THE CANOE AND THE SADDLE,ADVENTURES AMONG THE NORTHWESTERN RIVERS AND FORESTS;
AND ISTHMIANA.
BY THEODORE WINTHROP., AUTHOR OF "CECIL DREEME," "JOHN BRENT," AND EDWIN BROTHERTOFT."

EIGHTH EDITION.


BOSTON:TICKNOR AND FIELDS.
1866 {1866/00/00}

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Entered according to Act of  Congress, in the year 1862 {1862/00/00}, by
TICKNOR AND FIELDS,
In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts,


UNIVERSITY PRESS.
WELCH, BIGELOW, AND COMPANY,
CAMBRIDGE.

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CONTENTS.
PAGE
I.  AN ENTRANCE5
II. A KLALAm GRANDEE7
III. WHULGE24
IV. OWHHIGH53
V. FORESTS OF THE CASCADES80
VI. "BOSTON TILICUM".111
VII. TACOMA123
VIII. SOWEE HOUSE. - LOOLOWCAN155
IX. VIA MALA177
X. TREACHERY194
XI. KAMAIAKAN213
XII. LIGHTNING AND TORCHLIGHT244
XIII. THE DALLES.-THEIR LEGEND267
VOCABULARY299
ISTHMIANA303

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THE CANOE AND THE SADDLE.



I.  
AN ENTRANCE.

A wall of terrible breakers marks the mouth of the Columbia, Achilles of rivers.
Other mighty streams 'May swim feebly away seaward, may sink into foul marshes, may trickle through the ditches of an oozy delta, may scatter among sand-bars the currents that once moved majestic and united. But to this heroic flood was destined a short life and a glorious one, ---~ a life all one strong, victorious struggle., from the mountains to the sea. It has no infancy, -two great branches collect its waters up and down the continent. They join, and the Columbia is born to full manhood. It rushes forward, jubilant, through its magnificent chasm, and leaps to its death in the Pacific.
Through its white wall of breakers Captain Gray, with his bark, the Columbia, first steered

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6THE CANOE AND THE SADDLE.

boldly to discover and name the stream. I will not invite my reader to follow this example, and buffet in the wrecking uproar on the bar. The Columbia, rolling seaward, repels us.
Let us rather coast along northward, and enter the Northwest by the Straits of De Fuca, upon the mighty tides of an inland sea. We will profit by this inward eddy of ocean to float quietly past Vancouver's Island, and land at Kahtai, Port Townsend, the opening scene of my narrative.
The adventures chronicled in these pages happened some years ago, but the story of a civilized man's solitary onslaught at barbarism cannot lose its interest. A drama with Indian actors, in Indian costume, upon an Indian stage, is historical, whether it happened two hundred years since in the northeast, or five years since in the northwest corner of our country.

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II.

A KLALAM GRANDEE.

THE Duke of York was ducally drunk. His brother, King George, was drunk - royally. Royalty may disdain public opinion, and fall as low as it pleases. But a brother of the throne, leader of the opposition, possible Regent, possible King, must retain at least a swaying perpendicular. King George had kept his chair of state until an angular sitting position was impossible; then he had subsided into a curvilinear droop, and at last fairly toppled over, and lay in his lodge, limp and stertorous.
In his lodge lay Georgius Rex, in flabby insensibility. Dead to the duties of sovereignty was the King of the Klalams. Like other royal Georges, in palaces more regal than this Port Townsend wigwam, in realms more civilized than here, where the great tides of Puget's Sound rise and fall, this royal George had sunk in absolute wreck. Kings are but men. Several kings have thought themselves the god Bacchus. George of the Klalams had imbibed this ambi-

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8THE CANOE AND THE SADDLE.

lious error, and had proved himself very much lower than a god, much lower than a man, lower than any plebeian Klalam, Indian,-a drunken king.
In the great shed of slabs that served them for palace sat the Queen, - sat the Queens, - mildeyed, melancholy, copper-colored persons, also, sad to say, not sober. Etiquette demanded inebriety. The stern rules of royal indecorum must be obeyed. The Queen Dowager had succumbed to ceremony; the Queen Consort was sinking; every lesser queen, -the favorites for sympathy, the neglected for consolation, -all had imitated their lord and master.
Courtiers had done likewise. Chamberlain Gold Stick, Black Rod, Garter King at Arms, a dozen high functionaries, were prostrate by the side of prostrate majesty. Courtiers grovelled with their sovereign. Sardanapalus never presided, until he could preside no longer, at a more tumble-down orgie.
King, royal household, and court all were powerless, and I was a suppliant here, on the waters of the Pacific, for means of commencing my homeward journey across the continent toward the Atlantic. I needed a bark from that fleet by which King George ruled the waves. I had dallied too long at Vancouver's Island, under the hospitable roof of the Hudson's Bay

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A KLALAM GRANDEE. 9
Company, and had consumed invaluable hours in making a detour from my proper course to inspect the house, the saw-mill, the bluff, and the beach, called Port Townsend. These were the last days of August, 1853 {1853/08/00}. I was to meet my overland comrades, a pair of roughs, at the Dalles of the Columbia on the first of September {1853/09/01}. Between me and the rendezvous were the leagues of Puget's Sound, the preparation for an ultramontane trip, the passes of the Cascades, and all the dilatoriness and danger of Indian guidance. Moments now were worth days of common life.
Therefore, as I saw those winged moments flit away unharnessed to my chariot of departure, I became wroth, and, advancing where the king of all this region lay, limp, stertorous, and futile, I kicked him liberally.
Yes! I have kicked a king!
Proudly I claim that I have outdone the most radical regicide. I have offered indignities to the person of royalty with a moccasined toe. Would that that toe had been robustly booted! In his Sans Souci, his OEil de Boeuf, his Brighton Pavilion, I kicked so much of a first gentleman of his realm as was George R., and no scalping-knife leaped from greasy seal-skin sheath to avenge the insult. One bottle-holder in waiting, upon whose head I had casually trodden, did indeed stagger to his seat, and stammer trucu-
1*

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10THE CANOE AND THE SADDLE.

lently in Chinook jargon, "Potlatch lum! Give me to drink," quoth he, and incontinently fell prone again, a poor, collapsed bottle-holder.
But kicking the insensible King of the Klalams, that dominant nation on the southern shores of Puget's Sound, did not procure me one of his canoes and a crew of his braves to paddle me to Nisqually, my next station, for a blanket apiece and gratuities of sundries. There was no help to be had from that smoky barn or its sorry inmates, so regally nicknamed by British voyagers. I left them lying upon their dirty mats, among their fishy baskets, and strode away, applying the salutary toe to each dignitary as I passed.
Fortunately, without I found the Duke of York, only ducally drunk. A duke's share of the potables had added some degrees to the arc of Vibration of his swagger, but had not sent it beyond equilibrium. He was a reversed pendulum, somewhat spasmodic in swing, and not constructed on the compensation principle, -when one muscle relaxed, another did not tighten. However, the Duke was still sober enough to have speculation in his eyes, and as he was Regent now, and Lord High Admiral, I might still by his favor be expedited.
It was a chance festival that had intoxicated the Klalams, king and court. There had been

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A KLALAM GRANDEE.11

a fraternization, a powwow, a wahwah, a peace congress with some neighboring tribe, -perhaps the Squaksnamish, or Squallyamish, or Sinahomish, or some other of the Whulgeamish, dwellers by Whulge, -the waters of Puget's Sound. And just as the festival began, there had come to Port Townsend, or Kahtai, where the king of the Klalams, or S' Klalams, now reigned, a devilsend of a lumber brig, with liquor of the fieriest. An orgie followed, a nation was prostrate.
The Duke was my only hope. Yet I must not betray eagerness. A dignitary among Indians does not like to be bored with energy. If I were too ardent, the Duke would grow coy. Prices would climb to the unapproachable. Any exhibition of impatience would cost me largess of beads, if not blankets, beyond the tariff for my canoe-hire. A frugal mind, and, on the other hand, a bent toward irresponsible pleasure, kept the Duke palpably wavering. He would joyfully stay and complete his saturnalia, and yet the bliss of more chattels, and consequent consideration, tempted him. Which shall it be, " lumoti " or "pississy," - bottle or blanket ? revel and rum, or toil and toilette ? - the great alternative on which civilization hinges, as well among Klalams as elsewhere. Sunbeams are so warm, and basking such dulcet, do-nothing bliss, why overheat one's self now for the woollen raiment

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12THE CANOE AND THE SADDLE.

of future warmth? Not merely warmth, but wealth, -wives, chiefest of luxuries, are bought with blankets; with them canoes are bought, and to a royal highness of savages, blankets are purple, ermine, and fine linen.
Calling the Duke's attention to these facts, I wooed him cautiously, as craft wooes coyness; I assumed a lofty indifference of demeanor, and negotiated with him from a sham vantage-ground of money-power, knowing what trash my purse, would be, if he refused to be tempted. A grotesque jargon called Chinook is the lingua-franca of the whites and Indians of the Northwest. Once the Chinooks were the most numerous tribe along the Columbia, and the first, from their position at its mouth, to meet and talk with strangers. Now it is all over with them; their bones are dust; small-pox and spirits have eliminated the race. But there grew up between them and the traders a lingo, an incoherent coagulation of words, -as much like a settled, logical language as a legion of centrifugal, marauding Bashi Bazouks, every man a Jack-of-all-trades, a beggar and blackguard, is like an accurate, unanimous, disciplined battalion. It is a jargon of English, French, Spanish, Chinook, Kallapooga, Haida, and other tongues, civilized and savage. It is an attempt on a small scale to nullify Babel by combining

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A KLALAM GRANDEE.13
a confusion of tongues into a confounding of tongues, -a witches' caldron in which the vocable that bobs up may be some old familiar Saxon verb, having suffered Procrustean docking or elongation, and now doing substantive duty; or some strange monster, evidently nurtured within the range of tomahawks and calumets. There is some danger that the beauties of this dialect will be lost to literature,
"Carent quia vate sacro."

The Chinook jargon still expects its poet. As several of my characters will use this means of conveying their thoughts to my reader, and employ me only as an interpreter, I have thought it well to aid comprehension by this little philological preface.
My big talk with the Duke of York went on in such a lingo, somewhat as follows:
"Pottlelum mitlite King Jawge; Drunk lieth King George," said I. " Cultus tyee ocook; a beggarly majesty that. Hyas tyee mika; a mighty prince art thou, -pe kumtux skookoom mamook esick; and knowest how robustly to ply paddle. Nika tikky hyack klatawah copa Squally, copa canim; I would with speed canoe it to Squally. Hui pississy nika potlatch pe hui ikta; store of blankets will I give, and plenteous sundries."

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14THE CANOE AND THE SADDLE.

" Nawitka siks; yea, friend," responded the Duke, grasping my hand, after two drunken clutches at empty air. " Klosche nika tum, tum copa hyas Baasten tyee ; tender is my heart toward thee, o great Yankee don. Yaka pottlelum-halo nika -wake cultus mann Dookeryawk; he indeed is drunk- not I- no loafer-man, the Duke of York. Mitlite canim ; got canoe. Pe klosche nika tikky klatawah copa Squally; and heartily do I wish to go to Squally."
Had the Duke wavered still, and been apathetic to temptation of blankets, and sympathetic toward the joys of continued saturnalia, a new influence now brought to bear would have steadied him. One of his Duchesses, Only duchessly intoxicated, came forth from the ducal lodge, and urged him to effort.
" Go, by all means, with the distinguished stranger, my love," said she, in Chinook, "and I will be the solace of thy voyage. Perchance, also, a string of beads and a pocket-mirror shall be my meed from the Boston chief, a very generous Man, I am sure." Then she smiled enticingly, her flat-faced grace, and introduced herself as Jenny Lind, or, as she called it, " Chin Lin." Indianesque, not fully Indian, was her countenance. There was a trace of tin in her copper color, possibly a dash of Caucasian

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A KLALAM GRANDEE.15
blood in her veins. Brazenness of hue was the result of this union, and a very pretty color it is with eloquent blushes mantling through it, as they do Mantle in Indian cheeks. Her forehead was slightly and coquettishly flattened by art, as a woman's should be by nature, unless nature destines her for missions foreign to feminineness, and means that she shall be an intellectual roundhead, and shall sternly keep a graceless school, to irritate youthful cherubim into original sinners. Indian maids are pretty; Indian dames are bags. Only high civilization keeps its women beautiful to the last. Indian belles have some delights of toilette worthy of consideration by their blonde sisterhood. O mistaken harridans of Christendom, so bountifully painted and powdered, did ye but know how much better than your diffusiveness of daub is the concentrated brilliance of vermilion stripes parting at the nose-bridge and streaming athwart the cheeks ! Knew ye but this, at once ye would reform from your undeluding shams, and recover the forgotten charms of acknowledged pinxit.
At last, persuaded by his own desires and the solicitations of his fair Duchess, the Duke determined to transport me. He pointed to a grand canoe on the beach, -that should be our Bucentaur, and now he must don robes of ceremony for the voyage. For, indeed, both ducal

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16THE CANOE AND THE SADDLE.

