Chapter III: The Land of Legends

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The nomenclature of the Northwest suffered at the hands of its English-speaking discoverers, for much that was fair to the ear in the Indian names has been replaced with dreary commonplaces, possessing neither beauty nor special fitness.

Two Yankee sea captains tossed a coin to decide whether they would name the city Portland or Boston. The Boston skipper lost, and "Multnomah," which was the old Indian name for the place and means "Down the Waters," became prosaic Portland. Because some Methodist missionaries preferred a name with a Biblical twang to the Indian "Chemeketa," meaning the "Place of Peace," Oregon's capital of to-day became Salem and the title which the red men gave their council ground was abandoned.

The Great River was first known as the Oregon, just why no authority seems to tell us reliably but later became the Columbia when the ship of that name sailed across its bar. Jonathan Carver's choice in names, however, if no longer bestowed upon the river, soon became that of all its lower regions, and they acquired the lasting title of the Oregon Country.

The old Oregon, the Columbia of to-day, was the gateway to the Pacific for the explorers and the immigrants of yesterday. For Lewis and Clark it opened a friendly passageway through the mountain ranges, and likewise for the human stream of immigration which later followed its banks from the East. So is it too a modern portal of prosperity for Portland, as this greatest river of the West concentrates the tonnage of much of three vast states by water grades at Portland's door, and two transcontinental railroads follow its banks, draining the wealth of the Inland Empire while enriching it, just as the river itself physically drains and adds wealth to the territory it traverses.

Copyrighted photo by W. A. Raymond, Moro, Ore.]

To us the Columbia was a gateway to the hinterland, for our pilgrimage upon it was easterly, up into the land of sunshine beyond Mount Hood and the Cascade mountain range, starting, on an impulse, after viewing the snow-covered barriers from the heights of Portland. And as we journeyed easterly up the great river, whose water came from lakes of the Canadian Rockies distant fourteen hundred miles, we found ourselves at once in a region of surpassing scenery and a land of quaint Indian legends.

A great wall of mountains shuts off the coastal regions from eastern Oregon and Washington. The two divisions are as dissimilar in climate and vegetation as night and day. To the west is rain and lush growth; to the east, drought and semi-arid desert. West of the Cascades are fir forests cluttered with underbrush and soggy with springs, while east are dry pine lands, park-like in their open beauty. The high plains of the hinterland are yellow grain fields chiefly, and irrigation is the right hand of agriculture; in the Willamette Valley, nature brings forth all things in a revel of productivity.

The Columbia cleaves this great wall asunder, breaking through the mountains in a gorge some three thousand feet deep. Here was the mythical bridge of the gods, which, legend narrates, once spanned the river from one mountainous bank to the other until ultimately it fell and dammed the stream. You come upon the site of the legendary bridge where Government locks now circumnavigate the cascades, a fall in the river of wondrous beauty, hemmed in on north and south by timbered mountains. Sunken forests hereabout indicate that at one time the river's course was checked by some great dam or volcanic convulsion, and every evidence in the geological surroundings points to stupendous natural cataclysms which distorted the face of nature leaving the sublime formations of the present.

As the train or boat bound up the Columbia progresses through this weird portal, fortunate you are if told the myths of this region which so truly is a land of legends, as we were; of the mythical struggle between Mount Hood on the south and Mount Adams on the north, in whose progress Hood hurled a vast bowlder at his adversary which fell short of its intended mark, destroying the bridge; of the quaint fire legend of the Klickitats which later I chanced upon in print in Dr. Lyman's entertaining book _The Columbia River_.

From a photograph by Weister Co., Portland, Ore.]

A father and two sons came from the East to the land along the Columbia, and the boys quarreled over the division of their chosen acres. So, to end the dispute, the father shot an arrow to the west and one to the north, bidding his sons make their homes where the arrows fell. From one son sprang the tribe of Klickitats, while the other founded the nation of Multnomah. Then Sahale, the Great Spirit, erected the Cascade Range as a barrier wall between them to prevent possibility of friction. The remainder of Dr. Lyman's pretty myth is best told in his own words:

But for convenience' sake, Sahale had created the great tamanous
bridge under which the waters of the Columbia flowed, and on this
bridge he had stationed a witch woman called Loowit, who was to
take charge of the fire. This was the only fire of the world. As
time passed on Loowit observed the deplorable condition of the
Indians, destitute of fire and the conveniences which it might
bring. She therefore besought Sahale to allow her to bestow fire
upon the Indians. Sahale, greatly pleased by the faithfulness and
benevolence of Loowit, finally granted her request. The lot of the
Indians was wonderfully improved by the acquisition of fire. They
began to make better lodges and clothes and had a variety of food
and implements, and, in short, were marvellously benefitted by the
bounteous gift.

But Sahale, in order to show his appreciation of the care with which Loowit had guarded the sacred fire, now determined to offer her any gift she might desire as a reward. Accordingly, in response to his offer, Loowit asked that she be transformed into a young and beautiful girl. This was accordingly effected, and now, as might have been expected, all the Indian chiefs fell deeply in love with the guardian of tamanous bridge. Loowit paid little heed to any of them, until finally there came two chiefs, one from the north called Klickitat and one from the south called Wiyeast. Loowit was uncertain which of these two she most desired, and as a result a bitter strife arose between the two. This waxed hotter and hotter, until, with their respective warriors, they entered upon a desperate war. The land was ravaged, until all their new comforts were marred, and misery and wretchedness ensued. Sahale repented that he had allowed Loowit to bestow fire upon the Indians, and determined to undo all his work in so far as he could. Accordingly he broke down the tamanous bridge, which dammed up the river with an impassable reef, and put to death Loowit, Klickitat, and Wiyeast. But, inasmuch as they had been noble and beautiful in life, he determined to give them a fitting commemoration after death. Therefore he reared over them as monuments the great snow peaks; over Loowit, what we now call Mt. St. Helen's; over Wiyeast, the modern Mt. Hood; and, above Klickitat, the great dome which now we call Mt. Adams.

