The sun was fast sinking, and the hills rose as I advanced. I was so weary that I could go little further. But taking a careful view of the peaks which would guide me back to my camp, I determined to travel on till it should become too dark to see what might open before me. I climbed slowly and tediously the seemingly endless swells, lifting themselves over and beyond each other in beautiful, but to my wearied limbs, and longing eyes in most vexatious continuity, till the sun dipped his lower rim beneath the horizon.
A volcano burst the hills, thought I; and on I trudged with the little strength that a large quantity of vexation gave me. Fires blister your beautiful brows, I half uttered, as I dragged myself up the crowning eminence, and saw the plateau declining in irregular undulations far into the south-west—{156} a sterile waste, clothed in the glories of the last rays of a splendid sunset. The crests of the distant swells were fringed with bunch grass; not a shrub or a tree on all the field of vision; and evidently no water nearer than the Columbia. Those cattle which are, in the opinions of certain travellers, to depasture these plains in future time, must be of sound wind and limb to gather food and water the same day. I found myself so wearied on attaining this goal of my wishes, that, notwithstanding the lateness of the hour, I was literally compelled to seek some rest before attempting to descend.
I therefore seated myself, and in the luxury of repose permitted darkness to commence creeping over the landscape, before I could rouse myself to the effort of moving. When I did start, my style of locomotion was extremely varied, and withal sometimes not the most pleasant to every portion of the mortal coil. My feet were not unfrequently twice or thrice the length of that measure in advance of my body. But the reader must not suppose that this circumstance diminished my speed. I continued to slide down the hills, using as vehicles the small sharp stones beneath me, until an opportunity offered to put my {157} nether extremities under me again. Once I had nearly plunged headlong from a precipice some fifty feet high, and saved myself by catching a wormwood bush standing within three feet of the brink. Finally, without any serious mishap, I arrived in camp, so completely exhausted, that, without tasting food, I threw myself on my couch for the night.
3rd. The earthy bluffs continued to bind the chasm of the river till mid-day, when buttresses of basalt took their place. A little bunch grass grew among the wild wormwood. Turkeys, grouse, and a species of large hare frequently appeared; many ducks in the stream. For three hours before sunset the trail was rugged and precipitous, often overhanging the river, and so narrow that a mis-step of four inches would have plunged horse and rider hundreds of feet into the boiling flood. But as Skyuse horses never make such disagreeable mistakes, we rode the steeps in safety. Encamped in a small grove of willows. The river along the day's march was hemmed in by lofty and rugged mountains. The rocks showed indubitable evidences of a volcanic origin. As the sun went down, the Wallawalla village on the opposite shore {158} sang a hymn in their own language, to a tune which I have often heard sung in Catholic Churches, before the image of the Virgin. The country in the south, as seen from the heights, was broken and barren; view limited in all directions by the unevenness of the surface.
4th. Awakened this morning by the fall of a hundred tons of rock from the face of the mountain near us. The earth trembled as if the slumbering volcanoes were wrestling in its bowels. We were brought to our feet, and opened and rubbed our eyes with every mark of despatch. My "poor crane" and his hopeful son condescended to appear shocked; an event in an Indian's life that occurs as seldom as his birth. I had stationed myself near the fallen rocks as the sun's first rays awoke the morning hymn of the Indian village.
It was a sweet wild tune that they sung to God among the dark mountains of the Columbia. And sweeter, perhaps, in such a place, where every motion of the heart is a monition that one is alone, and every thought brings with it the remembrance that the social affections are separated from the objects of their fondness, and where every moral sensibility is chilled by a sense of {159} desolation and danger, calling into exercise the resisting and exterminating propensities, and where the holy memories of home find no response but in some loved star in the unchanging heavens. In such a place how far sweeter than anything beside is the evidence of the religious principle—the first teaching of a mother's love, rising over the wastes of nature from the altar of a pure heart—the incense of love going up to the heavenly presence.
At eight o'clock we were en route; at nine o'clock approached the bend in the river, where it changes from a south-west to a north-west course.[224] At this place the cliffs which overhang the southern bank presented a fine collection of basaltic columns. Along the margin of the river lay hillocks of scoriæ, piled together in every imaginable form of confusion. Among them grew considerable quantities of bunch grass, on which a band of Wallawalla horses were feeding. Sand-hills on the opposite shore rose one thousand feet in the air. Basalt occurred at intervals, in a more or less perfect state of formation, till the hour of noon, when the trail led to the base of a series of columns extending three-fourths of a mile down the bank. These were more perfectly formed than any previously seen.
{160} They swelled from a large curve of the mountain side, like the bastions of ancient castles; and one series of lofty columns towered above another, till the last was surmounted by a crowning tower, a little above the level of the plain beyond. And their pentagonal form, longitudinal sections, dark shining fracture, and immense masses strewn along my way, betokened me if not in the very presence of the Giant's Causeway, yet on a spot where the same mighty energies had exerted themselves which built that rare, beautiful wonder of the Emerald Isle. The river was very tortuous, and shut in by high dykes of basalt and sand hills the remainder of the day; saw three small rapids in the Columbia; encamped at sunset; too weary to climb the heights.
5th. Arose at break of day, and ordering my guide to make arrangements for starting as soon as I should return, I ascended the neighbouring heights. Grassy undulating plains in all directions south of the river. Far in the north-east towered the frozen peak of Mount Washington, a perfect pyramid, clothed with eternal snows.[225] The view in the north was hemmed in by mountains which rose higher than the place of observation. On descending, my guide Crickie complained of ill-health; and assigned that {161} circumstance as a reason why he should not proceed with me to the Dalles. I was much vexed with him at the time, for his unseasonable desertion, and believed that the real inducement to his course was the danger to be apprehended from the Indians at the Shutes. But I was sorry to learn from Dr. Whitman afterwards that the poor fellow was actually sick, and that he suffered much at the sand bank encampment, where I left him. After paying Crickie for his faithful services thus far along, and giving him four days' provision for himself and boy, a Wallawalla Indian who had encamped with us the previous night, took charge of Crickie's horses, bearing myself and packs, and led the way down the river.
The "poor crane" was an honest, honourable man; and I can never think of all his kind acts to me, from the time I met him in the plains beyond the Wallawalla mission, till I left him sick on the bank of the Columbia, without wishing an opportunity to testify my sense of his moral worth and goodness of heart in some way which shall yield him a substantial reward for all he suffered in my service. Two hours' ride brought to my ears the music of the "tum tum orter;" {162} the Indian-English for the "thundering waters" of the Shutes.[226] These are the only perpendicular falls of the Columbia, in its course from the junction of its great northern and southern branches, to the ocean. And they do indeed thunder. A stratum of black rock forming the bed of the river above, by preserving its horizontal position, rises at this place above the natural surface of the stream, and forms an abrupt precipice, hanging sixty feet in height over the bed below.