0
personages were in deshabille. A dirty shirt, blue and short, was the Duke's chief habiliment; hers, a shirt longer, but no cleaner.
Within his palace-curtains now disappeared the second grandee of the Klalams, to bedeck himself. Presently I lifted the banging mat that served for door to his shed of slabs, and followed him. His family and suite were but crapulous after their less than royal potations. He despatched two sleepy braves to make ready the canoe, and find paddles.
" Where is my cleanest shirt, Chin Lin? he asked.
" Nika macook lum; I buy grog with um," replied the Duchess.
" Cultus mamook; a dastardly act," growled the Duke, "and I will thwack thee for 't."
Jenny Lind sank meekly upon the mud-floor, and wept, while the Duke smote her with palm, fist, and staff.
" Kopet! hold! " cried I, rushing forward.
Thy beauteous spouse has bought the nectar for thy proper jollity. Even were she selfish, it is uncivilized to smite the fair. Among the Bostons, when women wrong us, we give pity or contempt, but not the strappado." Harangues to Indians are traditionally in such lofty style.
The Duke suffered himself to be appeased and proceeded to dress without the missing

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A KLALAM GRANDEE.17
article. He donned a faded black frock-coat, evidently a misfit for its first owner in civilization, and transmitted down a line of deformed wearers to fall amorphous on the shoulders of him of York. For coronet he produced no gorgeous combination of velvet, strawberry-leaves, and pearls; but a hat or tile, also of civilization, wrinkled with years and battered by world-wandering, crowned him frowzily. Black dress pantaloons of brassy sheen, much crinkled at the bottom, where they fell over moccasins with a faded scarlet instep-piece, completed his costume. A very shabby old-clo' Duke. A virulent radical would have enjoyed him heartily, as an emblem of decay in the bloated aristocracy of this region. Red paint daubed over his clumsy nose, and about the flats surrounding his little, disloyal, dusky eyes, kept alive the traditional Indian in his appearance. Otherwise he might have been taken for a decayed priest turned bar-tender, or a colporteur of tracts on spiritualism, or an exconstable pettifogger in a police court. Commerce, alas! had come to the waters of Whulge, stolen away his Indian simplicity, and made him a caricature, dress, name, and nature. A primitive Klalam, clad in skins and undevoured by the flames of fire-water, he would have done well enough as a type of fish-fed barbarism. Civilization came, with step-mother kindness, bap-
B

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18THE CANOE AND THE SADDLE.

tized him with rum, clothed him in discarded slops, and dubbed him Duke of York. Hapless scarecrow, disreputable dignitary, no dukeling of thine shall ever become the Louis Philippe of Klalam revolutions. Boston men are coming in their big canoes over sea.  Pikes have shaken off the fever and ague on the banks of the muddy Missouri, and are striding beyond the Rockys. Nasal twangs from the east and west soon will sound thy trump of doom. Squatters will sit upon thy dukedom, and make it their throne.
Tides in Whulge, which the uneducated maps call Puget's Sound, rush with impetus, rising and falling eighteen or twenty feet. The tide was rippling winningly up to the stranded canoes. Our treaty was made; our costume was complete ; we prepared to embark. But lo! a check! In malignant sulks, King George came forth from his mal-perfumed lodge of red-smeared slabs. "Veto," said he. "Dog am I, and this is -my manger. Every canoe of the fleet is mine, and from this beach not one shall stir this day of festival ! "
Whereupon, after a wrangle, short and sharp, with the Duke, in which the King whipped out a knife, and brandished it with drunken vibrations in my face, he staggered back, and again lay in his lodge, limp and stertorous. Had he

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A KLALAM GRANDEE.19
felt my kick, or was this merely an impulse of discontented ire ?
How now? Could we not dethrone the sovereign, and confiscate his property ? There are precedents for such a course. But savage life is full of chances. As I was urging the soberish Duke to revolutionary acts, or at least to a forced levy from the royal navy, a justifiable piracy, two canoes appeared rounding the point.
" ' Come unto these yellow sands,' ye brasscolored braves," we cried. They were coming, each crew roving anywhither, and soon, by the Duke's agency, I struck a bargain for the leaky better of the two vessels.
No clipper that ever creaked from statu quo in Webb's shipyard, and rumbled heavily along the ways, and rushed as if to drown itself in its new element, and then went cleaving across the East River, staggering under the intoxicating influence of a champagne-bottle with a blue ribbon round its neck, cracked on the rudderpost by a blushing priestess, -no such grand result of modern skill ever surpassed in mere model the canoe I had just chartered for my voyage to Squally. Here was the type of speed and grace to which the most untrammelled civilization has reverted, after cycles of junk, galleon, and galliot building, - cycles of lubberly development, but full of instruction as to what

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20THE CANOE AND THE SADDLE.

can be done with the best type when it is reasoned out or rediscovered. My vessel was a black dug-out with a red gunwale. Forty feet of pine-tree had been burnt and whittled into a sharp, buoyant canoe. Sundry cross-pieces strengthened it, and might be used as seats or backs. A row of small shells inserted in the red-smeared gunwale served as talismans against Bugaboo. Its master was a withered ancient; its mistress a haggish crone. These two were of unsavory and fishy odor. Three young men, also of unsavory and fishy odor, completed the crew. Salmon mainly had been the lifelong diet of all, and they were oozier with its juices than I could wish of people I must touch and smell for a voyage of two days.
In the bargain for canoe and crew, the Duke constituted himself my courier. I became his prey. The rule of tea-making, where British ideas prevail, is a rough generalization, a spoonful for the pot and one for each bibber. The tariff of canoe-hire on Whulge is equally simple, -a blanket for the boat, and one for each paddler. The Duke carefully included himself and Jenny Lind among the paddling recipients of blankets. I ventured to express the view that both he and his Duchess would be unwashed supernumeraries. At this he was indignant. He felt himself necessary as impresario of the expedition.

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A KLALAM GRANDEE.21
"Wake closche ocook olyman siwash; no good that oldman savage," said he, pointing to the skipper. " Yaka pottlelum, conoway pottlelum; he drunk, all drunk. Wake kumtux Squally; no understand Squally. Hyas tyee Dookeryawk, wake pottlelum, - kumtux skookoom mamook esick, pe tikky hyack klatawah copa Squally; mighty chief the Duke of York, not drunk, understand to ply paddle mightily, and want to go fast to Squally."
"Very well," said I, "I throw myself into your hands. My crew, then, numbers six, the three fishy youths, Olyman siwash, Jenny Lind, and yourself. As to Olyman's fishy squaw, she must be temporarily divorced, and go ashore; dead weight will impede our voyage."
" Nawitka," responded the Klalam, " cultus ocook olyman cloocheman; no use that oldman woman." So she went ashore, bow-legged, monotonous, and a fatalist, like all old squaws.
"And now," continued the Duke, drawing sundry greasy documents from the pocket of that shapeless draggle-tail coat of his, " mika tikky nanitch nika teapot; wilt thou inspect my certificates ? "
I took the foul papers without a shudder,-- have we not all been educated out of squeamishness by handling the dollar-bills of civilization ? There was nothing ambiguous in the wording

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22THE CANOE AND THE SADDLE.

of these "teapots." It chanced sometimes, in days of chivalry, that spies bore Missions with clauses sinister to themselves, as this: " The bearer is a losel vile, - have you never a hangman and an oak for him ? " The Duke's testimonials were of similar import. They were signed by Yankee skippers, by British naval officers, by casual travellers, - all unanimous in opprobrium. He was called a drunken rascal, a shameless liar, a thief; called each of these in various idioms, with plentiful epithets thrown in, according to the power of imagery possessed by the author. Such certificates he presented gravely, and with tranquil pride. He deemed himself indorsed by civilization, not branded. Men do not always comprehend the world's cynical praise. It seemed also that his Grace had once voyaged to San Francisco in what he called a " skookoom canim copa moxt stick ; a colossal canoe with two masts." He did not state what part he played on board, whether cook, captain, stowaway, or Klalam plenipo to those within the Golden Gate.  His photograph had been taken at San Francisco. This he also exhibited in a grandiose manner, the Duchess, Olyman siwash, and the three fishy siwashes examining it with wonder and grunts of delight.
Now it must not be supposed that the Duke was not still ducally drunk, or that it was easy

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A KLALAM GRANDEE.23

to keep him steady in position or intention. Olyman siwash, also, though not patently intoxicated, wished to be, - so did the three unsavory, hickory-shirted, mat-haired, truculent siwashes. Olyman would frequently ask me, aside, in the strange, unimpassioned, expressionless undertone of an Indian, for a " lumoti," Chinook jargon for la bouteille, meaning no empty bottle, but a full. Never a lumoti of delay and danger got Olyman from me. Our preparations went heavily enough. Sometimes the whole party would squat on the beach, and jabber for ten minutes, ending always by demanding of me liquor or higher wages. But patience and purpose always prevail. At last, by cool urgency,, I got them all on board and away. Adieu Port Townsend, then a town of one house on a grand bluff, and one saw-mill in a black ravine. Adieu intoxicated lodges of Georgius Rex Klalamorum! Adieu Royalty ! Remember my kick, and continue to be h'happy as you may.

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III.

WHULGE.

ACCORDING to the cosmical law that regulates the west ends of the world, Whulge is more interesting than any of the eastern waters of our country, Tame Albemarle and Pamlico, Chesapeake and Delaware, Long Island Sound, and even the Maine Archipelago and Frenchman's Bay, cannot compare with it. Whulge is worthy of the Scandinavian savor of its name. Its cockney misnomer should be dropped. Already the critical world demands who was " Puget," and why should the title be saved from Lethe and given to a sound. Whulge is a vast fiord, parting rocks and forests primeval with a mighty tide. Chesapeakes and the like do very well for oyster " fundums " and shad-fisheries, but Whulge has a picturesque significance as much greater as its salmon are superior to the osseous shad of the east. Some of its beauties will appear in this my voyage.
I sat comfortably amidships in my stately but leaky galley, Bucentaur hight for the nonce.

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WHULGE.25
Olyman siwash steered. The Duke and Duchess, armed with idle Paddles, were between him and me. The fishy trio were arranged forward, paddling to starboard and port. It was past noon of an August day, sultry, but not blasting, as are the summer days of that far Northwest. We sped on gallantly, paddling and spreading a blanket to the breeze.
The Duke, however, sogered bravely, and presently called a halt. Then, to my consternation, he produced a " lumoti " and passed it. Potations pottle-deep ensued. Each reveller took one sixth of the liquor, and, after the Duke's exhaustive draught, an empty bottle floated astern. A general stagger began to be perceptible among the sitters. Their paddling grew spasmodic.
After an interval I heard again a popping sound, not unknown to me. A gurgle followed. I turned. The Duke was pouring out a cupful from his second bottle. He handed me the cup and lumoti for transmission to the fishy, forward. This must stop. I deposited the bottle by my side and emptied the cup into Whulge. Into an arm of the Pacific in the far Northwest I poured that gill of fire-water. Answer me from the northeast corner, O Neal Dow, was it well done ?
Then raged the siwashes all, from Olyman perched on high  and wielding a helmsman pad-
2

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26THE CANOE AND THE SADDLE.

dle aft, to a special blackguard in the bow with villain eyes no bigger than a flattened pea, and a jungle of coarse black hair, thick as the mane of a buffalo bull. All stowed their paddles and talked violently in their own tongue. It was a guttural, sputtering language in its calmest articulation, and now every word burst forth like the death-rattle of a garroted man.
Finally, in Chinook, "Kopet; be still," said the Duke. " Keelapi ; turnabout," said, he.
They brandished paddles, and, whirling the canoe around, tore up the water violently for a few strokes. I said nothing. Presently they paused, and talked more frantically than before.  Something was about to happen.
Aha! What is that, O Duke ? A knife!
What are these, O dirty siwashes ? Guns are these, flint-locks of the Hudson's Bay pattern. " Guns for thee, O spiteful spiller of enlivening beverage, and capturer of a lumoti. Butchery is the order of the day!"
" Look you, then, aborigines all. I carry six siwash lives at my girdle. This machine - mark it well! -is called a six-shooter, an eight-inch navy revolver, invented by Col. Sam Colt, of Hartford, Conn. God bless him! We are seven, and I should regret sending you six others to the Unhappy Hunting-Grounds of the Kicuali Tyee, Anglice Devil, the lowermost chieftain

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WHULGE.27

Look down this muzzle as I whisk it about and bring it to bear on each of you in turn. Rifled you observe. Pleasant, well-oiled click that cylinder has. Behold, also, this other double-barrelled piece of artillery, loaded, as you saw but now, with polecat-shot, in case we should see one of these black and white objects skulking along shore. Unsavory though ye be, my Klalams, I should not wish to identify you in your deaths with that animal."
Saying this, with an air of indifference, but in expressive pantomime, I could not fail to perceive that the situation was critical. Three drunken Indians on this side, and two and a woman on that, and I playing bottle-holder in the midst, -what would follow? Their wild talk and threatening gestures continued. I kept my pistol and one eye cocked at him of the old clo', the, teapots, and the daguerrotype; my other eye and the double-barrel covered the trio in the bow. This dead lock lasted several minutes. Meantime the canoe had yielded to the tide, and was now sweeping on in a favorable course.
At last the Duke laid down his knife, Olyman siwash his gun, the three fishy ones theirs, and his Grace, stretching forth an eloquent arm, made a neat speech.  Fluency is impossible in few-worded Chinook jargon, but brevity is more potent.

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28THE CANOE AND THE SADDLE.

