The Canoe and the Saddle/Chapter I

An Entrance
A wall of terrible breakers marks the mouth of the Columbia, Achilles of rivers.

Other mighty streams may swim feebly away seaward, may sink into foul marshes, may trickle through the ditches of an oozy delta, may scatter among sand-bars the currents that once moved majestic and united. But to this heroic flood was destined a short life and a glorious one, — a life all one strong, victorious struggle., from the mountains to the sea. It has no infancy, — two great branches collect its waters up and down the continent. They join, and the Columbia is born to full manhood. It rushes forward, jubilant, through its magnificent chasm, and leaps to its death in the Pacific.

Through its white wall of breakers Captain Gray, with his bark, the Columbia, first steered boldly to discover and name the stream. I will not invite my reader to follow this example, and buffet in the wrecking uproar on the bar. The Columbia, rolling seaward, repels us.

Let us rather coast along northward, and enter the Northwest by the Straits of De Fuca, upon the mighty tides of an inland sea. We will profit by this inward eddy of ocean to float quietly past Vancouver’s Island, and land at Kahtai, Port Townsend, the opening scene of my narrative.

The adventures chronicled in these pages happened some years ago, but the story of a civilized man’s solitary onslaught at barbarism cannot lose its interest. A drama with Indian actors, in Indian costume, upon an Indian stage, is historical, whether it happened two hundred years since in the northeast, or five years since in the northwest corner of our country.