sails dot its blue surface as summer clouds a June sky. They are going out to their night's fishing with drag-nets.
Opposite us, and distant four miles, is the northern shore,—a line of rounded highlands, covered with trees, with a narrow, low, and level strip of land between them and the beach. The village of Chinook is a little to the northwest; another village, Knappton, a little to the northeast. Following the opposite shore-line with the eye, as far to the east as the view extends, a considerable indentation in the shore marks Gray's Bay, where the discoverer of the river went ashore with his mate, to "view the country."
On the Astoria side the shore curves beautifully in a northeast direction, quite to Tongue Point, four miles up the river. This point is one of the handsomest projections on the Columbia. Connected with the main-land by a low, narrow isthmus, it rises gradually to the height of fifty or sixty feet, and is crowned with a splendid growth of trees. Between Tongue Point and Astoria was erected the first custom-house in Oregon; the building and wharf have gone to decay, and "Upper Astoria" has become united to the main town by a line of fish canning establishments.
Following down the curving shore, I inquire for the site of the Astor establishment of 1811 and the cove where the "Dolly" was launched. A few years ago, I am told, the foundations of Fort George, as the place was named by the English successors to Astor, could have been traced, but they are now built over, and the cove in front is also concealed from view by a wilderness of wharves.
In 1849, a company or two of United States soldiers being temporarily quartered in the old "Shark" house, a squared-log mansion built to shelter the crew of the United States schooner wrecked on the bar in 1846, the canoes of eight hundred native warriors of the Chinooks covered the water in Astor Bay, curious, as savages always are, to watch the acts and note the customs of civilized men. Not a canoe is now in sight. The white race are to the red as sun to snow: as silently and surely the red men disappear, dissipated by the beams of civilization. Among those who came to gaze at the overpowering white race on that occasion was an old Chinook chief, named Waluska, the