"Hyas silex nika; in wrathful sulks am I. Masatche nika tum tum copa mika ; bitter is my heart toward thee. Wake cultus tyee Dooker-yawk; no paltry sachem, the Duke of York. Wake kamooks, halo pottlelum, ; no dog, by no Means a soaker. Ancoti conoway tikky mamook iscum mika copa Squally, - alta halo ; but now, all wished to conduct thee to Squally ; now, not so. Alta nesika wake tikky pississy, pe shirt, pe polealely, pe Kaliaton, pe hiu ikta, - tikky keelapi; now we no want blankets and shirts and powder and shot and many traps, -want to return. Conoway silex, -tikky moosum; all in the sulks, -want to sleep."
Whereupon, as if at a signal, all six dived deep into slumber, - slumber at first pretended, perhaps to throw me off my guard, perhaps a crafty method of evading the difficulty of a reconciliation, and the shame of yielding. So deep did they plunge into sham sleep, that they sunk into real, and presently I heard the gurgle of snores.
While they slept, the canoe drifted over Whulge. Fleet waters bore me on whither they listed, fortunately whither I also listed, and, if ever the vessel yawed, a few quiet strokes with the paddle set her right again. The current drew me away from under shore, and to the South, through distancing haze of summer the noble group of the Olympian Mountains became

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visible, - a grand family of vigorous growth, worthy more perfect knowledge. They fill the southern promontory, where Whulge passes into the Pacific, at the Straits of De Fuca. On the highest pinnacles of this sierra, glimmers of perpetual snow in sheltered dells and crevices gave me pleasant, chilly thoughts in that hot August day. After the disgusting humanity of King George's realms, and after the late period of rebellion and disorganization, the calming influence of these azure luminous peaks, their blue slashed with silver, was transcendent.
So I sat watchful, and by and by I heard a gentle voice, " Wake nika moosum ; I sleep not."
" Sleepest thou not, pretty Duchess, flat-faced one, with chevrons vermilion culminating at thy nose-bridge? Wilt thou forgive me for spilling thy nectar, Lalage of the dulcet laugh, dulcet-spoken Lalage ? Would that thou wert clean as well as pretty, and had known but seldom the too fragrant salmon! - would that I had never seen thee toss off a waterless gill of fire-water! Please wake the Duke."
The Duke woke. Olyman woke. Woke Klalams one and all. Sleep had banished wrath and rancor. All grasped their paddles, and, soon warming with work, the fugleman waked a wild chant, and to its stirring vibrations the canoe shook and leaped forward like a salmon in the buzz of a tideway.


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30THE CANOE AND THE SADDLE.

We careered on for an hour. Then I suggested a pause and a picnic. Brilliant and friendly thought, - " Conoway tikky muckamuck"; all want to eat. Take then, my pardoned crew, from my stores, portions of dried cod. Thin it is, translucent, and very nice for Klalam or Yankee. Take also hardtack at discretion, - " pire sapolol," or fired corn, as ye name it. Our picnic was rumless, wholesome, and amicable, and after it paddling and songs were renewed with vigor. We were not alone upon Whulge. Many lumber vessels were drifting or at anchor under the opposite shore, loaded mainly with fir-trees, soon to be drowned as piles for San Francisco docks. Those were prosperous days in the Pacific. The country which goes to sea through Whulge had recently split away from Oregon, and called itself Washington, after the General of that name. Indian Whulgeamish. and Yankee Whulgers were reasonably polite to each other, the Pacific Railroad was to be built straightway, Ormus and Ind were to become tributary. It was the epoch of hope, but fruition has not yet come. Savages and Yankees have since been scalping each other in the most uncivil way, the P. R. R. creeps slowly outward, Ormus and Ind are chary of tribute. Dreams of growth are faster than growth.
The persons of my crew have been described.

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They all, according to a superstition quite common among Indians, declined to give their names, or even an alias, as other scamps might do, except the Duke and Duchess, proud in their foreign appellatives. I will substitute, therefore, the names of the crew of another canoe in which I had previously voyaged from Squally to Vancouver's Island, with Dr. Tolmie, factor of the Hudson's Bay Company at the former place. These were, 1. Unstu or Hahal,- the handsome; 2. Mastu or La Hache ; 3. Khaadza ; 4. Snawhaylal ; 5. Ay-ay-whun, briefly A-wy; 6. Ai-tu-so ; 7. Nuckutzoot; 8. Paicks; and two women, Tlaiwhal and Smoikit-um-whal, "Smoikit " meaning chief. They were of several different tribes, Squallyamish, Skagets, members of the different " amish " that dwell along the Sound, and two, Ai-tu-so and Nuckutzoot, proudly distinguished themselves as Haida, a generic name applied to nations northward of Whulge. These few type names, not without melody or drollery, may be interesting to the philo-siwash. It would be inappropriate to the method of this sketch to go into detail with regard to Indians of Whulge. But literature has taken little notice of those distant gentry, and before they retreat into the dim past, to become subjects of threnody with other lost tribes, let me chronicle a few surface facts of their life and manners.

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It seems a sorry thing but is really a wise admonition of Nature, that we should first distinguish in people their faults and deformities. The first observation when one of the Whulgeamish appears is, " Lo the flat-head! " Among them a tight-strapped cushion controls the elastic skull of childhood, crushing it back idiotic. Now a forehead should not be too round, or a nose too straight, or a cheek too ruddy, or a hand too small. Nature, however, does quite well enough by those she means to be flat-head beauties. Indians do not recognize this, and strive to better Nature. Civilization, beholding the total failure of the skull-crushing system, is warned, and resolves to discard its coxcombries and deformities, and to strive to develop, not to distort, the body and soul.
Are thoughts equally profound to be suggested by other corporeal members of Klalams and their brethren ? All are bow-legged. All of a sadcolored, Caravaggio brown, through which salmon-juices exude, and which is varnished with fish-oil. All have coarse black hair, and are beardless. Old people of either sex are hardly to be distinguished, man from woman. The young ladies are not without charms, and blush ingenuously. The fashion of fish-ivory ornaments, hung to the lower lip, has retreated northward, and glass beads and necklaces of hiaqua, a shell like

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a quill tooth-pick, conchologically known as a species of Dentalium, have replaced the disgusting labial appendages. Hickory shirts and woollen blankets are worn instead of skin raiment, mat aprons, and Indian blankets, woven of the hair of the fleecy dog. In fact, except for paint, these Indians might pass well enough for dirty lazzaroni.
Gigantic clams, cod, and other maritimes, but chiefly salmon, are the food of the Whulgeamish. Ducks and geese visit their shores, and are bagged. No infrequent polecat skulks about their unsavory cabins, and meets the fatal arrow. Grasshoppers and crickets, dried, yield them pies. They cultivate a few potatoes, pluck plentiful berries, and dig sweet kamas bulbs in the swamps. Few things edible are disdained by them.
Once, the same summer, as I voyaged with a crew of the Lummi tribe toward Frazer's River, they discerned a dead seal grotesquely floating on the water. Him they embarked, with roars of laughter, as his unwieldiness slipped through their fingers; and they supped and surfeited unharmed on rancid phoca that evening. But salmon, netted, hooked, trolled, speared, weired, scooped, - salmon taken by various sleight of savage skill, -is the chief diet of Whulge. In the tide-ways toward the Sound's mouth, the Indians anchor two canoes parallel, fifteen feet
2*c

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34THE CANOE AND THE SADDLE.

apart, and stretch a flat net of strips of inner bark between them, sinking it just below the surface. They don a head-gear like a "rat's nest," confected of wool, feathers, furry tails, ribbons, and rags, considered attractive to salmon, and " hyas tamanous," highly magical. Salmon, either wending their unconscious way, or tufthunting for the enchantments of the magic cap, come swimming in shoals across the suspended net. Whereupon every fisher, with inconceivable screeches, whoops, and howls, beats the water to bewilder the silver swimmers, and, hauling up the net, clutches them by dozens. Sometimes fleets of canoes go a trolling, one fisherman in each slight shallop. He fastens his line to his paddle, and as he paddles trolls. A pretty sight to behold is a rocky bay of Whulge, gay with a fleet of these agile dug-outs, and ever and anon illumined with a gleam when a salmon takes the bait. In the voyage I have mentioned with Dr. Tolmie, a squadron of such trollers near the Indian village of Kowitchin crowded about us, praying to be vaccinated, and paying a salmon for the privilege. Small-pox is the fatalest foe of the Indian.
Spearmen also for food are the siwashes. In muddy streams, where Boston eyes would detect nothing, Indian sees a ripple, and divines a fish. He darts his long wooden spear, and out it ricochets, with a banner of salmon at its point. But

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salmon may escape the coquettish charms of the trolling-hook, may safely run the gauntlet of the parallel canoes and their howling, tamanous-cap, wearers; the spear, misguided in the drumly gleam, may glance harmless from scale-armed shoulders : still other perils await them. These aristos of the waters need change of scene. Blubberly fish may dwell through a life-long pickle in the briny deep, and grow rancid there like olives too salt, but the delicate salmon must have his bubbles from the brunnen. Besides, his youthful family, the Parrs, must be cradled on the ripples of a running stream, and in innocent nooks of freshness must establish their vigor and consistency, before they brave the risks of cosmopolitan ocean life. For such reasons gentleman salmon seeks the rivers, and Indian, expecting him there, builds a palisade of poles athwart the stream. The traveller, thus obstructed, whisks his tail, and coasts along, seeking a passage. He finds one, and dashes through, but is stopped by a shield of wicker-work, and, turning blindly, plunges into a fish-pot, set to take him as he whirls to retreat, bewildered.
At the magnificent Cascades of the Columbia, the second-best water bit on our continent, there is more exciting salmon-fishing in the splendid turmoil of the rapids. Over the shoots, between boulders and rifts of rock, the Indians rig a scaf-

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36THE CANOE AND THE SADDLE.

folding, and sweep clown stream with a scoop-net. Salmon, working their way up in high exhilaration, are taken twenty an hour, by every scooper. He lifts them out, brilliantly sheeny, and, giving them, with a blow from a billet of wood, a Lint to be peaceable, hands over each thirty-pounder to a fusty attache, who, in turn, lugs them away to the squaws to be cleaned and dried.
Thus in Whulge and at the Cascades the salmon is taken. And now behold him caught, and lying dewy in silver death, bright as an unalloyed dollar, varnished with opaline iridescence.
"How shall he be cooked? " asks squaw of sachem.
"Boil him, entoia, my beloved" (Haida tongue), "in a mighty pot of iron, plumping in store of Wapatoo, which pasaiooks, the pale-faces, name potatoes. Or, my cloocheman, my squaw, roast of his thicker parts sundry chunks on a spit. Or, best of all, split and broil him on an upright framework, a perpendicular gridiron of aromatic twigs. Thus by highest simple art, before the ruddy blaze, with breezes circumambient and wafting away any mephitic kitcheny exhalations, he will toast deliciously, and I will feast thereupon, O my cloocheman, whilst thou, O working partner of our house, art preparing these brother fish to be dried into amber transparency, or smoked in a lachrymose cabin, that we may sustain ourselves through dry-fish Lent, after this fresh fish Carni-

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val is over." Such discussions occur not seldom in the drama of Indian life.
In the Bucentaur, after our lunch on kippered cod and biscuits, we had not tarried. Generally in that region, in breezeless days of August, smoke from burning forests falls, and envelops all the world of land and water. In such strange chaos, voyaging without a compass is impossible. Canoes are often detained for days, waiting for the smoke to lift. To-day, fortunately for my progress, there was a fresh breeze from China-way. Only a soft golden haze hung among the pines, and toned the swarthy coloring of the rocky shores.
All now in good humor, and Col. Colt in retirement, we swept along through narrow straits, between piny islands, and by sheltered bays where fleets might lie hidden. With harmonious muscular throes, in time with Indian songs, the three stoutly paddled. The Duke generally sogered, or dipped his blade with sham vehemence, as he saw me observing him. Olyman steered steadily, a Palinurus skilful and sleepless. Jenny Lind, excusable idler, did not belie her musical name. She was our prima donna, and leader of the chorus. Often she uttered careless bursts of song, like sudden slants of rays through cloudiness, and often droned some drowsy lay, to which the crew responded with disjointed, lurching

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38THE CANOE AND THE SADDLE.

refrain. Few of these airs were musical according to civilized standards. Some had touches of wild sentiment or power, but most were grotesque combinations of guttural howls. In all, however, there were tones and strains of irregular originality, surging up through monotony, or gleams of savage ire suddenly flashing forth, and recalling how one has seen, with shudders, a shark, with white sierras of teeth, gnash upon him not far distant, from a bath in a tropic bay. I found a singular consolation in the unleavened music of my crew. Why should there not be throbs of rude power in aboriginal song? It is well to re-view the rudiments sometimes, and see whether we have done all we might in building systems from the primal hints.
The songs of Chin Lin, Duchess of York, chorussed by the fishy, seemed a consoling peace offering. The undertone of sorrow in all music cheats us of grief for our own distress. To counteract the miseries of civilization, we must have the tender, passionate despairs of Favorita and Traviata; for the disgusts of barbarism I found
Indian howls sufficient relief.
By and by, with sunset, paddle-songs died away, and the Bucentaur slowed. The tide had turned, and was urgently against us. My tired crew were oddly dropping off to sleep. We landed on the shingle for repose and supper. Twilight was

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already spreading downward from the zenith, and pouring gloom among the sombre pines. Grotesque masses of blanched drift-wood strewed the shore and grouped themselves about, - strange semblances of monstrous shapes, like amorphous idols, dethroned and waiting to perish by the iconoclastic test of fire. Poor Prometheus may have been badly punished by that cruel fowl of Caucasus, but we mortals got the unquenchable spark. I carried a modicum of compact flame in a match-box, and soon had a funeral pyre of those heathenish stumps and roots well ablaze, - a glory of light between the solemn wall of the forest and the dark glimmering flood.
On the romantic shores of Whulge, illumined by my fire, 1 had toasted salt pork for supper, while the siwashes banqueted to repletion on dried fish and the unaccustomed luxury of hard-tack, and were genially happy. But when, with kindly mind, I, their chieftain, brewed them a princely pot of tea, and tossed in sugar lavishly, sprinkling also unperceivedly the beverage with forty drops from the captured lumoti, and gave them tobacco, enough to blow a cloud, then happiness capped itself with gayety and merriment. They heaped the pyre with fuel, and made it the chief jester of their jolly circle, chuckling when it crackled, and roaring with laughter when the frantic tongues of flame leaped up, and shot a glare, almost fiendish, over the wild scene.

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40THE CANOE AND THE SADDLE.

