The Canoe and the Saddle/Chapter V
Forests of the Cascades[edit]
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, 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.
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 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 shadows. 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 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 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 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.
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 flanks 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, my chief? Indian come, Indian go; he somewhere, he nowhere. Perhaps my brother go to mountains see Tamanoüs, — 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 Tamanoüs, 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 he 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’Kamish 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, 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 fellow-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 Tamanoüs, 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 their raggedness, in the holes in their moccasins, in their overstuffed proportions after dinner, in the little skirmishes of the horses, when a grasshopper 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.
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 the mountain-tops; that Tamanoüs 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 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 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 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, 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 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-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 triumvirate of chieftainly siwashes would have rightly deemed the Boston road far inferior to their own. So the unenlightened generally deem, when they inspect the destruction that precedes reconstruction. This was a transition period. In the Cascades, Klickatat institutions were toppling, Boston notions coming in. It was the fulness of time. Owhhigh and his piratical band, slaves of Time and Space, might go dodging with lazy detours about downcast trunks, about tangles of shrubs and brambles, about zones of morass; but Boston clans were now, in the latter day, on the march, intending to be masters of Time and Space, and straightforwardness was to be the law of motion here.
It was a transition state of things on the Boston hooihut, with all the incommodities of that condition. The barricades of destructive disorder were in place, not yet displaced by constructive order. Passage by this road of the future was monstrous hard.
There is really no such thing as a conservative. Joshua is the only one on record who ever accomplished anything, and he only kept things quiet for one day. We must either move forward with Hope and Faith, or backward to decay and death of the soul. But though no man, not even himself, has any real faith in a conservative, for this one occasion I was compelled to violate the law of my nature, — to identify myself with conservatism, and take the ancient trail instead of the modern highway. Stiff as the obstacles in the trail might be, the obstacles of the road were still stiffer; stumps were in it, fresh cut and upstanding with sharp or splintered edges; felled trunks were in it, with wedge-shaped buts and untrimmed branches, forming impregnable abattis. One might enter those green bowers as a lobster enters the pot; extrication was another and a tougher task. Every inch of the surface was planted with laming caltrops, and the saplings and briers that once grew there elastic were now thrown together, a bristling hedge. A belt of forest had been unmade and nothing made. Patriotic sympathy did indeed influence me to stumble a little way along this shaggy waste. I launched my train into this complexity, floundered awhile in one of its unbridged bogs, and wrestled in its thorny labyrinths, until so much of my patience as was not bemired was flagellated to death by scorpion scourges of briers. I trod these mazes until even Klale showed signs of disgust, and Antipodes, ungainly plodder, could only be propelled by steady discipline of thwacks. Then I gave up my attempt to be a consistent radical. I shook off the shavings and splinters of a pioneer chaos, and fell back into primeval ways. In the siwash hooihut there was nothing to be expected, and therefore no acrid pang of disappointment pierced my prophetic soul when I found that path no better than it should be. Pride fired those dusky tunnels, the eyes of Loolowcan, when we alighted again upon his national road. The Boston hooihut was a failure, a miserable muddle. Loolowcan leaped Gubbins over the first barricade and, pointing where Antipodes trotted to, the sound of rattling packs along the serpentine way, said calmly, and without too ungenerous scorn, “Closche ocook; beautiful this.”
Though I had abandoned their undone road, I was cheered to have met fresh traces of my countrymen. Their tree surgery was skilful. No clumsy, tremulous hand had done butchery here with haggling axe. The chopping was handiwork of artists, men worthy to be regicide headsmen of forest monarchs. By their cleavage light first shone into this gloaming; the selfish grandeurs of this incognito earth were opened to day. I flung myself forward two centuries, and thanked these pioneers in the persons of posterity dwelling peacefully in this noble region. He who strikes the first blow merits all thanks. May my descendants be as grateful to these Boston men as I am now to the Boston men of two centuries ago. And may they remember ancestral perils and difficulties kindly, as I now recall how godly Puritans once brandished ruder axes and bill-hooks, opening paths of future peace on the shores of Massachusetts.
Our ascent was steady, along the gorge of the S’Kamish, ever in this same dense forest. We had, however escaped from the monotony of the bare fir-trunks. Columns, even such as those gracefullest relics of Olympian Jove’s temple by the Cephissus, would weary were they planted in ranks for leagues. The magnificent pyramids of arbor-vitae filled the wood with sheen from their bright, varnished leafage. It was an un-tenanted, silent forest, but silence here in this sunshiny morning I found not awful, hardly even solemn. Solitude became to me personal, and pregnant with possible emanations, as if I were a faithful pagan in those early days when gods were seen of men, and when, under Grecian skies, Pan and the Naiads whispered their secrets to the lover of Nature.
There was rough vigor in these scenes, which banished the half-formed dread that forest loneliness and silence without a buzz or a song, and dim vistas where sunlight falls in ghostly shapes, and leaves shivering as if a sprite had passed, may inspire. Pan here would have come in the form of a rough, jolly giant, typifying the big, beneficent forces of Nature in her rugged moods. Instead of dreading such a comrade, his presence seemed a fitting culmination to the influences of the spot, and, yielding to a wild exhilaration, I roused the stillness with appealing shouts.
