Page:McLoughlin and Old Oregon.djvu/30

 the Columbia, shaking the driftwood donjon till their voices were lost in the racket. A courier rode post to Fort Vancouver.

"They come," said Dr. McLoughlin, "not as rivals, not as traders, but as allies, to teach our Indians peace and industry."

Seated in the fur-traders' boats with Chief Factor Pambrun and his voyageurs, the Americans glided down the Columbia, beyond the drifting sand, past the log huts of the Walla Walla fishermen, who from point to point stood sweeping their nets in the foaming waters, on into the high dark dikes that shut in the tortuous river. Here they entered an elder, grander Hudson, lacking only castles on the cliffs to give a human touch. But there were castles, arrested mid air from the volcanic throat of Hood, in ages long gone by, columns upon columns crowned with towers, columns that swelled like the bastions of ancient citadels—basaltic bluffs, turreted with the pinnacles and shafts and domes that guard this gateway of the floods.

Where the Columbia breaks through the Cascade range they looked where never white woman looked before, on the dark foundations of the hills planted deep in the turbulent water, and rising hundreds of feet in the heavens. The whitecaps rolled as at sea. A gale came up from the west, and the little boats rose and fell like sea-gulls on the surges. Mt. Hood, visible for miles, grew to life size. St. Helens reared her graceful, tapering cone above the distant firs. Within the curving inlets vast amphitheatres with columnar tiers of seats outdid the Roman Coliseum. On every headland grim promontories frowned like forts of some Titanic age.

On the second day they had reached the Dalles.