Page:Recollections of My Boyhood.djvu/49

Rh the son of a negro man who came to the coast with Lewis and Clark's expedition as cook, about forty years before the time of which I am speaking, and who, peradventure, because of his black skin, woolly head, large proportions, thick lips,

was so petted by the squaws that he left the expedition in the Walla Walla country, and remained with the native daughters.

I was now wide awake, for I had expected to see something grand when we got in sight of Mount Hood. When we had reached a point on the river where they said we would get a first sight of it, I was on the lookout, but although I was scanning the sky in the direction where it was supposed to he, I did not see it. No doubt others in the boat had been looking at it for some time, for some one said to me, "What are you looking for away up there?"

"Mount Hood," said I.

"Well, it ain't up in the sky," some one said.

Now I had never seen a snow peak but had seen pictures of them and had been told they were very high, so I was looking for a kind of obelisk-shaped thing, towering up into the heavens almost as high as the moon, but upon this remark I began to look more towards the earth. I saw the tops of ordinary forest-clad mountains, and looking again yet lower and not high above the tops of fir trees skirting the river on the south side, I discovered what appeared to he a mere hill, it looked so low, with a dome or rather hood-shaped top as white as a lump of chalk. And this appeared to stand on an immense mass of snow as wide across as the biggest corn field I had ever seen. The mountain appeared to be only a few miles away and yet the wide expanse of snow could frequently he seen as we passed down the river, shining through gaps between the hills. What I saw seemed to be the best evidence, Mount Hood was, after all, only a snow covered hill. How did I account for that hill's being always snow clad, while the high mountains near by were not? Well, I didn't account for it at all. It might be I never thought of that, or it may he I