e Fish Indians is the
place to look for savage beauty. Still these tribes have fortified their
feebleness by such a cultivation of their ingenuity as surprises one
seeing for the first time their well-adapted tools, comfortable lodges,
and, in some cases, really beautiful canoes. In the last respect,
however, the Indians nearer the coast surpass those up the
Columbia,--some of their carved and painted canoes equalling the
"crackest" of shell-boats in elegance of line and beauty of ornament.

In a former article devoted to the Great Yo-Semite I had occasion to
remark that Indian legend, like all ancient poetry, often contains a
scientific truth embalmed in the spices of metaphor,--or, to vary the
figure, that Mudjekeewis stands holding the lantern for Agassiz and Dana
to dig by.

Coming to the Falls of the Columbia, we find a case in point. Nearly
equidistant from the longitudes of Fort Vancouver and Mount Hood, the
entire Columbia River falls twenty feet over a perpendicular wall of
basalt, extending, with minor deviations from the right angle, entirely
between-shores, a breadth of about a mile. The height of Niagara and the
close compression of its vast volume make it a grander sight than the
Falls of the Columbia,--but no other cataract known to me on this
continent rivals it for an instant. The great American Falls of Snake
are much loftier and more savage than either, but their volume is so
much less as to counterbalance those advantages. Taking the Falls of the
Columbia all in all,--including their upper and lower rapids,--it must
be confessed that they exhibit every phase of tormented water in its
beauty of color or grace of form, its wrath or its whim.

The Indians have a tradition that the river once followed a uniform
level from the Dalles to the sea. This tradition states that Mounts Hood
and St. Helen's are husband and wife,--whereby is intended that their
tutelar divinities stand in that mutual relation; that in comparatively
recent times there existed a rocky bridge across the Columbia at the
present site of the cataract, and that across this bridge Hood and St.
Helen's were wont to pass for interchange of visits; that, while this
bridge existed, there was a free subterraneous passage under it for the
river and the canoes of the tribes (indeed, this tradition is so
universally credited as to stagger the skeptic by a mere calculation of
chances); that, on a certain occasion, the mountainous pair, like othe