect their advancing rear had established a small garrison here at the Dalles. There were the old log barracks on the terrace a mile from the river. My very hospital, where I had suffered, and received the kindliest care, and where to my fevered dreams had come visions of Indians, antic, frantic, corybantic, circling about me with hatchets because I had brought the deadly pest into their tribe, — that log cabin, vacated by its occupant, the officer in command, that I might be well lodged through my illness, was still there among the rough, yellow pines, unaltered by one embrowning summer. There was the sutler’s shop near the shore, and grouped about it, tents of the first-comers of the overland emigration, each with its gypsy supper-fire. Truly an elysium of civilization as elysian as one could desire, and Mount Hood standing nobly in the background, no longer chill and unsympathizing. But between me and elysium flows the Styx, gray and turbulent, and Charon, where is he? There are no canoes on this side. How shall we cross, Fudnun, the Blanketeer?
“Kloneas; dunno. Pose mika mamook po; suppose you fire a shot,” said Fudnun, “pesiwash chaco copa canim; and Indian come with canoe.”
I fired shots, nay, impatient volleys, and very petty popgun noise it seemed by the loud river in this broad, rough bit of earth. No one appeared to ferry me. I waved a white blanket. No one heeded. I fired more shots, more volleys. It would be farcical, or worse, should we be forced to stay here “dum defluat amnis,” to wait until this continental current run driblets. Are we to repeat, with variations, the trials of Tantalus? No, for I see a figure stirring near a log on the beach. At this distance I cannot distinguish, but I can fancy the figure to be one of the Frowzy, and the log a canoe. It is so. He launches, and comes bravely paddling across the stream. We scuffled down the craggy bank to meet him.
“Howdydo! Howdydo!” said Olyman Charon, landing his canoe, and lounging bow-leggedly up to shake hands. A welcoming howdydo, said I in return, and for a fitting number of oboli he agreed to ferry me and mine in two detachments. I would cross first with the traps, swimming Klale; Fudnun would come afterward with k’Gubns and Antipodes. I upheld Klale’s head in the bow while Charon paddled and steered aft. The river proved indeed almost a Styx to poor Klale. It was a long half-mile of stemming a furious current, and once or twice the stout-hearted little nag struggled as if his death moment had come. But Charon paddled lustily, and we safely touched the farther shore.
It was sunset of the last of August. I had won the day, and not merely the day. Across the tide-ways of Whulge, the Squally prairies, the wooded flanks and buttresses of Tacoma, by the Nachchese, cañon and valley, from traitors on Weenas, from the Atinam, mission, from the camp of the flaring torch, across Skloo’s domains, and at last over the region of the Devil’s race-course here at the Dalles; — over all these stages of my route I had hastened, and my speed was not in vain. I had seen new modes of savage life. I had proved Indian treachery and Indian friendship. I knew the glory and the shame of Klalam and Klickatat. Among many types of character were some positively distinct and new ones; Dooker Yawk, the drunken; Owhhigh, the magisterial; Loolowcan, the frowzy; Shabbiest, the not ungrateful; merry Uplintz, and hero-worshipping Kpawintz; Kamaiakan, the regal and courteous; Fudnun, the jocund; — all these had been in some way intimately associated with my destiny. I had conquered time and space by just so little as to feel a respect for my antagonists, and some satisfaction in myself as victor. My allies in the contest, my three quadrupeds, had borne them nobly. I had a serene sense of new and large experience, and of some qualities in myself newly tested. Of all my passages of wild life, this was the most varied and concentrated. There had been much grandeur of nature, and vigorous dramatic scenes, crowded into this brief journey. As a journey, it was complete with a fortunate catastrophe after the rapidity of its acts, to prove the plot well conceived. I had rehearsed my longer march, and was ready to begin to enact it.
I left Klale to shake himself free of the waters of his Lethe, and nibble at what he could find of the promised asphodel, until his comrades came over, and myself moved about to greet old friends. My two comrades of the morrow were in a tent, hard by, playing poker with Pikes of the emigration, and losing money to the said crafty Pikes.
So, when the morrow came, I mounted a fresh horse, and went galloping along on my way across the continent. With my comrades, a pair of frank, hearty, kindly roughs, I rode over the dry plains of the Upper Columbia, beyond the sight of Mount Hood and Tacoma the less, across John Day’s river and the Umatillah, day after day, through throngs of emigrants with their flocks and their herds and their little ones, in great patriarchal caravans, with their white-roofed wagons strewed over the surging prairie, like sails, on a populous sea, moving away from the tame levels of Mid-America to regions of fresher and more dramatic life on the slopes toward the Western Sea. I climbed the Blue Mountains, looked over the lovely valley of the Grande Ronde, wound through the stern defiles of the Burnt River Mountains, talked with the great chiefs of the Nez Perces at Fort Boisee, dodged treacherous Bannacks along the Snake, bought salmon, and otter-skins for finery, of the Shoshonees at the Salmon Falls, shot antelope, found many oases of refreshing beauty along the breadth of that desolate region, and so, after much adventure, and at last deadly sickness, I came to the watermelon patches of the Great Salt Lake Valley, and drew recovery thence. I studied the Utah landscape, Oriental, simple, and severe. I talked with Brother Brigham, a man of very considerable power, practical sense, and administrative ability. I chatted with the buxom thirteenth of a boss Mormon, and was not proselyted. And then, in delicious October, I hastened on over the South Pass, through the buffalo, over prairies on fire, quenched at night by the first snows of autumn. For two months I rode with days sweet and cloudless, and every night I bivouacked beneath the splendors of unclouded stars.
And in all that period while I was so near to Nature, the great lessons of the wilderness deepened into my heart day by day, the hedges of conventionalism withered away from my horizon, and all the pedantries of scholastic thought perished out of my mind forever.