mountain, in whose crown, like a jewel, shone a resplendent glacier.

Just before them, on the bluffs of the river, under three gigantic
evergreens, each of which was more than two hundred feet high, stood an
odd structure of logs and sods, which the builders called the Sod
School-house. It was not a sod school-house in the sense in which the term
has been applied to more recent structures in the treeless prairie
districts of certain mid-ocean States; it was rudely framed of pine, and
was furnished with a pine desk and benches.

Along the river lay a plateau full of flowers, birds, and butterflies, and
over the great river and flowering plain the clear air glimmered. Like
some sun-god's abode in the shadow of ages, St. Helens still lifted her
silver tents in the far sky. Eagles and mountain birds wheeled, shrieking
joyously, here and there. Below the bluffs the silent salmon-fishers
awaited their prey, and down the river with paddles apeak drifted the bark
canoes of Cayuses and Umatillas.

[Illustration: _Indians spearing fish at Salmon Falls._]

A group of children were gathered about the open door of the new
school-house, and among them rose the tall form of Marlowe Mann, the
Yankee schoolmaster.

He had come over the mountains some years before in the early expeditions
organized and directed by Dr. Marcus Whitman, of the American Board of
Missions. Whether the mission to the Cayuses and Walla Wallas, which Dr.
Whitman established on the bend of the Columbia, was then regarded as a
home or foreign field of work, we can not say. The doctor's solitary ride
of four thousand miles, in order to save the great Northwest territory to
the United States, is one of the most poetic and dramatic episodes of
American history. It has proved to be worth to our country more than all
the money that has been given to missionary enterprises. Should the Puget
Sound cities become the great ports of Asia, and the ships of commerce
drift from Seattle and Tacoma over the Japan current to the Flowery Isles
and China; should the lumber, coal, minerals, and wheat-fields of
Washington, Oregon, Montana, and Idaho at last compel these cities to
rival New York and Boston, the populous empire will owe to the patriotic
missionary zeal of Dr. Whitman a debt which it can only pay in honor and
love. Dr. Whitman was murdered by the Indians soon after the settlement of
the Walla Walla country by the pioneers from the Eastern States.

Mr. Mann's insp