ed his arm in war, his enemy's lodge became ashes and his council
silence and death.

"The war-trails of the Willamette went north and south and east, and
there was no grass on them. He called the Chinook and Sound Indians,
who were weak, his children, and the Yakima, Cayuse, and Wasco, who
loved war, his brothers; but _he_ was elder brother. And the Spokanes
and the Shoshones might fast and cut themselves with thorns and
knives, and dance the medicine dance, and drink the blood of horses,
but nothing could make their hearts as strong as the hearts of the
Willamettes; for the One up in the sky had told the old men and the
dreamers that the Willamettes should be the strongest of all the
tribes as long as the Bridge of the Gods should stand. That was their
_tomanowos_."

But whenever the white listener asked about this superstition of the
bridge and the legend connected with it, the Indian would at once
become uncommunicative, and say, "You can't understand," or more
frequently, "I don't know." For the main difficulty in collecting
these ancient tales--"old-man talk," as the Siwashes call them--was,
that there was much superstition interwoven with them; and the Indians
were so reticent about their religious beliefs, that if one was not
exceedingly cautious, the lively, gesticulating talker of one moment
was liable to become the personification of sullen obstinacy the
next.

But if the listener was fortunate enough to strike the golden mean,
being neither too anxious nor too indifferent, and if above all he had
by the gift of bounteous _muck-a-muck_ [food] touched the chord to
which the savage heart always responds, the Indian might go on and
tell in broken English or crude Chinook the strange, dark legend of
the bridge, which is the subject of our tale.

At the time our story opens, this confederacy was at the height of its
power. It was a rough-hewn, barbarian realm, the most heterogeneous,
the most rudimentary of alliances. The exact manner of its union, its
laws, its extent, and its origin are all involved in the darkness
which everywhere covers the history of Indian Oregon,--a darkness into
which our legend casts but a ray of light that makes the shadows seem
the denser. It gives us, however, a glimpse of the diverse and squalid
tribes that made up the confederacy. This included the "Canoe Indians"
of the Sound and of the Oregon sea-coast, whose flat heads, greasy
squat bodies, and crooked legs were in marked con