Oregon Trunk Railway crosses the Columbia. "The
river rolls between banks of barrenness"

Copyright 1912 by Kiser Photo Co., Portland, Ore.]

Evidently it was while held captive by the "villain malady" that
Winthrop learned from the Indians the legend of The Dalles, which he
told so well that to paraphrase it would be folly. Here I give it, as
extracted from the thumb-marked little book whose publication date is
1863:

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
Umatilla, in the lovely valley of the Grande Ronde, between the
walls of the Grand Coulee, was an enormous inland sea filling the
vast interior of the continent, and beating forever against
ramparts 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