But I must leave my friends to introduce the reader to the "Island of the Tombs."[233] Mr. Lee pointed to it, as the tops of the cedar board houses of the dead peered over the hillocks of sand and rock among which they stood. We moored our canoe on the western side, and climbed up a precipice of black shining rocks two hundred feet; and winding among drifts of sand the distance of one hundred yards came to the tombs. They consisted of boxes ten or twelve feet square on the ground, eight or ten high, made of cedar {182} boards fastened to a rough frame, in an upright position at the sides, and horizontally over the top. On them, and about them, were the cooking utensils, and other personal property of the deceased. Within were the dead bodies, wrapped in many thicknesses of deer and elk skins, tightly lashed with leather thongs, and laid in a pile with their heads to the east. Underneath the undecayed bodies were many bones from which the flesh and wrappings had fallen: in some instances a number of waggon loads. Three or four of the tombs had gone to ruins, and the skulls and other bones lay strewn on the ground. The skulls were all flattened. I picked up one with the intention of bringing it to the States. But as Mr. Lee assured me that the high veneration of the living for the dead would make the attempt very dangerous, I reluctantly returned it to its resting place.[234]
We glided merrily down the river till sunset, and landed on the northern shore to sup. The river had varied from one to one and a half miles in width, with rather a sluggish current; water clear, cool, and very deep. Various kinds of duck, divers, &c., were upon its beautiful surface. The {183} hair seal was abundant.[235] The mountains rose abruptly on either side from five hundred to two thousand feet, in sweeping heights, clad with evergreen trees. Some few small oaks grew in the nooks by the water side. Among these were Indian wigwams, constructed of boards split from the red cedar on the mountains. I entered some of them. They were filthy in the extreme. In one of them was a sick man. A withered old female was kneading and pinching the devil out of him. He was labouring under a bilious fever. But as a "Medicine man" was pulling at his gall, it was necessary to expel him; and the old hag pressed his head, bruised his abdomen, &c., with the fury and groaning of a bedlamite.
Not an acre of arable land appeared along the shores. The Indians subsist on fish and acorns of the white oak. The former they eat fresh during the summer; but their winter stores they dry and preserve in the following manner:—The spine of the fish being taken out, and the flesh being slashed into checks with a knife, so as to expose as much surface as possible, is laid on the rocks to dry. After becoming thoroughly {184} hard, it is bruised to powder, mixed with the oil of the leaf fat of the fish, and packed away in flag sacks. Although no salt is used in this preparation, it remains good till May of the following year. The acorns, as soon as they fall from the trees, are buried in sand constantly saturated with water, where they remain till spring. By this soaking their bitter flavour is said to be destroyed.
After supper, Mr. Lee ordered a launch, and the Indian paddles were again dipping in the bright waters. The stars were out on the clear night, twinkling as of old, when the lofty peaks around were heaved from the depths of the volcano. They now looked down on a less grand, indeed, but more lovely scene. The fires of the natives blazed among the woody glens, the light canoe skimmed the water near the shore, the winds groaned over the mountain tops, the cascades sang from cliff to cliff, the loon shouted and dove beneath the shining wave; it was a wild, almost unearthly scene, in the deep gorge of the Columbia. The rising of the moon changed its features. The profoundest silence reigned, save the dash of paddles that echoed faintly from the shores; our canoe sprang lightly over {185} the rippling waters, the Indian fires smouldered among the waving pines; the stars became dim, and the depths of the blue sky glowed one vast nebula of mellow light. But the eastern mountains hid awhile the orb from sight.
The south-western heights shone with its pale beams, and cast into the deeply sunken river a bewitching dancing of light and shade, unequalled by the pencil of the wildest imagination. The grandeur, too, of grove, and cliff, and mountain, and the mighty Columbia wrapped in the drapery of a golden midnight! It was the new and rapidly opening panorama of the sublime wilderness. The scene changed again when the moon was high in heaven.
