Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/116

 had only two companions. He "carried a huge blank-book buckled and strapped to his back, and every night he wrote up his travels." He was an entertaining guest at Fort Vancouver and a clerk there remembered the grandiloquent way he talked. He settled in California, where he died in 1852. He was the author of several books, which Bancroft said were a good deal the same book dished up under different titles. The following selection is taken from Travels in the Great Western Prairies, the Anahuac and Rocky Mountains, and in the Oregon Territory.

October 15, 16, 1839.

After supper Mr. Lee ordered a launch, and the Indian paddles were again dipping in the bright waters. The stars were out on the clear night, twinkling as of old, when the lofty peaks around were heaved from the depths of the volcano. They now looked down on a less grand, indeed, but more lovely scene. The fires of the natives blazed among the woody glens, the light canoe skimmed the waters near the shore, the winds groaned over the mountain tops, the Cascades sang from cliff to cliff, the loon shouted and dove beneath the shining wave; it was a wild, almost unearthly scene, in the deep gorge of the Columbia. The rising of the moon changed its features. The profoundest silence reigned, save the dash of paddles that echoed faintly from the shores; our canoe sprang lightly over the rippling waters, the Indian fires smouldered among the waving pines; the stars became dim, and the depths of the blue sky glowed one vast nebula of mellow light. But the eastern mountains hid awhile the orb from sight. The south western hights shone with its pale beams, and cast into the deeply sunken river a bewitching dancing of light and shade, unequaled by the pencil of the wildest imagination. The grandeur too of grove, and cliff, and mountain, and the mighty Columbia wrapped in the drapery of a golden midnight! I was wholly lost. It was wholly lost. It was the new and rapidly opening panorama of the sublime wilderness. And the scene changed again when the moon was high in heaven. The cocks crew in the Indian villages; the birds twittered on the boughs; the wild fowls screamed, as her light gilded the chasm of the river, and re-