Page:The Columbia River - Its History, Its Myths, Its Scenery Its Commerce.djvu/310

254 war, had come an inrush of cattle, horses, and sheep. During the last years of the decade of the fifties, stockmen had driven from the Willamette Valley thousands of head of stock to the rich pasture lands of the Walla Walla, Umatilla, and Yakima. When the gold discoveries of 1860 and 1861 became known, the activities of the cowboys were multiplied, added bands of stock were driven in, all the wild and extravagant features of a combined cowboy and mining age, vendors of "chain-lightning and forty-rod," gamblers, prostitutes, murderers,—and with them missionaries and teachers,—became reproduced again on the shores of the Columbia, Snake, Clearwater, Salmon, Walla Walla, and other rivers of the Inland Empire. It was another of those wild eras in which the worst and the best that are in human nature jostled each other at every turn.

Transportation problems followed close upon the cowboy and the miner. The Oregon Steam Navigation Company, organised in 1860, began within a year to run steamboats from Portland to Lewiston, with portage railroads around the Cascades and the Dalles. Stage lines were started from Umatilla, Walla Walla, and Lewiston, within a year or two after the gold discoveries of Oro Fino. Prairie-schooners, huge waggons, sometimes three in tandem fashion, drawn by a team of twenty mules, with jingling bells, driven with a "single line," formed the approved system of hauling freight over the mountain roads. In addition to the stages and prairie-schooners, however, thousands of mules and horses were driven with pack-saddles over the trails and roads. Then was the time when "throwing the diamond hitch" be-