He led the way, climbing up gangways and ladders, until we reached the upper garret. He pointed to a dark-looking pile in one corner resembling a black bear-skin. On examination I found they were scalps. The scout remarked that he did not know how many were there now, because white men carried them off, and Capt. Smith, the agent, forbade them from touching them; that when they came home from “Crook’s war,” at the great scalp-dance they had sixty-two. He appeared to regret that the men who had cut them off the hated Snakes’ heads could not be permitted to ornament their shot-pouches with them. I selected one or two as reminders of the handiwork of the scouts, and also as specimens of the long black hair of the Snake Indians. I haven’t them now. For a while they hung in my office; but the doors were sometimes left unlocked, and they were missing. Pretty sure, they are now playing switch for a couple of handsome ladies residing,—well, no odds where.
If my reader will accompany me awhile we will visit the “Snake country,” and see it for ourselves. From the home office at Salem, Oregon, our route leads us down the beautiful Willamette valley, via Portland; thence once again up the Columbia by steamer and rail, through “the Cascades,” seeing new beauties each time in things we had not noticed on former trips. On the right a mountain stream leaps off a rock six hundred feet, and turns to mist, forming a perpetual cloud, that hides its main course, but pours its constant rain into a great pool below, and, overflowing, leaps again two hundred feet, and lighting
on stony bed, made deeper and softer each century, it comes out to a smiling, sparkling silver sheet beneath the evergreen forests, and joins the river in its flow to the briny deep.
On the left we see Castle Rock, on which Jay Cooke built a fine air-castle when the North Pacific Railroad was built upon paper, intending to match the ideal with the real in time, to sit on its summit, and, from the tower of his mansion, wave his welcome to the panting iron charger on his arrival from Duluth, en route to the great metropolis of the northwest.
Jay Cooke failed; the iron courser is stabled at Duluth; the metropolis is covered with heavy forests, and the hum of busy life is not heard very much at Puget Sound, and Castle Rock stands solitary and alone like some orphan boy.
So it will stand, for its mother mountains look on it with contempt, from its very insignificance. It is a pity Cooke can’t build the castle,—pity for this lonely rock, who bathes his feet in the boiling waters of the river.
“Rooster Rock” is still worse off, for he is surrounded by water too deep for him to wade, though he may keep his head above the flood.
Onward, upward we go, passing old rock towers and Indian burial-grounds, catching a glimpse of Father Hood, who seems in ill-humor now, and frowns, with dark clouds on his brow. Maybe he is angry with Mother Adams, on the north, who smiles beneath her silvery cap, while he scolds and thunders. The tables may yet turn with these mountain monarchs, and Hood may laugh while Mother Adams weeps. We will keep an eye on them for a
few days, as our journey leads us toward the “Snake country.”
We are at “The Dalles.” Our commissary, Dr. W. C. McKay has made preparation for the journey; we are no longer to be hurried by steam so fast we cannot have the full benefit of the scenes we pass.