-Department map of
Oregon and Washington Territories will explain the importance of this
place, where considerably previous to the foundation of the present
large and growing settlement there existed a fort and trading-post of
the same name. It stands, as we have said, at the entrance to the great
pass by which the Columbia breaks through the mountains to the sea. Just
west of it occurs an interruption to the navigation of the river,
practically as formidable as the first cataract. This is the upper
rapids and "the Dalles" proper,--presently to be described in detail.
The position of the town, at one end of a principal portage, and at the
easiest door to the Pacific, renders it a natural entrepot between the
latter and the great central plateau of the continent. This it must have
been in any case for fur-traders and emigrants, but its business has
been vastly increased by the discovery of that immense mining-area
distributed along the Snake River and its tributaries as far east as the
Rocky Mountains. The John-Day, Boise, and numerous other tracts both in
Washington and Idaho Territories draw most of their supplies from this
entrepot, and their gold comes down to it either for direct use in the
outfit-market, or to be passed down the river to Portland and the
San-Francisco mint.

In a late article upon the Pacific Railroad, I laid no particular stress
upon the mines of Washington and Idaho as sources of profit to the
enterprise. This was for the reason that the Snake River seems the
proper outlet to much of the auriferous region, and this route may be
susceptible of improvement by an alternation of portages, roads, and
water-levels, which for a long time to come will form a means of
communication more economical and rapid than a branch to the Pacific
Road. The northern mines east of the Rocky range will find themselves
occupying somewhat similar relations to the Missouri River, which
rises, as one might almost say, out of the same spring as the
Snake,--certainly out of the same ridge of the Rocky Mountains.

"The Dalles" is a town of one street, built close along the edge of a
bluff of trap thirty or forty feet high, perfectly perpendicular, level
on the top as if it had been graded for a city, and with depth of water
at its base for the heaviest draught boats on the river. In fact, the
whole water-front is a natural quay,--which wants nothing but time to
make it alive with steam-elevators, warehouses, and derricks. To