I sat apart with my dhudeen, studying the occasion for its lesson. " Would I be an Indian, -a duke of the Klalams ? " I asked myself. "As much as I am to-night, -no more, and no longer. To-night I am a demi-savage, jolly for my rest and my supper, and content because my hampers hold enough for to-morrow. I can identify myself thoroughly, and delight that I can, with the untamed natures of my comrades. I can yield myself to the dominion of the same impulses that sway them out of impassiveness into frantic excitement. They sit here over the fire, now jabbering lustily, and now silent and drifting along currents of association, undiverted by discursive thought, until some pervading fancy strikes them all at once, and again all is animation and guttural sputter of sympathy. I can also let myself go bobbing down the tide of thoughtless thought, until I am caught by the same shoals, or checked by the same reef, or launched upon the same tumultuous seas, as they. These influences are primeval, aboriginal, fresh, enlivening for their anti-cockney savor. Wretchedly slab-sided, and not at all fitting among the many-sided, is he who cannot adapt himself to the dreams and hopes, the awes and pleasures of savage life, and be as good a savage as the brassiest Brass-skin.
"However, it is not amiss, " continued my

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soliloquy, puffing itself away with the last whiffs of my pipe, "to have the large results of the world's secular toil in posse. It is sometimes pleasant to lay aside the resumable ermine. It is easy to linger while one has a hand upon the locomotive's valve. I will, on the whole, remain an American of the nineteenth century, and not subside into a Klalam brave. Every sincere man has, or ought to have, his differences or his quarrels with status quo, - otherwise what becomes of the millennium ? My personal grudge with the present has not yet brought me to the point of rupture and reaction."
Had I uttered these reflections in a prosy lecture, my fishy suite could not have been sounder asleep than they now were. They had coiled themselves about the fire, in genuine slumber, after labor and overfeeding. Without dread of treachery, I bivouacked near them. I was more placable and less watchful than I should have been had I known that the Kahtai Klalams, under the superintendence of King George and the Duke, were in the habit of murdering. They sacrificed a couple of pale-faced victims within the year, as I afterwards was informed. However, the lamb lay down with the wolf, and suffered no harm. From time to time I awoke, and rolled another log upon the pyre, and then returned to my uneasy naps on the pebbles, --

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uneasy, not because the pebbles dimpled me somewhat harshly through my blankets, not because, the inextinguishable stars winked at me fantastically through ether, nor because my scalp occasionally gave premonitions of departure; but because I did not wish, when offered the boon of a favorable tide, to be asleep at my post and miss it.
A new flood-tide was about to be sent whirling -up into the bays and coves and nooks of Whulge when I shook up my sobered hero of the libellous teapots, shook up Olyman and his young men, and touched the Duchess lightly on the shoulder, as she lay with her red-chevroned visage turned toward the zenith. The Duke alone grumbled, and shirked the toil of launching the Bucentaur. We others went at it heartily, dragging our vessel down the shingle to the chorus of a guttural De Profundis. It was an hour before dawn. We reloaded, and shoved off into the chill, star-lighted void, -a void where one might doubt whether the upper stars or the nether stars were the real orbs. Our red fire watched us as we sailed away, glaring after us like a Cyclops sentinel until we rounded a point and passed out of his range, only to find ourselves sadly gazed at by a pale, lean moon just lifting above the pines. With the flames of dawn a wind arose and lent us wings. I succeeded in inspiring my crew with a stolid intention to speed me. A comrade-ry grew

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up between me and the truculent blackguard who wielded the bow paddle, so that he essayed unintelligent civilities from time to time, and when we landed to breakfast, at a point where a giant arbor-vitae stood a rich pyramid of green, he brought me sallal-berries, and arbutus-leaves to dry for smoking; meaning perhaps to play Caliban to my Stephano, and worshipping him who bore the lumoti. The Duke remained either "hyas k1a hye am," in the wretched dumps, or " hyas silex," in the deep sulks, as must happen after an orgie, even to a princely personage. I could get nothing from him, either in philology or legend, - nothing but the Klalam name of Whulge, K'uk'lults. However, thanks to a strong following wind and a blanket-sail, we sped on, never flinching from the tide when it turned and battled us.
We had rounded a point, and opened Puyallop Bay, a breadth of sheltered calmness, when I, lifting sleepy eyelids for a dreamy stare about, was suddenly aware of a vast white shadow in the water. What cloud, piled massive on the horizon, could cast an image so sharp in outline, so full of vigorous detail of surface ? No cloud, as my stare, no longer dreamy, presently discovered, no cloud, but a cloud compeller. It was a giant mountain dome of snow, swelling and seeming to fill the aerial spheres as its image displaced

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44THE CANOE AND THE SADDLE.

the blue deeps of tranquil water. The smoky haze of an Oregon August hid all the length of its lesser ridges, and left this mighty summit based upon uplifting dimness. Only its splendid snows were visible, high in the unearthly regions of clear blue noonday sky. The shore line drew a cincture of pines across the broad base, where it faded unreal into the mist. The same dark girth separated the peak from its reflection, over which my canoe was now pressing, and sending wavering swells to shatter the beautiful vision, before it.
Kingly and alone stood this majesty, without any visible comrade or consort, though far to the north and the south its brethren and sisters dominated their realms, each in isolated sovereignty, rising above the pine-darkened sierra of the Cascade Mountains, -above the stern chasm where the Columbia, Achilles of rivers, sweeps, short-lived. and jubilant, to the sea, - above the lovely vales of the Willamette and Umpqua. Of all the peaks from California to Frazer's River, this one before me was royalest. Mount Regnier Christians have dubbed it, in stupid nomenclature perpetuating the name of somebody or nobody. More melodiously the siwashes call it Tacoma, -a generic term also applied to all snow peaks. Whatever keen crests and crags there may be in its rock anatomy of basalt, snow

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covers softly with its bends and sweeping curves. Tacoma, under its ermine, is a crushed volcanic dome, or an ancient volcano fallen in, and perhaps as yet not wholly lifeless. The domes of snow are stateliest. There may be more of feminine beauty in the cones, and more of masculine force and hardihood in the rough pyramids, but the great domes are calmer and more divine, and, even if they have failed to attain absolute dignified grace of finish, and are riven and. broken down, they still demand our sympathy for giant power, if only partially victor. Each form -the dome, the cone, and the pyramid -has its type among the great snow peaks of the Cascades.
And now let the Duke of York drowse, the Duchess cease awhile longer her choking chant, and the rest nap it on their paddles, floating on the image of Tacoma, while I ask recognition for the almost unknown glories of the Cascade Mountains of Oregon. We are poorly off for such objects east of the Mississippi. There are some roughish excrescences known as the Alleghanies. There is a knobby group of brownish White Mountains. Best of all, high in DownEast is the lonely Katahdin. Hillocks these, - never among them one single summit brilliant forever with snow, golden in sunshine, silver when sunshine has gone; not one to bloom rosy at dawn, and to be a vision of refreshment all the

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sultry summer long; not one to be lustrous white over leagues of woodland, sombre or tender ; not one to repeat the azure of heaven among its shadowy dells. Exaltation such as the presence of the sublime and solemn heights arouses, we dwellers eastward cannot have as an abiding influence. Other things we may have, for Nature will not let herself anywhere be scorned; but only mountains, and chiefest the giants of snow, can teach whatever lessons there may be in vaster distances and deeper depths of palpable ether, in lonely grandeur without desolation, and in the illimitable, bounded within an outline. Therefore, needing all these emotions at their maximum, we were compelled to make pilgrimages back to the mountains of the Old World, - commodiously as may be when we consider sea-sickness, passports, Murray's red-covers, and h-less Britons everywhere. Yes, back to the Old World we went, and patronized the Alps, and nobly satisfying we found them. But we were forced to inspect also the heritage of human institutions, and such a mankind as they had made after centuries of opportunity, - and very sadly depressing we found the work, so that, notwithstanding many romantic joys and artistic pleasures, we came back malecontent. Let us, therefore, develop our own world. It has taken us two centuries to discover our proper West

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across the Mississippi, and to know by indefinite hearsay that among the groups of the Rockys are heights worth notice.
Farthest away in the west, as near the western sea as mountains can stand, are the Cascades. Sailors can descry their landmark summits firmer than cloud, a hundred miles away. Kulshan, misnamed Mount Baker by the vulgar, is their northernmost buttress up at 490 and Frazer's River. Kulshan is an irregular, massive, moundshaped peak, worthy to stand a white emblem of perpetual peace between us and our brother Britons. The northern regions of Whulge and Vancouver's Island have Kulshan upon their horizon. They saw it blaze the winter before this journey of mine; for there is fire beneath the Cascades, red war suppressed where the peaks, symbols of truce, stand in resplendent quiet. Kulshan is best seen, as I saw it one afternoon of that same August, from an upland of Vancouver's Island, across the golden waves of a wheat-field, across the glimmering waters of the Georgian Sound, and far above its belt of misty gray pine-ridges. The snow-line here is at five thousand feet, and Kulshan has as much height in snow as in forest and vegetation. Its name I got from the Lummi tribe at its base, after I had dipped in their pot at a boiled-salmon feast. As to Baker, that name should be forgotten. Mountains

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should not be insulted by being named after undistinguished bipeds, nor by the prefix of Mt. Mt. Chimborazo, or Mt. Dhawalaghiri, seems as feeble as Mr. Julius Caesar, or Signor Dante.
South of Kulshan, the range continues dark, rough, and somewhat unmeaning to the eye, until it is relieved by Tacoma, vulgo Regnier. Upon this Tacoma's image I was now drifting, and was about to make nearer acquaintance with its substance. One cannot know too much of a nature's nobleman. Tacoma the second, which Yankees call Mt. Adams, is a clumsier repetition of its greater brother, but noble enough to be the pride of a continent. Dearest charmer of all is St. Helen's, queen of the Cascades, queen of Northern America, a fair and graceful volcanic cone. Exquisite mantling snows sweep along her shoulders toward the bristling pines. Sometimes she showers her realms with a boon of light ashes, to notify them that her peace is repose, not stupor, and sometimes lifts a beacon of tremulous flame by night from her summit. Not far from her base the Columbia crashes through the mountains in a magnificent chasm, and Mt. Hood, the vigorous prince of the range, rises in a keen pyramid fourteen or sixteen thousand feet high, rivalling his sister in glory. Mt. Jefferson and others southward are worthy snow peaks, but not comparable with these; and then

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this masterly family of mountains dwindles ruggedly away toward California and the Shasta group.
The Cascades are known to geography, - their summits to the lists of volcanoes. Several gentlemen in the United States Army, bored in petty posts, or squinting along Indian trails for Pacific railroads, have seen these monuments. A few myriads of Oregonians have not been able to avoid seeing them, have perhaps felt their ennobling influence, and have written, boasting that St. Helen's or Hood is as high as Blanc. Enterprising fellows have climbed both. But the millions of Yankees - from codfish to alligators, chewers of spruce-gum or chewers of pig-tail, cooks of chowder or cooks of gumbo -know little of these treasures of theirs. Poet comes long after pioneer. Mountains have been waiting, even in ancient worlds, for cycles, while mankind looked upon them as high, cold, dreary, crushing, as resorts for demons and homes of desolating storms. It is only lately, in the development of men's comprehension of nature, that mountains have been recognized as our noblest friends, our most exalting and inspiring comrades, our grandest emblems of divine power and divine peace.
More of these majesties of the Cascades hereafter; but now meseems that I have long enough
3D

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interrupted the desultory progress of my narrative. We have floated long enough, my Klalam braves, on the white reflection of Tacoma. To thy paddle, then, sluggard Duke. Dip and plough into Whulge, ye salmon-fed. Squally and blankets be the war-cry of our voyage.
But first obey the injunction of an Indian ditty, oddly sung to the air of Malbrook: --
Klatawah ocook polikely,
Klatawah Steilacoom ";

"Go to-night, go to Steilacoom." Steilacoom was a military post a mile inland from Whulge. It had a port on the Sound, consisting of one warehouse, where every requisite of pioneer life was to be had. Thither I directed my course, pork and hard-tack to buy, compact prog for my mountain journey. Also, because I could not ride the leagues of a transcontinental trip, barebacking the bonyness of prairie nags, a friend had given me an order for a capital saddle of his, stored there. The crafty trader at Port Steilacoom denied the existence of my friend's California saddle, a grandly roomy one I had often bestrode, and substituted for it an incoherent dragoon saddle. He hoped, the scamp, that my friend would never return to claim his property, and he would be left residuary legatee.
Some strange Indians lounging here gave me a

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helpful fact. The Klickatats, so the Sound Indians name generally the Yakimahs and other ultramontane tribes, had just arrived at Nisqually, on their annual trading-trip. Horses and a guide I could surely get from them for crossing the Cascades into their country. Here I heard first the mighty, name of Owhhigh, a chief of the Klickatats, their noblest horse-thief, their Diomed. He was at Nisqually, with his tail on, - his tail of bare-legged highlanders, - buying blankets and sundries-, with skins, furs, and stolen steeds.
Squally, euphonized to Nisqually, is six or seven miles from Steilacoom. We sped along near the shore, just away from the dense droop of the water-wooing arbor-vitae pyramids.
How now, my crew? Why this sudden check ? Why this agitated panic ? What, Dookeryawk! Are ye paralyzed by Tamanous, by demoniacal influence ? "
" By fear are we paralyzed, O kind protector," responded the Klalam. " Foes to us always are the Squallyamish. But more cruel foes are the mountain horsemen. We dare not advance. Conoway quash nesika; cowards all are we."
"Fear naught, my cowards. The retinue of my high mightiness is safe, and shall be honored. Ye shall not be maltreated, nor even punished by me for your misdeeds. Have a mighty heart in your breasts, and onward."

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Panic over, we paddled lustily, and soon landed at a high bluff, - the port of Nisqually. We hauled up the Bucentaur, grateful to the talisman shells along its gunwale, that they had guarded us against Bugaboo. I looked my last, for that time, upon the sturdy tides of Whulge, and led the way under the oaks toward the Fort.

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IV.

OWHHIGH.

