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1864.] with short grass of the grama kind and dusty-gray sage-brush. Simultaneously they lost some of their previous basaltic characteristics, running into more convex outlines, which receded from the river. We could not fail to recognize the fact that we had crossed one of the great thresholds of the continent,—were once more east of the Sierra-Nevada axis, and in the great central plateau which a few months previous, and several hundred miles farther south, we had crossed amid so many pains and perils by the Desert route to Washoe. From the grizzly mountains before us to the sources of the Snake Fork stretched an almost uninterrupted wilderness of sage. The change in passing to this region from the fertile and timbered tracts of the Cascades and the coast is more abrupt than can be imagined by one familiar with our delicately modulated Eastern scenery. This sharpness of definition seems to characterize the entire border of the plateau. Five hours of travel between Washoe and Sacramento carry one out of the nakedest stone heap into the grandest forest of the continent.

As we emerged from the confinement of the nearer ranges, Mount Hood, hitherto visible only through occasional rifts, loomed broadly into sight almost from base to peak, covered with a mantle of perennial snow scarcely less complete to our near inspection than it had seemed from our observatory south of Salem. Only here and there toward its lower rim a tatter in it revealed the giant's rugged brown muscle of volcanic rock. The top of the mountain, like that of Shasta, in direct sunlight is an opal. So far above the line of thaw, the snow seems to have accumulated until by its own weight it has condensed into a more compactly crystalline structure than ice itself, and the reflections from it, as I stated of Shasta, seem rather emanations from some interior source of light. The look is distinctly opaline, or, as a poet has called the opal, like "a pearl with a soul in it."

About five o'clock in the afternoon we reached the Oregon town and mining-depot of Dalles City. A glance at any good War-Department map of Oregon and Washington Territories will explain the importance of this place, where considerably previous to the foundation of the present large and growing settlement there existed a fort and trading-post of the same name. It stands, as we have said, at the entrance to the great pass by which the Columbia breaks through the mountains to the sea. Just west of it occurs an interruption to the navigation of the river, practically as formidable as the first cataract. This is the upper rapids and "the Dalles" proper,—presently to be described in detail. The position of the town, at one end of a principal portage, and at the easiest door to the Pacific, renders it a natural entrepot between the latter and the great central plateau of the continent. This it must have been in any case for fur-traders and emigrants, but its business has been vastly increased by the discovery of that immense mining-area distributed along the Snake River and its tributaries as far east as the Rocky Mountains. The John-Day, Boisé, and numerous other tracts both in Washington and Idaho Territories draw most of their supplies from this entrepot, and their gold comes down to it either for direct use in the outfit-market, or to be passed down the river to Portland and the San-Francisco mint.

In a late article upon the Pacific Railroad, I laid no particular stress upon the mines of Washington and Idaho as sources of profit to the enterprise. This was for the reason that the Snake River seems the proper outlet to much of the auriferous region, and this route may be susceptible of improvement by an alternation of portages, roads, and water-levels, which for a long time to come will form a means of communication more economical and rapid than a branch to the Pacific Road. The northern mines east of the Rocky range will find themselves occupying somewhat similar relations to the Missouri River, which rises,