tland the evening before their steamer sailed, taking a boat
belonging to a different line, that we might pass a night at Fort
Vancouver, and board the Company's boat when it touched at that place
the next morning. We recognized our return from rudimentary society to
civilized surroundings and a cultivated interest in art and literature,
when the captain of the little steamer Vancouver refused to let either
of us buy a ticket, because he had seen Bierstadt on the upper deck at
work with his sketch-book, and me by his side engaged with my journal.

The banks of the Willamette below Portland are low and cut up by small
tributaries or communicating lagoons which divide them into islands. The
largest of these, measuring its longest border, has an extent of twenty
miles, and is called Sauveur's. Another, called "Nigger Tom's," was
famous as the seigniory of a blind African nobleman so named, living in
great affluence of salmon and whiskey with three or four devoted Indian
wives, who had with equal fervor embraced the doctrine of Mormonism and
the profession of day's-washing to keep their liege in luxury due his
rank. The land along the shore of the river was usually well timbered,
and in the level openings looked as fertile as might be expected of an
alluvial first-bottom frequently overflowed. At its junction with the
Columbia the Willamette is about three-quarters of a mile in width, and
the Columbia may be half a mile wider, though at first sight the
difference seems more than that from the tributary's entering the main
river at an acute angle and giving a diagonal view to the opposite
shore. Before we passed into the Columbia, we had from the upper deck a
magnificent glimpse to the eastward of Hood's spotless snow-cone rosied
with the reflection of the dying sunset. Short and hurried as it was,
this view of Mount Hood was unsurpassed for beauty by any which we got
in its closer vicinity and afterward, though nearness added rugged
grandeur to the sight.

Six miles' sail between low and uninteresting shores brought us from the
mouth of the Willamette to Fort Vancouver, on the Washington-Territory
side of the river. Here we debarked for the night, making our way, in an
ambulance sent for us from the post, a distance of two minutes' ride, to
the quarters of General Alvord, the commandant. Under his hospitable
roof we experienced, for the first time in several months and many
hundred miles, the delicious sensation of a family