IT was harsh penance to a bootless man to tramp the natural Macadam of minced trap-rock on the plateau above the Sound. The little pebbles of the adust volcanic pavement cut my moccasined feet like unboiled peas of pilgrimage. I marched along under the oaks as stately as frequent limping permitted. My motley retinue followed me humbly, bearing "ikta," my traps, and their own plunder. Their demeanor was crushed and cringing, greatly changed since the truculent scene over the captured lumoti, which I still kept as a trophy, hung at my waist to balance my pistol.
After a walk of a mile, with my body-guard of shabby S'Klalam aristocrats, I entered the Hudson's Bay Company's fort of Nisqually. Disrepute draggled after me, but my character was already established in a previous visit. I had left Dr. Tolmie, the factor, at Vancouver's Island ; Mr. H., his substitute, received me hospitably at the postern. Nisqually is a palisaded enclosure, two

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64THE CANOE AND THE SADDLE.

hundred feet square. Bartizan towers protect its corners. Within are blockhouses for goods and furs, and one-story cottages for residence.
Indian leaguers have of yore beset this fort. Indians have lifted Indians up toward the -fifteenth and topmost foot of the fir palisades. Shots from the loopholes of the bartizans dropped the assailants, and left them lying on the natural Macadam without. Whereupon the survivors retired, and consulted about fire ; but that fatal foe was also defeated by the death of every incendiary as he approached.
To visit such a place is to recall and illustrate all our early New-England history. Our forefathers fled, in King Philip's time, to just such refuges. Personal contact with a similar state of facts makes their forgotten perils real. In that recent antiquity, pioneers exposed to the indiscriminate revenge of the savage flew from cabin and clearing to stockades far less defensible than this. Better its insecure shelter for wife and child than the terror of a forest forever seeming aglare with cruel eyes, -where the forester could never banish the curdling consciousness of an unseen presence, watching until the assassin moment came; where the silence might hear other sounds than the hum of insects or the music of birds, - might hear the scoffing yell of Indians, contemptuous victors over the race that scorned

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them. What wonder that the agonies of such suspense stirred up the settlers to cowardly slaughter of every savage, friend or foe ? A frightened man becomes a barbarian and a brute. Fear is a miserable agent of civilization. We can hardly, now connect ourselves with that period. No longer, when twigs crackle in the forest, do we shrink lest the parting leaves may reveal a new-comer, with whom we must race for life. Larceny is disgusting, burglary is unpleasant, arson is undesirable, murder is one of the foul arts ; Indians were adepts in all of these trades at once. Any reminiscence of a condition from which we have happily escaped is agreeable. This palisade fort was a monument of a past age to me. It made me two hundred years old at once.
A monument, but not a cenotaph; on the contrary, it was full of bustling life. Rusty Indians, in all degrees of frowziness of person and costume, were trading at the shop for the three b's of Indian desire, -blankets, beads, and 'baccy, - representatives of need, vanity, and luxury. The Klickatats had indeed arrived. To-morrow Owhhigh and the grandees were to come in from their camp to buy and sell. All the squaws purchasing to-day were hags beyond the age of coquetry in costume, yet they were buying beads and hanging them in hideous contrast about their

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baggy, wrinkled necks, and then glowering for admiration with dusky eyes. These were valued customers, since they knew the tariff, and never haggled, but paid cash or its equivalent, otter beaver, and skunk skins, and similar treasures. The pretty girls would come afterward, as money failed, and try to make their winsome smiles a substitute for funds.
In contrast to these unpleasant objects, a very handsome and gentlemanly young brave entered just after me, and came forward as I was greeting Mr. H. He was tall and loungingly graceful, and so fair that there must have been silver in the copper of his blood. This rather supercilious personage was, he told me, of Owhhigh's band, not by nation but by adoption. He was a Spokan from the Upper Columbia, a volunteer among the Klickatats, perhaps because their method of filibusterism was attractive, perhaps because there was a vendetta for him at home. He wore a semi-civilized costume, - coat of black from some far-away slop-shop of Britain, fringed leggins of buckskin from the lodge of a Klickatat tailoress. A broad-beaded band crossed his breast, like the ribbon of an order of nobility. The incongruity in his costume was redeemed by his cool, dignified bearing. He was an Adonis of Nature, not a rubicund Adonis of the D'Orsay type. While we talked, he kept a cavalier's advan-

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OWHHIGH.57
tage, not dismounting from his fiery little saddleless black.
Him, by Mr. H's advice, I prayed to be my ambassador to the great Owhhigh. Would that dignitary permit me an interview to-morrow, and purvey me horses and a guide for my dash through his realm? My Spokan Adonis, with the self-possessed courtesy of a high-bred Indian, accepted the office of negotiator, and ventured to promise that Owhhigh would speed me. But in case Adonis should prove faithless, or Owhhigh indifferent, Mr. H. despatched a messenger at once for one of the Company's voyageurs, -now a quiet colonist, who could resume the rover, and guide me, if other guidance failed, anywhere in the Northwest.
I now conducted the Duke and my party to the shop, and served out to them one two-and-a-halfpoint blanket apiece, and one to Olyman for the Bucentaur, accompanying the boon with a lecture on the evils of intemperance and the duty of faithfulness. They seemed quite pleased now that they had not butchered and scalped me, and expressed the friendliest sentiments, perhaps with a view to a liberal "potlatch" of trinkets. They also besought permission to encamp in the fort, lest pillage should befall them. It was growing dark, and the different parties of Indians admitted within the palisades were grouped, gypsy-like,
 3*

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58THE CANOE AND THE SADDLE.

about their cooking-fires. Some of these unbrotherly siwashes cast wolf's-eyes upon my Klalams, now an enviable and plunderable squad. These latter, wealthy and well-blanketed, skulked away into a corner, and when I saw them last, by their fire-light, the Duke, more like a degraded ecclesiastic than ever, was haranguing his family, while Jenny Lind sat at his feet, and bent upon him untruthful eyes. At morn they were not to be seen; the ducal pair, Olyman and the fishy, all had vanished. A few unconsidered trifles, such as a gun, a blanket, and a basket of kamasroots, property of the unbrotherly, had vanished with them. Unconsidered trifles will stumble against the shins of Indians, stealing away at night.
As these representatives of Klalam civilization now make final exit from my narrative, I must give them a proper " teapot." They may be taken as types of the worse character of the coast Indians, -jolly brutes, with the bad and the good traits of savages, and much harmed by the besettings of civilized temptations.
I cannot omit from the Duke of York's teapot facts within my own observation, -that he was drunken, idle, insolent, and treacherous, - nor the hearsay fact that he has since been beguiled into murders; but I must notice also his apologies of race, circumstance, the bad influence of

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Pikes by land and profane tars by sea, and governmental neglect, a logical result of slavery.
Mr. H. had had great success in converting the brown dust of a dry swamp without the fort into a garden of succulent vegetables. As we were inspecting the cabbages and onions next morning, we heard a resonance of hoofs over the trap pavement. A noise of galloping sounded among the oaks. - Presently a wild dash of Indian cavaliers burst into sight. Their equipment might not have borne inspection: few things will, here below, except such as rose-leaves and the cheeks of a high-bred child. Prejudice might have called their steeds scrubby mustangs; prejudice might have used the word tag-rag as descriptive of the fly-away effect of a troop all a-flutter with ribbons, fur-tails, deerskin fringes, trailing lariats, and whirling whip-thongs, It was a very irregular and somewhat ragamuffin brigade. But the best hussars of the Christendom that sustains itself by means of hussars are tawdry and clumsy to a critical eye, and certainly, not so picturesque as these Klickatats, stampeding toward us from under the gray mossy oaks.
They came, deployed in the open woods, now hidden in a hollow, now rising a crest, all at full gallop, loud over the baked soil, - a fantastic cavalcade. They swept about the angle of the fort, and we, following, found them grouped near

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60THE CANOE AND THE SADDLE.

the open postern, waiting for permission to enter. Some were dismounted ; some were dashing up and down on their shaggy nags, - a band of picturesque marauders on a peaceful foray.
Owhhigh and his aides-de-camp stood a little apart, Spokan Adonis among them. At a sign from Mr. H., they followed us within the fort, and entered the factor's cottage. Much ceremony is observed by the Hudson's Bay Company with the Indians. Discipline, must be preserved. Dignity tells. Indians, having it, appreciate it. Owhhigh alone was given a seat opposite us. His counsellors stood around him, while three or four less potent members of his suite peered gravely over their shoulders. The palaver began.
0whhigh's braves were gorgeous with frippery, and each wore a beaded order. The Murats of the world make splendid fighting-cocks of themselves with martial feathers ; the Napoleons wear gray surtouts. Owhhigh was in stern simplicity of Indian garb. On ordinary occasions of council with whites, he would courteously or ambitiously have adopted their costume ; now, as he was master of the situation and grantee of favors, he appeared in his own proper style. He wore a handsome buckskin shirt, heavily epauletted and trimmed along the seams with fringe, and leggins and moccasins of the same. For want of Tyrian dye, these robes were regalized by a daubing of

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OWHHIGH.61
red clay. A circlet of otter fur served him for coronet. He was a man of bulk and stature, a chieftainly personage, a fine old Roman, cast in bronze, and modernized with a fresh glazing of vermilion over his antiquated duskiness of hue. And certainly no Roman senator, with adjuncts of whity-brown toga, curule chair, and patrician ancestry, seated to wait his doom from the Gauls, ever had an air of more impassive dignity than this head horse-thief of the Klickatats.
In an interview with a royal personage, his own language should be used. But we, children of an embryo civilization, are trained in the inutilities of tongues dead as Julius Caesar, never in the living idioms of our native princes. I was not, therefore, voluble in Klickatat and Yakimah. Chinook jargon, however, the French of Northwestern diplomatic life, I had mastered. Owhhigh called upon one of his "young men" to interpret his speeches into Chinook. The interpreter stepped forward, and stood expectant, -a youth fraternally like my Spokan Adonis, but with a sprinkle more of intelligence, and a sparkle less of beauty.
My suit, already known, was now formally, stated to the chief. I wanted to buy three quadrupeds, and hire one biped guide for a trip across the Cascade Mountains, and on to the Dalles of the Columbia. The distance was about two hun-

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62THE CANOE AND THE SADDLE.

dred miles, and I had seven days to effect it. Could it be done ?
"Yes," replied Owhhigh; and then - his bronze face remaining perfectly calm and Rhadamanthine -he began, with most expressive pantomime, an oration, describing my route across the mountains. His talk went on in swaying monotone, rising and falling with the subject, while with vigorous gesture he pictured the changeful journey. The interpreter saw that I comprehended, and did not interfere. Occasionally, when I was posed, I turned to him, and he aided me with some Chinook word, or a sputtered phrase of concentrated meaning. Meanwhile the circle of councillors murmured approval, and grunted coincidence of opinion.
My way was to lead, so said the emphatic recital of Owhhigh, first through an open forest, sprinkled with lakes, and opening into great prairies. By and by the denser forest of firs would meet me, and giant columnar stems, parting, leave a narrow vista, where I could penetrate into the gloom. The dash of a rapid, shallow, white river, the Puyallop, where was a salmon fishery, would cross my trail. Then I must climb through mightier woods and thicker thickets, where great bulks of fallen trees lay, and barricaded the path; must follow up a turbulent river, the S'Kamish, crossing it often, at

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OWHHIGH.   63

fords where my horses could hardly bear up against the current. Ever and anon, like a glimpse of blue through a storm, this rough way would be enlivened by a prairie, with beds of fern for my repose, and long grass for my tiring beasts, - grass long as macaroni, so he measured it with outstretched hands. Now the difficulties were to come. He depicted the craggy side of a great mountain, -horses scrambling up stoutly, riders grasping the mane and balancing carefully lest a misstep should send horse and man over a precipice. The summit gained, here again were luxurious tarrying-places, oases of prairie, and perhaps, in some sheltered nook, a bank of last winter's snow. Here there must be a long nooning, that the horses, tied up the night before in the forest, and browsing wearily on bitter twigs, might recruit. Then came the steep descent, and so, pressing on, I should arrive for my third night's camp at a prairie, low down on the eastern slope of the mountains, where a mighty hunter, the late Sowee, once dwelt. Up before dawn next morning, - continued Owhhigh's vivid tale, vivid in gesture, and droning ever in delivery, -up at the peep of day, for this was a long march and a harsh one, and striking soon a clear river flowing east, the Nachchese, I was to follow it. The river grew, and went tearing down a terrible gorge; through this my path led, sometimes in

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64THE CANOE AND THE SADDLE.

the bed of the stream, sometimes, when precipices drew too close and the gulf too profound, I must climb, and trace a perilous course along the brink far above, where I might bend over and see the water roaring a thousand feet below. At last the valley would broaden, and groves of pine appear. Then my horses, if not too wayworn, could gallop over the immense swells of a rolling prairie-land. Here I would encounter some of the people of Owhhigh. A sharp turn to the right would lead me across a mass of wild, bare hills, into the valley of another stream, the Atinam, where was a mission and men in long robes who prayed at a shrine. By this time my horses would be exhausted; I should take fresh ones, if possible, from the priests' band, and riding hard across a varied region of hill, prairie, and bulky mountains thick with pines, and then long levels where Skloo a brother-chieftain ranged, I would arrive, after two days from the mission, at a rugged space of hills, and, climbing there, find myself overlooking the vast valley of the Columbia. Barracks and tents in sight. Scamper down the mountain. Fire a gun at river's bank. Indians hear, cross in canoe, ferry me and swim my horses. All safely done in six crowded days. So said Owhhigh.
This description was given with wonderful vivacity and verity. Owhhigh as a pantomimist

