ork, the black man. "I was a boy of twelve. When the black man turned and looked at us, we children fled behind the rocks."
Here at the Dalles were wooden houses, the first that Lewis and Clark had seen since leaving the Illinois country, with roofs, doors, and gables like frontier cabins,—and still more stacks of salmon. "Ten thousand pounds," said Clark, "dried, baled, and bound for traffic down the river."
The ancient Indian village of Wishram stands on that spot still, with the same strong smell of salmon. The houses are much the same, and among their treasures may be found a coin of 1801, bartered, no doubt, by Lewis and Clark for a bale of salmon.
On sped the boats, through mighty mountains, past ancient burial places of the savage dead, to the wild-rushing Cascades. Past these Cascades, five miles of continuous rapids, white with sheets of foam. "We mak' portage," said Cruzatte, his bow grating on the narrow shelf of shore.
On either side, rocky palisades, "green-mossed and dripping," reached the skies. Tiny waterfalls, leaping from the clouds, fell in rainbow mist a thousand feet below. "Mt. Hood stood white and vast."
Below the Cascades great numbers of hair-seals slept on the rocks. Swarms of swans, geese, ducks, cranes, storks, white gulls, cormorants, plover swept screaming by. The hills were green, the soft west wind was warm with rain.
Of space! of room! What a sense of seas!"
They had come into a new world,—the valley of the lower Columbia, the home of the Chinook wind.
At Hood River alarmed Indians, dressed in skins of the mountain goat, the Oregon mazama, peered after the passing white men. At every house, and among mouldering remains of ancient tombs, lay scattered innumerable images of wood and stone or of burnt clay, household gods of the Columbian
