“And what is the most distinctive thing about Tygh Valley?” we later asked a friend who frequently visits the town and he as promptly answered, “Rattlesnakes; the canyon is one of the greatest habitats of this interesting reptile in the whole country. The last time I was there a local character who makes a practice of hunting the snakes had just come in with the carcases of forty-five of them, which he was proudly displaying on the street. He makes a good revenue from the oil, which is in great demand, and the skins are worth from fifty cents to a dollar each. The snake hunter once started to breed the reptiles to increase his gains but the citizens objected. They thought there were quite enough rattlesnakes in the canyon without raising them artificially. Since then the hunter has confined himself to catching the denizens of the wild and is doing Tygh Valley a good service in reducing the number of the pests.”
We ourselves, however, saw nothing of the valley’s aboriginal inhabitants, though we might have looked more closely for them had we known of their presence.
Almost immediately after leaving the town we began our climb out of the canyon, ascending one of the longest grades that we found in all our wanderings. This road is a wonderful piece of engineering, swinging its wide ribbon in long loops around and over the giant hills and affording some awe-inspiring vistas of barren summits and wooded canyons. It is a road of thrills for the nervously inclined, for in places at its sides the slopes drop almost sheer for a thousand feet or more and there are many abrupt turns around cliff-like headlands. But for all that it is an easy road, smooth, fairly free from dust, and with no rise greater than seven or eight per cent. May they do more road work of this kind in Oregon!
At the summit we paused and caught our breath at the panorama that suddenly broke on our vision. An endless sea of blue mountains stretched out to meet the sunset and dominating them all rose the awful bulk of Mount Hood, sharply silhouetted against a wide stretch of crimson sky. There was something awful and overpowering in its lonely, inaccessible majesty—the sunset and the mystery of the blue shadows that enveloped its feet gave it something more than the fascination which the lone snow-covered mountain ever has for the beholder—its relative isolation from other peaks giving it an added grandeur and individuality. Mount Hood, for example, with an altitude of 11200 feet, is far more impressive than Mount Whitney, the culminating peak of a range, though its actual height is 3300 feet greater.
And so, as we contemplated this mystery mountain looming in lonely majesty in the fading twilight, we could not wonder that Indian myth and legend made it the subject of many a weird tale. It dominated the western horizon during the remainder of our run except at short intervals and presented many fascinating changes of color and light ere it faded away in the darkness. From a hilltop several miles out of The Dalles we caught our first glimpse of the Columbia in its mad dash through the narrow straits that give the name to the town. The valley and surrounding hills were bleak and cheerless in the extreme and in the gathering shadows of the distance the mad tumult of the waters was hardly visible, but if the first view was distinctly disappointing, the unfavorable impression was to be effaced by our later acquaintance with the noble river.
We were glad indeed to come into the well-lighted streets of The Dalles. It had been an exceedingly hard day’s run—nearly two hundred miles with much bad road, stony and deep with dust in places. The dust was especially annoying during the last twenty-five miles of our run; the wind was blowing a perfect gale and there were numerous cars on the road. When we entered The Dalles Hotel our appearance hardly fitted us for civilized society, but such a plight creates no comment and attracts little attention. It is too commonplace here—the party that preceded us and the one that followed were very like unto ourselves in unkempt appearance. The hotel with its large comfortable rooms and well-ordered bath was indeed a haven of rest after the day’s experience and when we had regained the semblance of respectability we descended to a late dinner, for which we were quite ready. We found everything about the hotel decidedly first-class and more metropolitan than is common in towns of five thousand, for that is all the census books accord to The Dalles. Of course it claims to have gained considerably since the last enumeration and its private and public buildings, well-improved streets and general business activity seem to bear out the contention.
The town is built on a historic site. Old Fort Dalles was a milestone of pioneer travel, having been established here in 1838 and about the same time a mission was founded—not by Father Junipero, whose name always comes to mind in connection with the word in the west, but by the Methodist Church. The name was given by Canadian voyagers in the Hudson Bay service—The Dalles signifying gutter or trough, referring to the chasms between the great glacier-polished sheets of basaltic rock which break the river into the wild cascades opposite the town. A short distance above this broken pavement the river is thousands of feet in width but where it forces its mad passage through these rocks it is confined to a few yards and where the channels are most contracted it sweeps through three rifts of rocky floor, each so narrow that a child might cast a stone across.
OR BON DESCHUTES RIVER CANYON
From photo by The Weister Co., Portland, Oregon