Alternating with these swimmers came occasional flocks of shag, a bird belonging to the cormorant tribe, and here and there a gull, though these last grew rarer as we increased our distance from the sea. I was surprised to notice a fine seal playing in the channel, twenty miles above Fort Vancouver, but learned that it was not unusual for these animals to ascend nearly to the cataract. Both the whites and Indians scattered along the river-banks kill them for their skin and blubber,—going out in boats for the purpose. My informant's boat had on one occasion taken an old seal nursing her calf. When the dam was towed to shore, the young one followed her, occasionally putting its fore-flippers on the gunwale to rest, like a Newfoundland dog, and behaving with such innocent familiarity that malice was disarmed. It came ashore with the boat's-crew and the body of its parent; no one had the heart to drive it away; so it stayed and was a pet of the camp from that time forward. After a while the party moved its position a distance of several miles while Jack was away in the river on a fishing-excursion, but there was no eluding him. The morning after the shift he came wagging into camp, a faithful and much-overjoyed, but exceedingly battered and used-up seal. He had evidently sought his friends by rock and flood the entire night preceding.
Occasionally the lonely river-stretches caught a sudden human interest in some gracefully modelled canoe gliding out with a crew of Chinook Indians from the shadow of a giant promontory, propelled by a square sail learned of the whites. Knowing the natural, ingrained laziness of Indians, one can imagine the delight with which they comprehended that substitute for the paddle. After all, this may perhaps be an ill-natured thing to say. Who does like to drudge when he can help it? Is not this very Wilson G. Hunt a triumph of human laziness, vindicating its claim to be the lord of matter by an ingenuity doing labor's utmost without sweat? After all, nobody but a fool drudges for other reason than that he may presently stop drudging.
At short intervals along the narrow strip of shore under the more gradual steeps, on the lower ledges of the basaltic precipices, and on little rock-islands in the river, appeared rude-looking stacks and scaffoldings where the Indians had packed their salmon. They left it in the open air without guard, as fearless of robbers as if the fish did not constitute their almost entire subsistence for the winter. And within their own tribes they have justification for this fearlessness. Their standard of honor is in most respects curiously adjustable,—but here virtue is defended by the necessities of life.
In the immediate vicinity of the cured article (I say "cured," though the process is a mere drying without smoke or salt) maybe seen the apparatus contrived for getting it in the fresh state. This is the scaffolding from which the salmon are caught. It is a horizontal platform shaped like a capital A, erected upon a similarly framed, but perpendicular set of braces, with a projection of several feet over the river-brink at a place where the water runs rapidly close in-shore. If practicable, the constructor modifies his current artificially, banking it inward with large stones, so as to form a sort of sluice in which passing fish will be more completely at his mercy. At the season of their periodic ascent, salmon swarm in all the rivers of our Pacific coast; the Columbia and Willamette are alive with them for a long distance above the cascades of the one and the Oregon-City fall of the other. The fisherman stands, nearly or quite naked, at the edge of his scaffolding, armed with a net extended at the end of a long pole, and so ingeniously contrived that the weight of the salmon and a little dexterous management draw its mouth shut on the captive like a purse as soon as he has entered. A helper stands behind the fisherman to assist in raising the haul,—to give the fish a tap on the nose, which kills him instantly,—and finally to carry him ashore to be split and dried, without any danger of his throwing himself back into the water from the hands of his captors, as might easily happen by omitting the coup-de-grace. Another method of catching salmon, much in vogue among the Sacramento and Pitt-River tribes, but apparently less employed by the Indians of the Columbia, is harpooning with a very clever instrument constructed after this wise. A hard-wood shaft is neatly, but not tightly, fitted into the socket of a sharp-barbed spear-head carved from bone. Through a hole drilled in the spear-head a stout cord of deer-sinew is fastened by one end, its other being secured to the shaft near its insertion. The salmon is struck by this weapon in the manner of the ordinary fish-spear; the head slips off the shaft as soon as the barbs lodge, and the harpoon virtually becomes a fishing-rod, with the sinew for a line. This arrangement is much more manageable than the common spear, as it greatly diminishes the chances of losing fish and breaking shafts.
