But Sahale, in order to show his appreciation of the care with which Loowit had guarded the sacred fire, now determined to offer her any gift she might desire as a reward. Accordingly, in response to his offer, Loowit asked that she be transformed into a young and beautiful girl. This was accordingly effected, and now, as might have been expected, all the Indian chiefs fell deeply in love with the guardian of tamanous bridge. Loowit paid little heed to any of them, until finally there came two chiefs, one from the north called Klickitat and one from the south called Wiyeast. Loowit was uncertain which of these two she most desired, and as a result a bitter strife arose between the two. This waxed hotter and hotter, until, with their respective warriors, they entered upon a desperate war. The land was ravaged, until all their new comforts were marred, and misery and wretchedness ensued. Sahale repented that he had allowed Loowit to bestow fire upon the Indians, and determined to undo all his work in so far as he could. Accordingly he broke down the tamanous bridge, which dammed up the river with an impassable reef, and put to death Loowit, Klickitat, and Wiyeast. But, inasmuch as they had been noble and beautiful in life, he determined to give them a fitting commemoration after death. Therefore he reared over them as monuments the great snow peaks; over Loowit, what we now call Mt. St. Helen's; over Wiyeast, the modern Mt. Hood; and, above Klickitat, the great dome which now we call Mt. Adams.
Up through timbered hillsides, from green fields, from the verdure of the western flanks of the Cascades, winds the great river. The banks become steeper, the mountains behind them more rugged. Fairy threads of silver, falling water, flutter down from cliffs. Grotesque rocks, mighty monuments erected by a titan fire god when the world was young, rise sheer from the river's edge. Cumbersome fish wheels revolve sedately where the silver-sided salmon run in the springtime. The railroads cling close to the stream, perforce tunneling where nature has provided no passageway, and the boat ploughs against the current which here and there is swift and swirling as the cascades are approached. Then through the locks you go, or by them if you travel by the steel highways, and quickly the scenes change, these new ones painted in a vastly different vein from those that have gone before.
The lofty, steep-walled hills become more gentle, and their cloak of green timber merges into brown grass. The river rolls between banks of barrenness as we emerge on the western rim of the land of little rain, for the moisture-laden clouds from the Pacific are thwarted in their eastern progress by the mountain barrier, along whose summits they cluster weeping, in their baffled anger, upon the wet westerly slopes, while the dry sunny eastland mocks their dour grayness. Close beside the river is the harshest of all this rainless land; sand blows, the cliffs are bare and black, the hillsides bleak and brown. But ever so little away from the barren valley bottom are rich regions of orchards and green fields, and easterly, in the countries of Walla Walla, Palouse, and John Day, far-reaching fields of grain abound. Farming is upon a bonanza basis, and the bigness of it all is reminiscent of the Dakotas, were it not for the majestic mountain skylines, blessed visual reliefs lacking altogether in the continental mid-regions. The volume then, is bound misleadingly, and those who see naught but its unprepossessing exterior gain no inkling of its charming hidden chapters.
Then come The Dalles of the Columbia, close to the town of the same name, where the river, a sane waterway for a half a thousand miles above, suddenly goes mad for a brief space of lawless waterfall and rock-rimmed cascades. At Walla Walla—whose very name means "where the waters meet"—the two chief forks of the old Oregon River converge, the Columbia proper and the Snake, the one draining a northern empire, the other swinging southerly through Idaho, "the gem of the mountains" as the Indians baptized it. Thence the great stream flows westerly some one hundred and twenty miles until it reaches the outlying ridge of the Cascade chain, there encountering a huge low surface paved with glacier-polished sheets of basaltic rock. These plates, says Winthrop Parker, who saw them as a trail follower in the early 'sixties, gave the place the name Dalles, thanks to the Canadian voyageurs in the Hudson Bay service. A brief distance above this flinty pavement the river is a mile wide, but where it forces tumultuous passageway through the rocks it narrows to a mere rift compressed, if not subdued, by the adamantine barriers it cannot force asunder. Where the sides grow closest through three rough slits in the rocky floor the white waters bore, each chasm so narrow that a child could cast a stone across.
On either hand are monotonous plains, gray with sagebrush and brown with sunburned grass. Rough hills rise northerly, in Washington. Eastward roll lower broadening lands, but turbulent with lesser hills. West is the great ridge of the Cascade Range, with Hood rising majestic guardian over all, and the broad Columbia vanishing into the very heart of the shadowed mountains, unchecked on its seaward quest. The summer sunlight is blinding bright and the sky ethereal blue. An Indian hovel, or a ragged home of a fish-spearer beside the rushing waters, furnishes contrast—that of puny humanity in the face of nature at her mightiest. The view is at once compellingly beautiful and weirdly repelling. Few would live along the great river or thereabout from choice; and yet the view of it—the startling, colorful panorama—is golden treasure beyond the dreams of avarice.
Celilo Falls on the Columbia
Copyright 1902 by Benj. A. Gifford, The Dalles, Ore.
The north abutment of the Bridge of the Gods
Copyright 1902 by Benj. A. Gifford, The Dalles, Ore.