The cocks crew in the Indian villages; the birds twittered on the boughs; the wild fowl screamed, as her light gilded the chasm of the river, and revealed the high rock Islands with their rugged crags and mouldering tombs. The winds from Mount Adams were loaded with frosts, and the poetry of the night was fast waning into an ague, when Mr. Lee ordered the steersman to moor. A crackling pine fire was soon blazing, and having warmed our shivering {186} frames, we spread our blankets, and slept sweetly till the dawn.
Early on the morning of the 16th, our Indians were pulling at the paddles. The sky was overcast, and a dash of rain occasionally fell, the first I had witnessed since leaving Boyou Salade.[236] And although the air was chilly, and the heavens gloomy, yet when the large clear drops pattered on my hat, and fell in glad confusion around our little bark, a thrill of pleasure shot through my heart. Dangers, wastes, thirst, starvation, eternal dearth on the earth, and dewless heavens, were matters only of painful recollection. The present was the reality of the past engrafted on the hopes of the future; the showery skies, the lofty green mountains, the tumbling cataracts, the mighty forests, the sweet savour of teeming groves, among the like of which I had breathed in infancy, hung over the threshold of the lower Columbia, the goal of my wayfaring.
Hearken to that roar of waters! see the hastening of the flood! hear the sharp rippling by yonder rock; the whole river sinks from view in advance of us. The bowsman dips his paddle deeply and quickly; the frail canoe shoots to the {187} northern shore between a string of islands and the main land; glides quickly down a narrow channel; passes a village of cedar board wigwams on a beautiful little plain to the right; it rounds the lower island; behold the Cascades!—an immense trough of boulders of rocks, down which rushes the "Great River of the West." The baggage is ashore; the Indians are conveying the canoe over the portage, and while this is being done, the reader will have time to explore the lower falls of the Columbia, and their vicinage.[237]
The trail of the Portage runs near the torrent, along the rocky slope on its northern bank, and terminates among large loose rocks, blanched by the floods of ages, at the foot of the trough of the main rapid. It is about a mile and a half long. At its lower end voyagers reembark when the river is at a low stage, and run the lower rapids. But when it is swollen by the annual freshets, they bear their boats a mile and a half farther down, where the water is deep and less tumultuous. In walking down this path, I had a near view of the whole length of the main rapids. As I have intimated, the bed of the river here is a vast inclined trough of white rocks, sixty {188} or eighty feet deep, about four hundred yards wide at the top, and diminishing to about half that width at the bottom. The length of this trough is about a mile. In that distance the water falls about one hundred and thirty feet; in the rapids, above and below it, about twenty feet, making the whole descent about one hundred and fifty feet. The quantity of water which passes here is incalculable. But an approximate idea of it may be obtained from the fact that while the velocity is so great, that the eye with difficulty follows objects floating on the surface, yet such is its volume at the lowest stage of the river, that it rises and bends like a sea of molten glass over a channel of immense rocks, without breaking its surface, except near the shores, so deep and vast is the mighty flood!
In the June freshets, when the melted snows from the western declivities of seven hundred miles of the Rocky Mountains, and those on the eastern sides of the President's Range, come down, the Cascades must present a spectacle of sublimity equalled only by Niagara. This is the passage of the river through the President's Range, and the mountains near it on either {189} side are worthy of their distinguished name. At a short distance from the southern shore they rise in long ridgy slopes, covered with pines, and other terebinthine trees of extraordinary size,[238] over the tops of which rise bold black crags, which, elevating themselves in great grandeur one beyond another, twenty or thirty miles to the southward, cluster around the icy base of Mount Washington. On the other side of the Cascades is a similar scene. Immense and gloomy forests, tangled with fallen timber and impenetrable underbrush, cover mountains, which in the States, would excite the profoundest admiration for their majesty and beauty, but which dwindle into insignificance as they are viewed in presence of the shining glaciers, and massive grandeur of Mount Adams, hanging over them.