The Cascades, where the salmon first meet with a hindrance to their upward course, is a lovely spot. The vast river here breaks its way through the Cascade Mountains, a mountain-gap unequalled, I should say, in depth and extent, by any in the world. Some parts are massive walls of rock, and others wooded slopes like to a narrow valley. One can hardly imagine the possibility of so great a change in climate, and consequently vegetation, as there is betwixt this place and the Dalles, only a few miles farther up the river. I have left the Dalles when the ground was covered with snow, and within a distance of forty miles entered this gap, and found the climate to be that of summer. The sloping forests brightly green, shrubs of various sorts, tropical in appearance, immense ferns, the emerald moss clothing the rocks, over which dozens of waterfalls, unbroken for a thousand feet, tumble from the hills into the river —all together make up a scene of beauty and rich luxuriance, unlike any other part of the river.
From the Dalles to the Cascades the river has scarcely a perceptible current, either side being bounded by perpendicular walls of mountains. Tradition says, that once the river had a uniformly swift course the entire way, and that where the Cascades now are, the water passed at that time under a huge arch that reached from side to side. Afterwards an earthquake tumbled it down, the ruins of the arch still existing as a chain of islands across the head of the rapids; the river, having gradually carried away the fragments, forming now the long rapid. The river, thus suddenly thrown back, flooded the forests up to the Dalles, and to this day stumps of trees are to be seen sticking out of the water many hundred yards from the shore.
Below the Cascades, before reaching the flat district about Fort Vancouver, the scenery is bold and massive; immense hills densely wooded, bold promontories, and grassy glades are passed successively as the steamer dashes on her downward trip. At the Cascades there is now a railway, over which goods and passengers are conveyed to the steamers above the rapids, which are so swift that canoes plied by experienced Indians dare not venture to run them.
Wandering along by this foaming rush of water, one sees numberless scaffoldings erected amongst the boulders—rude clumsy contrivances, constructed of poles jammed between large stones, and lashed with ropes of bark to other poles, that cross each other to form stages. Indian lodges, pitched in the most picturesque and lovely spots imaginable, are dotted along from one end of the rapids to the other. Indians from long distances and of several tribes have come here to await the arrival of the salmon.
Leaning against the trees, or supported by the lodges, are numbers of small round nets (like we catch shrimps with in rocky pools), fastened to handles forty and fifty feet in length. Hollow places are cunningly enclosed, with low walls of boulders, on the riverside of each stage.
It is early in June; the salmon have arrived, and a busy scene it is. On every stage plying their nets are Indian fishers, guiltless of garments save a piece of cloth tied round the waist. Ascending the rapids, salmon seek the slack-waters at the edges of the current, and are fond of lingering in the wake of a rock or any convenient hollow; the rock-basins constructed by the sides of the stages are just the places for idling and resting. This the crafty fisher turns to good account, and skilfully catches the loiterer by plunging his net into the pool at its head, and letting the current sweep it down, thus hooping salmon after salmon, with a certainty astounding to a looker-on. Thirty salmon an hour is not an unusual take for two skilled Indians to land on a stage. As soon as one gets tired, another takes his place, so that the nets are never idle during the ‘run.’
The instant a fish reaches the stage, a heavy blow on the head stops its flapping; boys and girls are waiting to seize and carry it ashore, to be split and cured—a process I can better describe when at the salmon-falls. As there is at the Cascades simply hindrance to the salmon’s ascent, of course vast numbers escape the redskins’ nets.
Forty miles above this fishery is another obstruction, the Dalles; where the river forces its way through a mass of basaltic rocks in numerous channels, some of them appearing as if hewn by human hands. Another portage has to be made here, a neat little town having grown up in consequence of the transhipment. The journey from steamer to steamer is accomplished in stages, the heavy goods being hauled by mule and ox-teams. The road lies over a steep ridge of hills to the junction of the Des Chutes, or ‘Fall river,’ with the Columbia. Fishing at the Dalles is much the same as at the Cascades.
Great numbers of salmon turn off and ascend the Snake river, to be captured at the Great Shoshonee Falls by the Snake and Bannock Indians. We follow on the vanguard of the swimming army, passing numberless tributaries, up which detachments make their way, right and left, into the heart of the country—supplies for tribes living near the different streams—to the great falls of the Columbia, the ‘Kettle Falls,’[3] why so named is not very clear. These falls, except when the river is at its highest flood, form an impassable barrier to the salmon’s progress; the distance from the sea is about 700 miles, and the first arrivals are usually about the middle of June.
The winter-quarters of the Boundary Commission were about two miles above the falls, and close to the falls is a trading-post of the Hudson’s Bay Company, Fort Colville. The gravelly plateau on which the trading-post stands, together with one or two houses belonging to old employés, was clearly once a lake-bottom. The water at some remote period filling the lake appears to have broken its way out through the rocks at the falls, and left this flat dry land. Patches of wheat and barley are grown, but the soil is far too poor to repay the labour of cultivation.