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OWHHIGH.65
would have commanded brilliant success on any stage. Would that there were more like him in this wordy world.
He promised also a guide, his son, now at the camp, and as to my horses, I might choose from the cavalcade.. We went out to make selection, all the Klickatats, except Owhhigh, Adonis, and the interpreter, following in bow-legged silence. These three were vocal, and of better model than their fellows. No Indian wished to sell his best horse ; each his second-best, at the price of the best. Their backs were in shocking condition. Pads and pack-saddles had galled them so that it was painful to a humane being to mount; but I felt that any one of them, however maltreated,, would better in my service. I should ride him hard, but care for him tenderly. Indians have too much respect for " pasaiooks," blanketeers, Caucasians, to endeavor to cajole us. They suppose that, in a horse-trade, we know what we want. No jockeying was attempted ; there were the nags, I might prove them, and buy or not, without solicitation.
The hard terrace without the fort served us for race-course. We galloped the wiry nags up and down, while the owners waited in an emotionless group, calm as gamblers. Should any one sell a horse, he would not only pocket the price, but be spurred to new thefts from tribes hostile or friend-

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66THE CANOE AND THE SADDLE.

ly to fill the vacancy; yet all were too proud to exhibit eagerness, or puff their property.
At last, from the least bad I chose first for my pack animal a strawberry roan cob, a "chunk of a horse," a quadruped with the legs of an elephant, the head of a hippopotamus, and a peculiar gait; - he trod most emphatically, as if he were striving to go through the world's crust at every step. This habit suggested the name he at once received. I called him Antipodes, in honor of the region he was aiming at, - a name of ill omen, suggesting a spot where I often wished him afterwards. My second choice, the mount for my guide, was Antipodes' repeated, with slight improvements of form and manner. Gubbins I dubbed him, appropriately, with a first accolade, - accolade often repeated, during our acquaintance, with less mildness. Hard horses were Antipodes and Gubbins, - hard trotters, hard-mouthed, hardhided brutes. Each was delivered to me with a hair rope twisted for bridle, about his lower lip, sawing it raw.
And now the most important decision remained to be made. It was nothing to me that a misty phantom, my guide, should be jolted over the passes of Tacoma on a Gubbins or an Antipodes, but my own seat, should it be upon Rosinante or Bucephalus, upon an agile caracoler or a lubberly plodder ? Step forward, then, cool and care-

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OWHHIGH.67
less Klickatat, from thy lair of dirty blanket, with that black pony of thine. The black was satisfactory. His ribs, indeed, were far too visible, and there were concavities where there should have been the convex fulness of well-conditioned muscle, but he had a plucky, wiry look, and his eye showed spirit without spite. His lope was as elastic as the bounding of a wind-sped cloud over a rough mountain-side. His other paces were neat and vigorous. I bought him at more dollars than either of his comrades of clumsier shape and duller hue. Indians do not love their horses well enough to name them. My new purchase I baptized Klale. Klale in Chinook jargon is Black, - and thus do, mankind, putting commonplace into foreign tongues or into big words of their own, fancy that they make it uncommonplace and original.
There are several requisites for travel. First, a world and a region of world to traverse; second, a traveller; third, means of conveyance, legs human or other, barks, carts, enchanted carpets, and the like; fourth, guidance by man personal, or man impersonal acting by roads, guide-boards, maps, and itineraries ; fifth, multifarious wherewithals. The first two requisites seem to be indispensable in the human notion of travel, and existed in my case. The third I had provided; my stud was complete. A guide was

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68THE CANOE AND THE SADDLE.

promised; after an interview with Owhhigh I could give credence to his unseen son, and believe that the fourth requisite of my journey was also ready. I must now arrange my miscellaneous outfit. For this purpose the resources of Fort Nisqually were infinite. Mr. H. approached the dusty warehouses; he wielded the wand of an enchanter, and forth from dim corners came a pack-saddle for Antipodes, a pad-saddle for Gubbins, and great hide packs for my traps. Forth from the shelves of the shop came paraphernalia, -tin pot, tin pan, tin cups, and the needful luxuries of tea and sugar. My pork and hard-tack had been already provided at Steilacoom, and Mr. H. added to them what I deemed half a dozen gnarled lignum-vitae roots. Experimental whittling proved these to be cured ox-tongues, a precious accession. My list was complete.
 I was lodged in a small cabin adjoining the factor's cottage. All my sundries had been piled here for packing, and I was standing, somewhat mazed, in the centre of a group of tin pots, gnarled tongues, powder-horns, papers of tea, blankets, bread-bags, bridles, spurs, and toggery, when in walked Owhhigh, followed by several of his suite.
Owhhigh seated himself on the floor, with an air of condescension, and for some time regarded

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my preparations in grave silence. Mr. H. had told me that his parade of an interpreter during the council was only to make all impression. Some men regard all assumption of ignorance as lofty. Now, however, Owhhigh, dropping in unceremoniously, laid aside his sham dignity with a purpose. We had before agreed upon the terms of payment for my guide. The ancient horse-thief sat like a Pacha, smoking an inglorious dhudeen, and at last, glancing at certain articles of raiment of mine, thus familiarly, in Chinook, broke silence.
Owhhigh. " Halo she collocks nika tenas; no breeches hath my son " (the guide).
I. (in an Indianesque tone of some surprise, but great indifference). " Ah hagh! "
Owhhigh. " Pe halo shirt; and no shirt."
I. (assenting, with equal indifference). " Ah hagh ! "
Owhhigh smokes, and is silent, and Spokan Adonis fugues in, " Pe wake yaka shoes; and no shoes hath he."
Another aide-de-camp takes up the strain.
Yahwah mitlite shoes, closche copa Owhhigh tenas; there are shoes (pointing to a pair of mine) good for the son of Owhhigh."
I. "Stick shoes ocook, -wake closche copa siwash ; hard shoes (not moccasins) those, -not good for Indian."

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Owhhigh. " Hyas tyee mika, - hin mitlite ikta, -halo ikta mitlite copa nika tenas, - mika tikky hin potlatch ; great chief thou, - with thee plenty traps abide, -no traps hath my son, -thou wilt give him abundance."
I. " Pe hyas tyee Owhhigh, - conoway ikta mitlite-pe hin yaka potlatch copa liticum. ; and a great chief is Owhhigh, - all kinds of property are his, and many presents does he make to his people."
Profound silence followed these mutual hints. Owhhigh smoked in thoughtful whiffs, and the pipe went round. The choir bore their failure stoically. They had done their best that their comrade might be arrayed at my expense, and if I did not choose to throw in a livery, I must bear the shame and the unsavoriness if he were frowzy. At last, to please Owhhigh, and requite him for the entertainment of his oratory, I promised that, if his son were faithful, I would give him a generous premium, possibly the very shirt and other articles they had admired. Whereupon, after more unwordy whiffs and ineffectual hints that they too were needy, Owhhigh and his braves lounged off, the gloomy bow-legged ones, who had not spoken, bringing up the rear. I soon had everything in order, tongues, tea, and tin properly stowed, and was ready to be off.
Experienced campaigners attempt no more than

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a start and a league or two the first day of a long march. To burst the ties that bind us to civilization is an epoch of itself. The first camp of an expedition must not be beyond reclamation of forgotten things. Starts, too, will often be false starts. Raw men and raw horses and mules will condense into a muddle, or explode into a centrifugal stampede, a "blazing star," as packers name it. Then the pack-horse with the flour bolts and makes paste of his burden, up to his spine in a neighboring pool. The powder mule lies down in the ashes of a cooking fire. The pork mule, in greasy gallop, trails fatness over the plain. In a thorny thicket, a few white shreds reveal where the tent mule tore through. Another beast flies madly, while after him clink all the cannikins, battering themselves shapeless upon his flanks. It is chaos, and demands hours perhaps of patience to make order again.
Such experience in a minor degree might befall even my little party of three horses and two men. I therefore, for better speed, resolved to disentangle myself this evening, and have a clear field to-morrow. Recalcitrant Antipodes, therefore, suffered compulsion, and was packed with his complex burdens. Leaving him and Gubbins with Owhhigh to follow and be disciplined, Mr. H. and I galloped on under the oaks, over the trap-rock, toward the Klickatat camp.  Klale,

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with ungalling saddle, and a merciful rider of nine stone weight, loped on gayly.
The Klickatats were encamped on a prairie near the house of a settler, five miles from the Fort. Just without the house was a group of them gambling. Presently Owhhigh followed Mr. H. and me into the farmer's kitchen, bringing forward for introduction his son, my guide. He was one of the gambling group. I inspected him narrowly. My speed, my success, my safety, depended upon his good faith. Owhhigh bore no very high character, -why should son be honester than father ? To an Indian the temptation to play foul by a possessor of horses, guns, blankets, and traps was enormous.
My future comrade was a tallish stripling of twenty, dusky-hued and low-browed. A mat of long, careless, sheenless black hair fell almost to his shoulders. Dull black were his eyes, not veined with agate-like play of color, as are the eyes of the sympathetic and impressionable. His chief pbysiognomical characteristic was a downward look, like the brown study of a detected pickpocket, inquiring with himself whether villany pays; his chief personal and seemingly permanent characteristic was squalor. Squalid was his hickory shirt, squalid his buckskin leggins, long widowed of their fringe. Yet it was not a mean, but a proud uncleanliness, like that of a

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fakir, or a voluntarily unwashed hermit. He flaunted his dirtiness in the face of civilization, claiming respect for it, as merely a different theory of the toilette. I cannot say that this new actor in my drama looked trustworthy, but there was a certain rascally charm in his rather insolent dignity, and an exciting mystery in his indecipherable phiz. I saw that there was no danger of our becoming friends. There existed an antagonism in our natures which might lead to, defiance and hostility, or possibly terminate in mutual respect.
Loolowcan was his name. I took him for better or for worse, without questions.
Owhhigh fully vouched for him, - but who would vouch for the voucher? Who could satisfy me that the horse-thieving morality of papa might not result in scalp-thieving principles in the youth ? At least, he knew the way unerringly. My path was theirs, of constant transit from inland to seaside. As to his conduct, Owhhigh gave him an impressive harangue, stretching forth his arm in its fringed sleeve, and gesturing solemnly. This paternal admonition was, for my comprehension, expressed in Chinook jargon, doubly ludicrous with Owhhigh's sham stateliness of rhetoric. His final injunctions to young hopeful may be condensed as follows: -
" Great chief go to Dalles. Want to go fast. 
4

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74THE CANOE AND THE SADDLE.

Six days. Good pay. S'pose want fresh horses other side mountains, -you get 'em. Get everything. Look sharp. No fear bad Indian at Dalles; great chief not let 'em, beat you. Be good boy! Good bye! "
Owhhigh presented me, as a parting gift, his whip, which I had admired, a neat baton with a long hide lash and loop of otter fur for the wrist I could by its aid modify, without altering, the system of education already pursued with my horses. Homeric studies had taught me that the gifts of heroes should be reciprocal. I therefore, for lack of more significant token, prayed Owhhigh to accept a piece of silver. We shook hands elaborately and parted. He was hung or shot last summer in the late Indian wars of that region. I regret his martyrdom, and hope that in his present sphere his skill as a horse-thief is better directed.
I had also adieux to offer to Mr. H., and thanks for his kind energy in forwarding me. From him, as from all the gentlemen of the Hudson's Bay Company in the Northwest, I had received the most genuine hospitality, hearty entertainment, legendary and culinary.
And now for my long ride across the country! Here, Loolowcan, is Gubbins, thy steed, - drive thou Antipodes, clumsiest of cobs. I have mounted Klale, - let us gallop eastward.

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OWHHIGH.    75
Eastward I galloped with what eager joy! I flung myself again alone upon the torrent of adventure, with a lurking hope that I might prove new sensations of danger, new tests of manhood in its confident youth. I was going homeward across the breadth of the land, and with the excitement of this large thought there came a slight reactionary sinking of heart, and a dread lest I had exhausted onward life, and now, turning back from its foremost verge, should find myself dwindling into dull conservatism, and want of prophetic faith. I feared that I was retreating from the future into the past. Yet if one but knew it, his retreats are often his wisest and bravest advances.
I had, however, little time for meditation, morbid or healthy. Something always happens, in the go and the gallop of travel, demanding quick, instinctive action. Antipodes was in this case the agent to make me know my place. Antipodes, pointing his nose eastward toward his native valleys, had pounded along the trail for a couple of miles over the hillocks of a stony prairie, and on his back rattled my packs, for solace or annoyance, according to his own views. At a fork of the trail, Loolowcan urged Gubbins to the front, to indicate the route. Right-about went Antipodes. Back toward Squally bolted that stifflegged steed, - stiff-legged no more, but far too

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limber, - and louder on his back rattled my pots and pans, a merry sound, could I have listened with no thought of the pottage and pancakes that depended upon the safety of my tin-ware. Still I could be amused at his grotesque gallop, for he had not discomfited me, and I could chuckle at the thought of another sound, when he was overtaken, and when upon a strawberry-roan surface fell the whip, the Owhhigh gift, now swinging at my wrist by its loop of otter-skin, for greater momentum of stroke. Clattering over the paved prairie we hied, the defaulter a little in advance and artfully dodging, - Loolowcan and I close upon him. Still more artfully at last he made show of finding the trail, and went pounding along, as if no traitorous stampede had happened. A total failure was this crafty sham, this too late repentance and acknowledgment of defeat. Vengeance will not thus be baffled.' Men discover with bitterness that nature continues to use the scourge long after they have reformed, until relapse becomes impossible by the habit of virtue. So Antipodes experienced. Pendulum whips do not swing for nothing, and he never again attempted absolute revolt, but grumblingly acknowledged his duty to his master.
This was an evening of August, in a climate where summer is never scorching nor blasting. We breathe air as a matter of course, unobserv-

