teen hundred miles, counting from the crossing
of the Missouri, we dragged ourselves on to the end of the Overland
Trail at The Dalles on the Columbia River. From here my wife and I, with
the baby, went by boat down the river, while Oliver took the ox team on
to Portland by the land way.

The Dalles is a name given to the peculiar lava rock formation that
strikes across the Columbia, nearly two hundred miles from the mouth.
These rocks throw the great stream into a fury of foaming rapids. An
Indian legend says that the Bridge of the Gods was once near The Dalles,
but that the bridge broke and fell.

On the September day in 1852 when we reached The Dalles, we found there
a great crowd of travel-worn people. This assemblage was constantly
changing. It was a coming-and-going congregation.

[Illustration: _Gifford & Prentiss_

Where the Columbia cuts through the Cascades.]

The appearance of this crowd of emigrants beggars description. Their
dress was as varied as pieces in a crazy quilt. Here was a matronly dame
in clean apparel, but without shoes; her husband perhaps lacked both
shoes and hat. Youngsters of all sizes were running about with scarcely
enough clothing to cover their nakedness. Some suits and dresses were so
patched that it was impossible to tell what was the original cloth. The
color of practically everybody's clothing was that of desert dust.

Every little while other sweat-streaked, motley-dressed homeseekers
would straggle up to this end of the long trail. Their thoughts went
back to their old homes, or to the loved ones that they had laid away
tenderly in the shifting sands of the Plains. Most of them faced the
future with fortitude; the difficulties they had met and mastered had
but steeled them to meet the difficulties ahead. There was an
undercurrent of gladness in their souls with the thought that they had
achieved the end of the Overland Trail. They were ready now to go on
down the Columbia to find their new homes in this great, unknown Land of
Promise.

Almost every nationality was represented among them. All traces of race
peculiarity and race prejudice, however, had been ground away in the
mill of adversity. The trying times through which these pioneers had
just passed had brought all to a kinship of feeling such as only trail
and danger can beget.

Friendships, sincere and lasting, came as one of the sweet rewards of
those days of common struggle and adversity. Few of the pioneers are n