trast with their
skill and dexterity in managing their canoes and fish-spears; the
hardy Indians of the Willamette Valley and the Cascade Range; and the
bold, predatory riders of eastern Oregon and Washington,--buffalo
hunters and horse tamers, passionately fond, long before the advent of
the white man, of racing and gambling. It comprised also the
Okanogans, who disposed of their dead by tying them upright to a tree;
the Yakimas, who buried them under cairns of stone; the Klickitats,
who swathed them like mummies and laid them in low, rude huts on the
_mimaluse_, or "death islands" of the Columbia; the Chinooks, who
stretched them in canoes with paddles and fishing implements by their
side; and the Kalamaths, who burned them with the maddest saturnalia
of dancing, howling, and leaping through the flames of the funeral
pyre. Over sixty or seventy petty tribes stretched the wild empire,
welded together by the pressure of common foes and held in the grasp
of the hereditary war-chief of the Willamettes.

* * * * *

The chiefs of the Willamettes had gathered on Wappatto Island, from
time immemorial the council-ground of the tribes. The white man has
changed its name to "Sauvie's" Island; but its wonderful beauty is
unchangeable. Lying at the mouth of the Willamette River and extending
for many miles down the Columbia, rich in wide meadows and crystal
lakes, its interior dotted with majestic oaks and its shores fringed
with cottonwoods, around it the blue and sweeping rivers, the wooded
hills, and the far white snow peaks,--it is the most picturesque spot
in Oregon.

The chiefs were assembled in secret council, and only those of pure
Willamette blood were present, for the question to be considered was
not one to be known by even the most trusted ally.

All the confederated tribes beyond the Cascade Range were in a ferment
of rebellion. One of the petty tribes of eastern Oregon had recently
risen up against the Willamette supremacy; and after a short but
bloody struggle, the insurrection had been put down and the rebels
almost exterminated by the victorious Willamettes.

But it was known that the chief of the malcontents had passed from
tribe to tribe before the struggle commenced, inciting them to revolt,
and it was suspected that a secret league had been formed; though when
matters came to a crisis, the confederates, afraid to face openly the
fierce warriors of the Willamette,