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ant usually of how fair a draught it is. But to-night the chalice of nature was brimming with a golden haze, which touched the lips with luxurious winy flavor.
So inhaling delicate gray-gold puffs of indolent summer-evening air, and much tranquillized by such beverage, mild yet rich, I rode on, now under the low oaks, now over a ripe prairie, and now beside a lake fresh, pure, and feminine. And whenever a vista opened eastward, Tacoma appeared above the low-lying mists of the distance. " Polikely, spose mika tikky, nesika mitlite copa Comcomli house; to-night, if you please, we stop at Comcomli's house," said Loolowcan the taciturn.
Night was at hand, and where was the house? It is not wise to put off choice of camping-ground till dark; foresight is as needful to a campaigner as to any other mortal. But presently, in a pretty little prairie, we reached the spot where a certain Montgomery, wedded to a squaw, had squatted, and he should be our host. His name, too articulate for Indian lips, they had softened to Comcomli. A similar corruption befell the name, of the Scotticized chief of the Chinooks, whom Astor's people found at Astoria, and whom Mr. Irving has given to history.
Mr. Comcomli was absent, but his comely " mild-eyed, melancholy " squaw received us hos-

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pitably. Her Squallyamish proportions were oddly involved in limp robes of calico, such as her sisters from Pike County wear. She gave us a supper of fried pork, bread, and tea. We encamped upon her floor, and were somewhat trodden under foot by little half-breed Comcomlis, patrolling about during the night-watches.
Loolowcan here began to show the white feather. His heart sank when he contemplated the long leagues of the trail. He wanted to return. He was solitary, -homesick for the congenial society of other youths with matted hair, dusky skins, paint-daubed cheeks, low brows, and distinguished frowziness of apparel. He wanted to squat by camp-fires, and mutter guttural gibberish to such as these. The old, undying feud of blackguard against gentleman seemed in danger of pronouncing itself. Besides, be feared hostile siwashes at the Dalles of the Columbia. In his superstitious soul of a savage he dreaded, or pretended to dread, some terrible magical influence in the gloomy forests of the mountains. Of evil omen to me, and worse than any demon spell in the craggy dells of the Cascades, was this vacillation of my guide. However, I argued somewhat, and somewhat wheedled and bullied the doubter. Loolowcan was harder to keep in line than Antipodes. One may tame Bucephalus, but several new elements of character are to

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be considered when the attempt is made to manage Pagan savages.
At last my guide seemed to waver over to the side of good faith, with a dishonest air and a pretence of wishing to oblige. Shaken confidence hardly returns, and from hour to hour, as the little Comcomlis pranced over my person, and trampled my upturned nose a temporary aquilline, I awoke and studied the dark spot where my dusky comrade lay. Each time I satisfied myself that he had not flitted. Nor did he. When morning came, his heart grew bigger. Difficulties portentous in the ghostly obscure of night vanished with cock-crowing. He contemplated his fair proportions, and felt that new clothes would become them. He rose, stalked about, and longed for the dignified drapery of a new blanket. How the other low-browed and squalid, from whom he had been selected for his knowledge as a linguist and his talents as a guide, -how they would scoff, and call him Kallapooya, meanest of Indians, if he sneaked back to camp bootless! He turned to me, and saw me a civilized man, in garb and guise to be envied. So for a time treachery was argued out of the heart of Loolowcan the frowzy.

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V.

FORESTS OF THE CASCADES.

To have started with dawn is a proud and exhilarating recollection all the day long. The most godlike impersonality men know is the sun. To him the body should pay its matinal devotions, its ardent, worshipful greetings, when he comes, the joy of the world ; then is the soul elated to loftier energies, and nerved to sustain its own visions of glories transcending the spheres where the sun reigns sublime. Tame and inarticulate is the harmony of a day that has not known the delicious preludes of dawn. For the sun, the godlike, does not come hastily blundering in upon the scene. Nor does he bounce forth upon the arena of his action, like a circus clown. Much beautiful labor of love is done by earth and sky, preparing a pageant where their Lord shall enter. Slowly, like the growth of any feeling grand, deep, masterful, and abiding, nature's power of comprehending the coming blessing develops. First, up in the colorless ranges of night there is a feeling of quiver and life,

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broader than the narrow twinkle of stars, - a tender lucency, not light, but rather a sense of the departing of darkness. Then a gray glimmer, like the sheen of filed silver, trembles upward from the black horizon. Gray deepens to violet. Clouds flush and blaze. The sky grows azure. The pageant thickens. Beams dart up.. The world shines golden. The sun comes forth to cheer, to bless, to vivify.
For other reasons more obviously practical, needs must that campaigners stir with dawn, and start with sunrise. No daylight is long enough for its possible work, as no life is long enough for its possible development in wisdom and love. In the beautiful, fresh hours of early day vigorous influences are about. The sun is doing his uphill work easily, climbing without a thought of toil to the breathing-spot of high noon. Every flower of the world is boldly open ; there is no languid droop in any stem. Blades of grass have tossed lightly off each its burden of a dew-drop, and now stand upright and alert. Man rises from recumbency taller by fractions of an inch than when he sank to repose, with a brain leagues higher up in the regions of ability, - leagues above doubt and depression ; and a man on a march, with long wildness of mountain and plain to overpass, is urged by necessity to convert power into achievement.
4*F

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82THE CANOE AND THE SADDLE.

Up, then, at earliest of light, I sprang from the ground. I roused Loolowcan, and found him in healthier and braver mood, and ready to lead on. While, after one sympathetic gaze at Aurora, I made up my packs, my Klickatat untethered the horses from spots where all night they had champed the succulent grasses. This control of tethering was necessary on separating my steeds from their late comrades. Indian nags, like Indian youths, are gregarious, and had my ponies escaped, I should probably have seen them nevermore. Even my graceful Adonis, the Spokan, would not have hesitated to seclude a stray Antipodes, galloping back to the herd, and innocently to offer me another and a sorrier, to be bought with fresh moneys.
The trail took us speedily into a forest-temple. Long years of labor by artists the most unconscious of their skill had been given to modelling these columnar firs. Unlike the pillars of human architecture, chipped and chiselled in bustling, dusty quarries, and hoisted to their site by sweat of brow and creak of pulley, these rose to fairest proportion by the life that was in them, and blossomed into foliated capitals three hundred feet overhead.
Riding steadily on, I found no thinning of this mighty array, no change in the monotony of this monstrous vegetation. These giants with their

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rough plate-armor were masters here; one of human stature was unmeaning and incapable. With an axe, a man of muscle might succeed in smiting off a flake or a chip, but his slight fibres seemed naught to battle, with any chance of victory, with the time-hardened sinews of these Goliaths. It grew somewhat dreary to follow down the vistas of this ungentle woodland, passing forever between rows of rough-hewn pillars, and never penetrating to any shrine where sunshine entered and dwelt, and garlands grew for the gods of the forest. Wherever I rode into the sombre vista, and turned by chance to trace the trail behind me, the dark-purple trunks, drew together, like a circuit of palisades, and closed after, crowding me forward down the narrow inevitable way, as ugly sins, co-operating only to evolve an uglier remorse, forbid the soul to turn back to purity, and crowd it, shrinking, on into blacker falseness to itself.
Before my courage was quelled by a superstitious dread that from this austere wood was no escape, I came -upon a river, cleaving the darkness with a broad belt of sunshine. A river signifies much on the earth. It signifies something to mix with proper drinkables; it signifies navigation, in birch-canoe, seventy-four, floating palace, dug-out, or lumber ark; it signifies motion, less transitory than the tremble of leaves, and shad-

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ows. This particular river, the Puyallop, had another distinct significance to me, - it was certain to supply provisions, fish, salmon. As I expected, some fishing Indians were here to sell me their silver beauty, a noble fellow who this morning had tasted the pickle of Whulge, and had the cosmopolitan look of a fish but now from ocean palace and grot, where he was a welcome guest and a regretted absentee. It was truly to be deplored that he could never reappear in those Neptunian realms with tales of wild adventure; yet if to this most brilliant of fish his hour of destiny had come, how much better than feeding foul Indians it was to belong to me, who would treat his proportions with respect, feel the exquisiteness of his coloring, grill him delicately, and eat him daintily!
Potatoes, also, I bought of the Indians, and bagged them till my bags were knobby withal, --potatoes with skins of smooth and refined texture, like the cheeks of a brunette, and like them showing fair rosiness through the transparent brown. For these peaceful products I paid in munitions of war. Four charges of powder and shot were deemed by the Nestor of the siwash family a liberal, even a lavishly bounteous price, for twoscore of tubers and a fifteen-pound salmon ; and in two corners of the flap of his sole inner and outer garment that tranquil sage

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tied up his hazardous property. Such barter dignifies marketing. Usually what a man pays for his dinner does not interest the race; but here I was giving destruction for provender, death for life. Perhaps Nestor shot the next traveller with my ammunition, and the juices of that salmon were really my brother Yankee's blood. Avaunt, horrid thought! and may it be that the powder and the shot went for killing porcupines, or that their treasurer stumbled in the stream, and drowned his deadly stores!
Well satisfied with my new possessions, I said adieu to the monotonous mumblers of Puyallop, - a singularly fishy old gentleman, his wife an oleaginous hag, an emotionless youth of the Loolowcan type, and a flat-faced young damsel with a circle of vermilion on each broad cheek and a red blanket for all raiment. I waded the milky stream, scuffled across its pebbly bed, and plunged again among the phalanxes of firs. These opened a narrow trail, wide enough to wind rapidly along, and my little cortege dashed on deeper into the wilderness. 1 had not yet entirely escaped from civilization, so much as Yankee pioneers carry with them, namely, blue blankets and the smell of fried pork. In a prairie about noon to-day, I saw a smoke, near that smoke a tent, and at that smoke two men in ex-soldier garb. Frying pork were these two braves, as at most

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habitations, up and down and athwart this continent, cooking braves or their wives are doing three times a day, incensing dawn, noon, and sun set. These two had taken this pretty prairie as their "claim," hoping to become the vanguard of colonization. They became its forlorn hope. The point of civilization's entering wedge into barbarism is easily knocked off. These squatters were knocked off, as some of the earliest victims of the Indian war three summers after my visit. It is odd how much more interest I take in these two settlers since I heard that they were scalped. More fair prairies strung themselves along the trail, possibly less fair in seeming to me then, could I have known that murder would soon disfigure them; that savages, and perhaps among them the low-browed Loolowcan, would lurk behind the purple trunks of these colossal firs, watching not in vain for the safe moment to slay. For so it was, and the war in that territory began three years after, by massacres in these outlying spots.
I was now to be greeted by a nearer vision of an old love. A great bliss, or a sublime object, or a giant aspiration of our souls, lifts first upon our horizon, and swelling fills our sphere, and stoops forward with winsome condescension. And taking our clew, we approach through the labyrinths.   Glimpses are never wanting to sustain

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us, lest we faint and fail along the lacerating ways. Such a glimpse I was now to have of Tacoma. I had long been obstructedly nearing it, first in the leaky Bucentaur, propelled over strong-flowing Whulge by Klalams, drunken, crapulous, unsteady, timid, -such agents progress finds ; next by alliance of Owhhigh, the horse-thief, and aid from the Hudson's Bay Company; then between the files of veteran evergreens in plate-armor, tempered purple by the fiery, sun, and across prairies where might have hung an ominous mist of blood. Now suddenly, as Klale the untiring disentangled us from the black forest, and galloped out upon a little prairie, delighted to comb his fetlocks in the long yellow grass, I beheld Tacoma at hand, still undwarfed by any underlift of lower ridges, and only its snows above the pines. Over the pines, the snow peak against the sky presented the quiet fraternal tricolor of nature, who always, Where there is default of uppermost peaks to be white with clouds fallen in the form of snow, brings the clouds themselves, so changefully fair that we hardly wish them more sublimely permanent, and heaps them above the green against the blue. Here, then against the unapproachable glory of an Oregon summer sky stood Tacoma, less dreamy, than when I floated over its shadow, but not less divine, - no divine thing dwindles as one with sparks of divineness in his mind approaches.

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88THE CANOE AND THE SADDLE.

