Page:Bridge of the Gods (Balch).djvu/303

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Thus he who gave his life for the Indians, and died seemingly in vain, sowed seed that sprung up and bore a harvest long after his death. And to-day, two centuries since his body was laid in the lonely grave on Wappatto Island, thousands of Indians are the better for his having lived. No true, noble life can be said to have been lived in vain. Defeated and beaten though it may seem to have been, there has gone out from it an influence for the better hat has helped in some degree to lighten the grer heartache and bitterness of the world. Truth, goodness, and self- sacrifice are never beaten, no, not by death itself. The example and the influence of such things is deathless, and lives after the individual is gone, flowing on forever in the broad life of humanity.

I write these last lines on Sauvie s Island the Wappatto of the Indians, sitting upon the bank of the river, beneath the gnarled and ancient cotton- wood that still marks the spot where the old Columbia trail led up from the water to the interior of the island. Stately and beautiful are the far snow-peaks and the sweeping forests. The woods are rich in the colors of an Oregon autumn. The white wappatto blooms along the marshes, it? roots ungathered, the dusky hands that once reaped the harvest long crumbled into dust. Blue and majestic in the sunlight flows the Columbia, river of many names, the Wauna and Wemath of the Indians, the St. Roque of the Spaniards, the Oregon of poetry, always vast and grand, always flowing placidly to the sea. Steam boats of the present; batteaux of the fur traders; ships, Grey's and Vancouver's, of discovery; Indian