“Mika wah wah copa Tamanoüs? you talk with demons?” inquired Loolowcan with something of mysterious awe in his tone.
I called unto the gods of the forest, but none answered. No sound came back to me save some chance shots of echo where my voice struck a gray, sinewy cedar-trunk, that rang again, or the gentle murmur of solitude disturbed deep in the grove, as the circles of agitated air vibrated again to calmness. No answer from Pan or Pan’s unruly rout, — no sound from Satyr, Nymph, or Faun, — though I shouted and sang ever so loudly to them upon my way.
Through this broad belt of woodland, utterly lifeless and lonely, I rode steadily, never dallying. In the early afternoon I came upon a little bushy level near the S’Kamish. We whisked along the bends of the trail, when, suddenly whisking, I pounced upon a biped, — a man, — a Caucasian man, — a Celtic soldier, — a wayworn U. S. Fourth Infantry sergeant, — a meditative smoker, apart from the little army encamped within hail.
I followed him toward the tent of his fellows. They were not revelling in the mad indulgence of camp-life. Nor were their prancing steeds champing angry bits and neighing defiance at the foe. Few of those steeds were in marching, much less in prancing order. If they champed their iron bits, it was because they had no other nutriment to nibble at in that adust halting-place. As to camp revelry, the American army has revelled but once, — in the Halls of the Montezumas, — a very moderate allowance of revelry for a space of threescore and ten years. Since that time they have fortunately escaped the ugly business of butchery, antecedent to revelry. Their better duty has been to act as the educated pioneers and protectors of Western progress.
Such was the office of this detachment. They were of Capt. McClellan’s expedition for flushing a Pacific Railroad in the brakes and bosks and tangled forests of the Cascades. I, taking casual glimpses through intricacy, had flushed or seared up only an unfledged Boston hooihut. Their success had been no greater, and while the main body continued the hunt, this smaller party was on commissariat service, going across to Squally and Steilacoom for other bags of pork and hard-tack, lest dinnerlessness should befall the Hunters of Railroads, and there should be aching voids among them that no tightening of belt-buckles could relieve.
I found an old acquaintance, Lieut. H., in command of these foragers. Three months before we had descended the terrace where Columbia Barracks behold the magnificent sweeps of the Columbia, and, far beyond, across a realm of forest, Mt. Hood, sublime pyramid of snows, — we had strolled down together to the river-bank to take our stirrup-cup with Governor Ogden, kindliest of hosts, at the Hudson’s Bay Company’s post of Fort Vancouver. Now, after wanderings hither and yon, we suddenly confronted each other in the wilderness, and exchanged hearty greetings. I was the enviable man, with my compact party and horses in tolerable condition. He officered a squadron of Rosinantes, a very wayworn set, and the obstacles on the trail that I could lightly skip over he must painfully beleaguer. He informed me that the road-makers were at work somewhere this side of the summit of the Pass. I might overtake them before night.
While we sympathized and gossiped, Loolowcan slunk forward to say, “Sia-a-ah mitlite ocook tipsoo, car nesika moosum; far, far is that grass spot where we sleep; — pe wake siah chaco polikely; and not far comes night.”
So I turned from the tents of the busy camp, busy even in repose. H. walked with me to the S’Kamish to show me the ford. If from the scanty relics of his stores he could not offer hospitality, he would give me a fact from his experience of crossing the river, so that I need not dip involuntarily in the deeps, and swallow cold comfort. On the bank some whittlers of his squad had amused themselves with whittling down a taper fir-tree, a slender wand, three hundred feet in length from where its but lay among the chips, to the tip of its pompon, where it had fallen across the stream.
H. looked suspiciously upon the low-browed and frowzy Loolowcan, and doubted the safety and certainty of journeying with such a guide in such a region, — as, indeed, I did myself. I forded unducked in the ripples, turned to wave him adieu, and blotted myself out of his sphere behind the sky-scraper firs. We met next in the foyer of the opera, between acts of Traviata.
Loneliness no longer lay heavy in the woods. It was shattered and trampled out where that little army had marched. Presently in their trail a ghostly object appeared, — not a ghost, but something tending fast toward the ghostly state; a poor, wasted, dreary white horse, standing in the trail, abandoned, too stiff to fall, too weary to stir. Every winged phlebotomizer of the Oregon woods seemed to have hastened hither to blacken that pale horse, soon to be Death’s, and, though he trembled feebly, he had not power to scatter the nipping insects with a convulsive shake. I approached, and whisked away his tormentors by the aid of a maple-bush. They fought me for a while, but finding me resolute, confident in their long-enduring patience, they retired with a loud and angry buzz. I could find no morsel of refreshment for him in the bitter woods. At mouldy hard-tack he shook a despairing head. In fact, it was too late. There comes a time to horses when they cannot prance with the prancers, or plod with the plodders, or trail weary hoofs after the march of their comrades. Yet it was more chivalric for this worn-out estray to die here in the aromatic forest, than to lose life in the vile ooze of a Broadway.
Poor, lean mustang, victim of progress! Nothing to do but let him die, since I could not bring myself to a merciful assassination. So I went on disconsolate after the sight of suffering, until my own difficulties along that savage trail compelled my thought away from dwelling on another’s pain.