Yet I could not dally here to  watch Tacoma bloom at sunset against a violet sky. Alas that life with an object cannot linger among its own sweet episodes! My camp was farther on, but the re-volutionary member of the party, Antipodes, hinted that we would do wisely to set up our tabernacle here. His view of such a hint was to bolt off where grass grew highest, and standing there interpose a mobile battery of heels between his Ranks and their castigators. This plan failed; a horse, cannot balance on his fore legs and take hasty bites of long, luxurious fodder, while he brandishes his hind legs in the air. Some sweeter morsel will divert his mind from self-defence; his assailants will get within his guard. Penance follows, and Antipodes must again hammer elephantine along the trail.
What now ? What is this strange object in the utterly lonely woods, - a furry object hanging on a bush by our faint and obstructed trail ? A cap of fox-skin, fantastic with tails. And what, O Loolowcan the mysterious, means this tailful head-gear, hung carefully, as if a signal ? " It is," replied Loolowcan, depositing it upon his capless mop of hair, my brother's cap, and he must be hereabouts he informs me of his neighborhood, and will meet us presently." " Son of Owhhigh, what doth thy brother skulking along our trail ?"How should I know,

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my chief ? Indian come, Indian go; he somewhere, he nowhere. Perhaps my brother go to mountains see Tamanous, - want to be big medicine."
Presently, appearing from nowhere, there stood in the trail a little, shabby, capless Indian, armed with a bow and arrows, -a personage not at all like the pompous, white-cravatted, typical big-medicine man of civilization, armed with gold-headed cane. Where this M. D. had been prowling, or from what lair he discovered our approach, or by what dodging he evaded us along the circuits of the trail, was a mystery of which he offered no explanation. The presence of this disciple of Tamanous, this tyro magician, this culler of simples, this amateur spy, or whatever else he might be, was unaccountable. He was the counterpart of Loolowcan, but evidently an inferior spirit to that youth of promise. He offered me his hand, not without Indian courtesy, and be and his compatriot, if not brother, plunged together into a splutter of confidential talk.
The Doctor, for he did not introduce himself by name, trotted along by the side of the ambling Gubbins, and soon, just before sunset, we emerged upon a little circle of ferny prairie, our camp, already known to me by the description of Owhhigh. The White River, the S'Ka,

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mish flowed hard by, behind a belt of luxuriant arbor-vitae. With the Doctor's aid, we took down pot and pan, blanket and bread-bag, from the galled back of the much-enduring Antipodes, and gave to him and his two comrades full license to bury themselves, among the tall, fragrant ferns, and nibble, without stooping, top bits from the gigantic grass. It was a perfect spot for a bivouac, a fairy ring of ferns beneath the tall, dark shelter of the firs. Tacoma was near, an invisible guardian, hidden by the forest. Beside us the rushing river sounded lulling music, making rest sweeter by its contrast of tireless toil. And thus under favorable auspices we set ourselves to prepare for the great event of supper, - the Doctor slipping quietly into the position of a welcome guest without invitation.
I lifted the salmon to view. Loolowcan's murky brow expanded. A look became decipherable upon that mysterious phiz, and that look meant gluttony. The delicate substance of my aristocratic fish was presently, to be devoured by frowzy Klickatat. At least, O pair of bush-boys, you shall have cleanlier ideas of cookery than heretofore in your gypsy life, and be taught that civilization in me, its representative for want of a better, does not disdain accepting the captaincy of a kitchen battery. First, then,

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my marmitons, clear ye a space carefully of herbage, and trample down the ferns about, lest the flame of our fire show affinity to this natural hay, and our fair paddock become a charred and desolate waste. We will have salmon in three courses on this festive occasion, when I, for the first time, entertain two young Klickatats of distinction. Do thou, Loolowcan, seek by the river-side tenacious twigs of alder and maple, wherewith to construct an upright gridiron. One blushing half of that swimmer of the Puyallop shall stand and toast on this slight scaffolding. Portions from the other half shall be fried in this pan, and other portions, from the thicker part, shall be neatly wrapped in green leaves, and bake beneath the ashes.
So it was done, and well done. The colors that are encased within a salmon, awaiting fire that they may bloom, came forth artistically. On the toasted surface brightened warm yellows, and ruddy orange ; and delicate pinkness, softened with downy gray, suffused the separating flakes. Potatoes, too, roasted beneath aromatic ashes by the side of roasting blocks of salmon, -- potatoes hardened their crusts against too ardent heat, that slowly ripeness might penetrate to their heart of hearts. Unworthy the cook that does not feel the poetry of his trade !
The two Klickatats, whether brothers or fel-
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low-clansmen, feasted enormously. Rasher after rasher of the fried, block after block of the roasted, flake after flake of the toasted salmon vanished. I should have supposed that the Doctor was suffering with a bulimy, after short commons in his worship of Tamanous, the mountain demon, had not the appetite of Loolowcan, although well fed at three meals in my service, been equal or greater. Before they were quite gorged, I made them a pot of tea, well boiled and sticky with sugar, and then retired to my dhudeen. The summer evening air enfolded me sweetly, and down from the cliffs and snowy mounds of Tacoma a cool breeze fell like the spray of a cascade.
After their banquet, the Indians were in merry mood, and fell to chaffing one another. With me Loolowcan was taciturn. I could not tell whether he was dull, sulky, or suspicious. When I smote him with the tempered steel of a keen query, meaning to elicit sparks of information on Indian topics, no illumination came. He acted judiciously his part, and talked little. Nor did he bore me with hints, as bystanders do in Christendom, but believed that I knew also my part. With his comrade be was communicative and jolly, even to uproariousness. They laughed sunset out and twilight in, finding entertainment in everything that was or that happened, -in

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their raggedness, in the holes in their moccasins, in their overstuffed proportions after dinner, in the little skirmishes of the horses, when a grass hopper chirped or a cricket sang, when either of them found a sequence of blackberries or pricked himself with a thorn, -in every fact of our little world these children of nature found wonderment and fun. They laughed themselves sleepy, and then dropped into slumber in the ferny covert.
As night drew on, heaven overhead, seen as from the bottom of a well, was so starry clear and intelligible, and the circuit of forest so dreamy mysterious by contrast, that I found restful delight, better than sleep, in studying the clearness above the mystery. But twilight drifted away after the sun, and darkness blackened my green blankets. I mummied myself in their folds, and rolled in among the tall, elastic, fragrant ferns.
My last vision, as sleep came upon me, was the eyes of Loolowcan staring at me, and glowing serpent-like. At midnight, when I stirred, the same look watched me by the dim light of our embers. And when gray dawn drew over our bivouac, and my blankets from black to green began to turn, the same dusky, unvariegated eyeballs were inspecting me still. As to the little medicine-man, he had no responsibility at present; a pleasant episode had befallen him, and he made the most of it, sleeping unwatchfully.

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Seediness of a morning is not the meed of him who has slept near Tacoma with naught but a green blanket and miles of elastic atmosphere between him and the stars. When I woke, sleep fell from me suddenly, as a lowly, disguise falls from a prince in a pantomime. I sprang up, myself, fresh, clear-eyed, and with never a regretful yawn. Nothing was astir in nature save the river, rushing nigh at hand, and rousing me to my day's career by its tale of travel and urgency.
It was a joy to behold three horses so well fed as my stud appeared. Klale looked toward me and whinnied gratefully for the juicy grasses and ferny bed of his sheltered paddock, and also for the remembrance of a new sensation he had had the day before, - he had carried a biped through a day of travel, and the biped had not massacred him with his whip. Klale thought better and more hopefully of humanity. Tougher Gubbins, who, with Loolowcan on his back, had had no such experience, sung no paeans, but stood doltishly awaiting a continuance of the inevitable discomforts of life.
After breakfast, the Doctor hinted that he liked my cheer and my society, and would gladly volunteer to accompany me if I would mount him upon Antipodes. I pointed out to him that it would be weak to follow with us, along flowery paths of pleasure, when stern virtue called him to

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the mountain-tops; that Tamanous would not pardon backsliding. I suggested that I was prepared for the appetite of only one Klickatat gourmand, and that my tacit bargain with Antipodes did not include his carrying an eater as well as provisions. The youth received my refusal impassively; to ask for everything, and never be disappointed at getting nothing, is Indian manners. We left him standing among the ferns, gazing vacantly upon the world, and devouring a present of hard-tack I had given him, -he was ridding himself at once of that memorial of civilization, that, with bow and arrows in hand, he might relapse into barbarism, in pathless wilds along the flanks of Tacoma.
Soon the trail took a dip in the river, - a morning bath in S'Kamish.  Rapid, turbulent,
and deep was the S'Kamish, white with powder of the boulders it had been churning above, and so turbid that boulders here were invisible. We must ford with our noses pointing. up stream, lest the urgent water, bearing against the broadsides of our unsteady horses, should dowse, if not drown us. Klale, floundering sometimes, but always recovering himself, took me over stoutly. My moccasins and scarlet leggins were wet, but I had not become dazed in the whirr and fallen, as it is easy to do.  Lubberly Antipodes flinched. He had some

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96THE CANOE AND THE SADDLE.

stupid theory that the spot we had chosen, just at the break above of a rapid, was a less commodious ford than the smooth whirlpools below. He turned aside from honest roughness to deluding smoothness. He stepped into the treacherous pool, and the waters washed over him. There was bread in the bags he bore. In an instant he scrambled out, trying to look meritorious, as dolts do when they have done doltishly, and yet escaped. And there was pulp in the bags he bore. Pulp of hard-tack was now oozing through the seams. I was possessor of two bag puddings. -My cakes were dough. Downright and desiccating may be the sunshine of Oregon August, but pilot-bread converted into wet sponge resists a sunbeam as a cotton-bale resists a cannon-ball. Only a few inner layers of the bread were untouched; as to the outer strata, mouldiness pervaded them. Yet some one profited by this disaster; Loolowcan henceforth had mouldy biscuit at discretion. His discretion would not have rejected even a fungous article. To him my damp and crumbling crackers were a delicacy, the better for their earthy fragrance and partial fermentation.
We struck the trail again after this slight misadventure, and went on through forests nobler and denser than those of the dry levels near Whulge. The same S'Kamish floods that

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spoiled my farinaceous stores nourished to greater growth the mighty vegetables of this valley. The arbor-vitae here gained grander arborescence and fresher vitality. This shrub of our gardens in the Middle States, and gnarled tree of the Northeast, becomes in the Northwest a giant pyramid, with rich plates of foliage drooping massively about a massive trunk. Its full, juicy verdure, sweeping to the ground, is a relief after the monotony of the stark stems of fir forests. There was no lack of luxuriant undergrowth along these lowlands by the river. The narrow trail plunged into thickets impenetrable but for its aid. Wherever ancient trunks had fallen, there they lay; some in old decay had become green, mossy mounds, the long graves of prostrate giants, so carefully draped with their velvet covering, that all sense of ruin was gone. And some, that fell from uprightness but a few seasons ago, showed still their purple bark deepening in hue, and dotted with tufts of Moss; or where a crack had opened and revealed their inner structure rotting slowly away, there was such warm coloring as nature loves to shed, that even decay may not be unlovely, and the powdery wood, fractured into flaky cubes, showed browns deep as the tones of old Flemish pictures, or changeful agate-like crimsons and solid yellows. Not always had the ancient
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98THE CANOE AND THE SADDLE.

stem fallen to lie prone and hidden by younger growths, whose life was sucked from the corse of their ancestor. Sometimes, as the antiquated arbor-vitae, worn away at its base, swayed, bent, and went crashing downward, it had been arrested among the close ranks of upstart trunks, and hung there still, with long gray moss floating from it like the torn banners in a baronial chapel, - hung there until its heart should rot and crumble, and then, its shell of bark breaking, it should give way, and shower down in scales and dust.
In this Northern forest there was no feverish apprehension, such as we feel in a jungle of the tropics, that every breath may be poison, - that centipede in boot and scorpion in pocket, mere external perils, will be far less fatal than the inhaling of dense miasms, stirred from villanous ambushes beneath mounds of flowery verdure. Here no black and yellow serpent defended the way, lifting above its ugly coil a mobile head, with jaws that quiver and fangs that play. It was a forest without Poison, -without miasma, and without venom. 
It was a forest just not impassable for a train like mine, and the trail was but a faint indication of a way, suggesting nothing except to the trained eye of an Indian. Into the pleached thickets Klale could plunge and crash through,

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while, his cavalier fought against buffeting branches, and bent to saddle-horn to avoid the fate of Absalom. But when new-fallen trunks of the sylvan giants, or great mossy mounds, built barricades across the path, tall as the quadruped whose duty it was to leap over them -how in such case Klale the sprightly? how here Antipodes the flounderer ? how Gubbins, stiff in the joints ?
Thus, by act answered Klale, -thus; by a leap, by a scramble, by a jerking plunge, by a somerset ; like a cat, like a squirrel, like a monkey, like an acrobat, like a mustang. To overpass these obstacles is my business; be it yours to pass with me. You must prove to me, a nag of the Klickatats, that Boston strangers are as sticky as siwashes. Centaurs have somewhat gone out. I have been a party and an actor when the mustang sprang lightly over the barricade, and his rider stayed upon the other side supine, and gazing still where he had just seen- a disappearance of horse-heels.
Not wishing to lose the respect of so near a comrade as my horse, I did not allow our union to be dissolved. We clung together like voluntary Siamese twins, dashing between fir-trunks, where my nigh leg or my off leg must whisk away to avoid amputation, thrusting ourselves beneath the aromatic denseness of the drooping

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arbor-vitae, smothered together in punk when a moss mound gave way and we sank down into the dusty grave of a buried monarch of his dell, or caught and balanced half-way over as we essayed to leap the broad back of a fir fifteen feet in the girth. Whether Klale, in our frantic scrambles, became a biped, gesticulating and clutching the air with two hoofed arms, - or whether a monopod, alighted on his nose, and lifting on high a quintette of terminations, four legs and a tail, -still Klale and I remained inseparable.
Assuredly the world has no path worse than that, -not even South American muds or damaged corduroys in tropic swamps. But men must pay their footing by labor, and we urged on, with horses educated to their task, often fording the S'Kamish, and careless now of wetting, clambering up ridges black with sunless woods, and penetrating steadily on through imperviousness. Indian trails aim at the open hill-sides and avoid the thickset valleys; but in this most primeval of forests the obstacles on the rugged buttresses of the Cascade chain were impracticable as the dense growth below.
"Ancoti nesika nanitch Boston hooihut; presently we see the Boston road," said Loolowcan. A glad sight whenever it comes, should "Boston road" here imply neat Macadam, well

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kept sidewalks, and files of pretty cottages, behind screens of disciplined shrubbery. I had heard indefinitely that a party of "Boston" men, for so all Americans are called in the Chinook jargon - were out from the settlements of Whulge, viewing, or possibly opening, a way across the Cascades, that emigrants of this summer might find their way into Washington Territory direct, leaving the great overland caravan route near the junction of the two forks of the Columbia. Such an enterprise was an epoch in progress. It was the first effort of an infant community to assert its individuality and emancipate itself from the tutelage of Oregon.
Very soon the Boston hooihut became apparent. An Indian's trail came into competition with a civilized man's rude beginnings of a road. Wood-choppers had passed through the forest, like a tornado, making a broad belt of confusion. Trim Boston neighborhoods would have scoffed at this rough-and-tumble cleft of the wild wood, and declined being responsible for its title. And yet two centuries before this tramp of mine, my progenitors were cutting just such paths near Boston, and then Canonicus, Chickatabot, and Passaconomy, sagamores of that region, were regarding the work very much as Owhhigh, Skloo, and Kamaiakan, the "tyees" hereabouts, might contrast this path with theirs. At present this

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102THE CANOE AND THE SADDLE.

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