Our greetings were less restrained than our parting had been. We were truly glad to meet again. He had arrived just two days before me, although he had been at Salt Lake City. But he had been able there to refit, had obtained ample supplies and fresh animals. Curiously enough, his Nelson—the French-Canadian—had also been drowned in crossing the Snake River. His place, however, had been filled by another man, and Jacob had turned out a treasure. The good fellow greeted me warmly. And it was no slight compensation for bygone troubles to be assured by him that our separation had led to the final triumphal success.
Fred and I now shared the same tent. To show what habit will do, it was many days before I could accustom myself to sleep under cover of a tent even, and in preference slept, as I had done for five months, under the stars. The officers liberally furnished us with clothing. But their excessive hospitality more nearly proved fatal to me than any peril I had met with. One’s stomach had quite lost its discretion. And forgetting that
Famished people must be slowly nursed,
And fed by spoonfuls, else they always burst,
one never knew when to leave off eating. For a few days I was seriously ill.
An absurd incident occurred to me here which might have had an unpleasant ending. Every evening, after dinner in the mess tent, we played whist. One night, quite by accident, Fred and I happened to be partners. The Major and another officer made up the four. The stakes were rather high. We two had had an extraordinary run of luck. The Major’s temper had been smouldering for some time. Presently the deal fell to me; and as bad luck would have it, I dealt myself a handful of trumps, and—all four honours. As the last of these was played, the now blazing Major dashed his cards on the table, and there and then called me out. The cooler heads of two or three of the others, with whom Fred had had time to make friends, to say nothing of the usual roar of laughter with which he himself heard the challenge, brought the matter to a peaceful issue. The following day one of the officers brought me a graceful apology.
As may readily be supposed, we had no hankering for further travels such as we had gone through. San Francisco was our destination; but though as unknown to us as Charles Lamb’s ‘Stranger,’ we ‘damned’ the overland route ‘at a venture’; and settled, as there was no alternative, to go in a trading ship to the Sandwich Islands thence, by the same means, to California.
On October 20 we procured a canoe large enough for seven or eight persons; and embarking with our light baggage, Fred, Samson, and I, took leave of the Dalles. For some miles the great river, the Columbia, runs through the Cascade Mountains, and is confined, as heretofore, in a channel of basaltic rock. Further down it widens, and is ornamented by groups of small wooded islands. On one of these we landed to rest our Indians and feed. Towards evening we again put ashore, at an Indian village, where we camped for the night. The scenery here is magnificent. It reminded me a little of the Danube below Linz, or of the finest parts of the Elbe in Saxon Switzerland. But this is to compare the full-length portrait with the miniature. It is the grandeur of the scale of the best of the American scenery that so strikes the European. Variety, however, has its charms; and before one has travelled fifteen hundred miles on the same river—as one may easily do in America—one begins to sigh for the Rhine, or even for a trip from London to Greenwich, with a white-bait dinner at the end of it.
The day after, we descended the Cascades. They are the beginning of an immense fall in the level, and form a succession of rapids nearly two miles long. The excitement of this passage is rather too great for pleasure. It is like being run away with by a ‘motor’ down a steep hill. The bow of the canoe is often several feet below the stern, as if about to take a ‘header.’ The water, in glassy ridges and dark furrows, rushes headlong, and dashes itself madly against the reefs which crop up everywhere. There is no time, one thinks, to choose a course, even if steerage, which seems absurd, were possible. One is hurled along at railway speed. The upreared rock, that a moment ago seemed a hundred yards off, is now under the very bow of the canoe. One clenches one’s teeth, holds one’s breath, one’s hour is surely come. But no—a shout from the Indians, a magic stroke of the paddle in the bow, another in the stern, and the dreaded crag is far above out heads, far, far behind; and, for the moment, we are gliding on—undrowned.
At the lower end of the rapids (our Indians refusing to go further), we had to debark. A settler here was putting up a zinc house for a store. Two others, with an officer of the Mounted Rifles—the regiment we had left at the Dalles—were staying with him. They welcomed our arrival, and insisted on our drinking half a dozen of poisonous stuff they called champagne. There were no chairs or table in the ‘house,’ nor as yet any floor; and only the beginning of a roof. We sat on the ground, so that I was able surreptitiously to make libations with my share, to the earth.
According to my journal: ‘In a short time the party began to be a noisy one. Healths were drunk, toasts proposed, compliments to our respective nationalities paid in the most flattering terms. The Anglo-Saxon race were destined to conquer the globe. The English were the greatest nation under the sun—that is to say, they had been. America, of course, would take the lead in time to come. We disputed this. The Americans were certain of it, in fact this was already an accomplished fact. The big officer—a genuine “heavy”—wanted to know where the man was that would give him the lie! Wasn’t the Mounted Rifles the crack regiment of the United States army? And wasn’t the United States army the finest army in the universe? Who that knew anything of history would compare the Peninsular Campaign to the war in Mexico? Talk of Waterloo—Britishers were mighty fond of swaggering about Waterloo! Let ’em look at Chepultapec. As for Wellington, he couldn’t shine nohow with General Scott, nor old Zack neither!’