the gem of the mountains" as
the Indians baptized it. Thence the great stream flows westerly some one
hundred and twenty miles until it reaches the outlying ridge of the
Cascade chain, there encountering a huge low surface paved with
glacier-polished sheets of basaltic rock. These plates, says Winthrop
Parker, who saw them as a trail follower in the early 'sixties, gave the
place the name _Dalles_, thanks to the Canadian voyageurs in the Hudson
Bay service. A brief distance above this flinty pavement the river is a
mile wide, but where it forces tumultuous passageway through the rocks
it narrows to a mere rift compressed, if not subdued, by the adamantine
barriers it cannot force asunder. Where the sides grow closest through
three rough slits in the rocky floor the white waters bore, each chasm
so narrow that a child could cast a stone across.

On either hand are monotonous plains, gray with sagebrush and brown with
sunburned grass. Rough hills rise northerly, in Washington. Eastward
roll lower broadening lands, but turbulent with lesser hills. West is
the great ridge of the Cascade Range, with Hood rising majestic guardian
over all, and the broad Columbia vanishing into the very heart of the
shadowed mountains, unchecked on its seaward quest. The summer sunlight
is blinding bright and the sky ethereal blue. An Indian hovel, or a
ragged home of a fish-spearer beside the rushing waters, furnishes
contrast--that of puny humanity in the face of nature at her mightiest.
The view is at once compellingly beautiful and weirdly repelling. Few
would live along the great river or thereabout from choice; and yet
the view of it--the startling, colorful panorama--is golden treasure
beyond the dreams of avarice.

It is this setting which marked the old-time entrance into Central
Oregon. Those words "old-time," are characteristic of the swift-moving
country; for using them, I refer to but six years ago, when Oregon's
hinterland was a wilderness so far as railroads were concerned. These
dalles of the Columbia, a milepost on the old transcontinental trail,
are a place seen and passed to-day by those who rush on rails in brief
hours where the pioneers of fifty years ago labored weeks. Also were
these dalles prominent in Indian life in the quiet midyears of the last
century, when beavers were more plentiful than palefaces. Indeed, back
to the very beginnings of Northwestern Indian lore their story goes,
coming to us, like so much else of