There can scarcely be a more sculpturesque sight than that of a finely formed, well-grown young Indian struggling on his scaffold with an unusually powerful fish. Every muscle of his wiry frame stands out in its turn in unveiled relief, and you see in him attitudes of grace and power which will not let you regret the Apollo Belvedere or the Gladiator. The only pity is that this ideal Indian is a rare being. The Indians of this coast and river are divided into two broad classes,—the Fish Indians, and the Meat Indians. The latter, ceteris paribus, are much the finer race, derive the greater portion of their subsistence from the chase, and possess the athletic mind and body which result from active methods of winning a livelihood. The former are, to a great extent, victims of that generic and hereditary tabes mesenterica which produces the peculiar pot-bellied and spindle-shanked type of savage; their manners are milder; their virtues and vices are done in water-color, as comports with their source of supply. There are some tribes which partake of the habits of both classes, living in mountain-fastnesses part of the year by the bow and arrow, but coming down to the river in the salmon-season for an addition to their winter bill-of-fare. Anywhere rather than among the pure Fish Indians is the place to look for savage beauty. Still these tribes have fortified their feebleness by such a cultivation of their ingenuity as surprises one seeing for the first time their well-adapted tools, comfortable lodges, and, in some cases, really beautiful canoes. In the last respect, however, the Indians nearer the coast surpass those up the Columbia,—some of their carved and painted canoes equalling the "crackest" of shell-boats in elegance of line and beauty of ornament.
In a former article devoted to the Great Yo-Semite I had occasion to remark that Indian legend, like all ancient poetry, often contains a scientific truth embalmed in the spices of metaphor,—or, to vary the figure, that Mudjekeewis stands holding the lantern for Agassiz and Dana to dig by.
Coming to the Falls of the Columbia, we find a case in point. Nearly equidistant from the longitudes of Fort Vancouver and Mount Hood, the entire Columbia River falls twenty feet over a perpendicular wall of basalt, extending, with minor deviations from the right angle, entirely between-shores, a breadth of about a mile. The height of Niagara and the close compression of its vast volume make it a grander sight than the Falls of the Columbia,—but no other cataract known to me on this continent rivals it for an instant. The great American Falls of Snake are much loftier and more savage than either, but their volume is so much less as to counterbalance those advantages. Taking the Falls of the Columbia all in all,—including their upper and lower rapids,—it must be confessed that they exhibit every phase of tormented water in its beauty of color or grace of form, its wrath or its whim.
The Indians have a tradition that the river once followed a uniform level from the Dalles to the sea. This tradition states that Mounts Hood and St. Helen's are husband and wife,—whereby is intended that their tutelar divinities stand in that mutual relation; that in comparatively recent times there existed a rocky bridge across the Columbia at the present site of the cataract, and that across this bridge Hood and St. Helen's were wont to pass for interchange of visits; that, while this bridge existed, there was a free subterraneous passage under it for the river and the canoes of the tribes (indeed, this tradition is so universally credited as to stagger the skeptic by a mere calculation of chances); that, on a certain occasion, the mountainous pair, like others not mountainous, came to high words, and during their altercation broke the bridge down; falling into the river, this colossal Rialto became a dam, and ever since that day the upper river has been backed to its present level, submerging vast tracts of country far above its original bed.
I notice that excellent geological authorities are willing to treat this legend respectfully, as containing in symbols the probable key to the natural phenomena. Whether the original course of the Columbia at this place was through a narrow cañon or under an actual roof of rock, the adjacent material has been at no very remote date toppled into it to make the cataract and alter the bed to its present level. Both Hood and St. Helen's are volcanic cones. The latter has been seen to smoke within the last twelve years. It is not unlikely that during the last few centuries some intestine disturbance may have occurred along the axis between the two, sufficient to account for the precipitation of that mass of rock which now forms the dam. That we cannot refer the cataclysm to a very ancient date seems to be argued by the state of preservation in which we still find the stumps of the celebrated "submerged forest," extending a long distance up the river above the Falls.
At the foot of the cataract we landed from the steamer on the Washington side of the river, and found a railroad-train waiting to do our portage. It was a strange feeling, that of whirling along by steam where so few years before the Indian and the trader had toiled through the virgin forest, bending under the weight of their canoes. And this is one of the characteristic surprises of American scenery everywhere. You cannot isolate yourself from the national civilization. In a Swiss châlet you may escape from all memories of Geneva; among the Grampians you find an entirely different set of ideas from those of Edinburgh: but the same enterprise which makes itself felt in New York and Boston starts up for your astonishment out of all the fastnesses of the continent. Virgin Nature wooes our civilization to wed her, and no obstacles can conquer the American fascination. In our journey through the wildest parts of this country, we were perpetually finding patent washing-machines among the chaparral,—canned fruit in the desert,—Voigtlander's field-glasses on the snow-peak,—lemon-soda in the cañon,—men who were sure a railroad would be run by their cabin within ten years, in every spot where such a surprise was most remarkable.