Up through timbered hillsides, from green fields, from the verdure of the western flanks of the Cascades, winds the great river. The banks become steeper, the mountains behind them more rugged. Fairy threads of silver, falling water, flutter down from cliffs. Grotesque rocks, mighty monuments erected by a titan fire god when the world was young, rise sheer from the river's edge. Cumbersome fish wheels revolve sedately where the silver-sided salmon run in the springtime. The railroads cling close to the stream, perforce tunneling where nature has provided no passageway, and the boat ploughs against the current which here and there is swift and swirling as the cascades are approached. Then through the locks you go, or by them if you travel by the steel highways, and quickly the scenes change, these new ones painted in a vastly different vein from those that have gone before.

The lofty, steep-walled hills become more gentle, and their cloak of green timber merges into brown grass. The river rolls between banks of barrenness as we emerge on the western rim of the land of little rain, for the moisture-laden clouds from the Pacific are thwarted in their eastern progress by the mountain barrier, along whose summits they cluster weeping, in their baffled anger, upon the wet westerly slopes, while the dry sunny eastland mocks their dour grayness. Close beside the river is the harshest of all this rainless land; sand blows, the cliffs are bare and black, the hillsides bleak and brown. But ever so little away from the barren valley bottom are rich regions of orchards and green fields, and easterly, in the countries of Walla Walla, Palouse, and John Day, far-reaching fields of grain abound. Farming is upon a bonanza basis, and the bigness of it all is reminiscent of the Dakotas, were it not for the majestic mountain skylines, blessed visual reliefs lacking altogether in the continental mid-regions. The volume then, is bound misleadingly, and those who see naught but its unprepossessing exterior gain no inkling of its charming hidden chapters.

Then come The Dalles of the Columbia, close to the town of the same name, where the river, a sane waterway for a half a thousand miles above, suddenly goes mad for a brief space of lawless waterfall and rock-rimmed cascades. At Walla Walla--whose very name means "where the waters meet"--the two chief forks of the old Oregon River converge, the Columbia proper and the Snake, the one draining a northern empire, the other swinging southerly through Idaho, "the gem of the mountains" as the Indians baptized it. Thence the great stream flows westerly some one hundred and twenty miles until it reaches the outlying ridge of the Cascade chain, there encountering a huge low surface paved with glacier-polished sheets of basaltic rock. These plates, says Winthrop Parker, who saw them as a trail follower in the early 'sixties, gave the place the name _Dalles_, thanks to the Canadian voyageurs in the Hudson Bay service. A brief distance above this flinty pavement the river is a mile wide, but where it forces tumultuous passageway through the rocks it narrows to a mere rift compressed, if not subdued, by the adamantine barriers it cannot force asunder. Where the sides grow closest through three rough slits in the rocky floor the white waters bore, each chasm so narrow that a child could cast a stone across.

On either hand are monotonous plains, gray with sagebrush and brown with sunburned grass. Rough hills rise northerly, in Washington. Eastward roll lower broadening lands, but turbulent with lesser hills. West is the great ridge of the Cascade Range, with Hood rising majestic guardian over all, and the broad Columbia vanishing into the very heart of the shadowed mountains, unchecked on its seaward quest. The summer sunlight is blinding bright and the sky ethereal blue. An Indian hovel, or a ragged home of a fish-spearer beside the rushing waters, furnishes contrast--that of puny humanity in the face of nature at her mightiest. The view is at once compellingly beautiful and weirdly repelling. Few would live along the great river or thereabout from choice; and yet the view of it--the startling, colorful panorama--is golden treasure beyond the dreams of avarice.

It is this setting which marked the old-time entrance into Central Oregon. Those words "old-time," are characteristic of the swift-moving country; for using them, I refer to but six years ago, when Oregon's hinterland was a wilderness so far as railroads were concerned. These dalles of the Columbia, a milepost on the old transcontinental trail, are a place seen and passed to-day by those who rush on rails in brief hours where the pioneers of fifty years ago labored weeks. Also were these dalles prominent in Indian life in the quiet midyears of the last century, when beavers were more plentiful than palefaces. Indeed, back to the very beginnings of Northwestern Indian lore their story goes, coming to us, like so much else of the misty past of the Oregon Country, in a quaint legend.

In the late 'fifties Theodore Winthrop made his way 'cross country from Port Townsend, on Puget Sound, to The Dalles on the Columbia. His book, _The Canoe and the Saddle_, describes that pioneer excursion through Indian land, traversing what was in reality an untrodden wilderness. Its charm of literary expression is in no whit less fascinating than the wealth of its adventurous material, but the two, like the writer, are far behind us, and all of the pleasant account I would refer to here is the last chapter, which concerns the arrival at The Dalles, then an outpost of civilization.

Looking down upon the valley of The Dalles, Winthrop writes a half century ago:

Racked and battered crags stood disorderly over all that rough
waste. There were no trees, nor any masses of vegetation to soften
the severities of the landscape. All was harsh and desolate, even
with the rich sun of an August afternoon doing what it might to
empurple the scathed fronts of rock, to gild the ruinous piles with
summer glories, and throw long shadows veiling dreariness. I looked
upon the scene with the eyes of a sick and weary man, unable to
give that steady thought to mastering its scope and detail without
which any attempt at artistic description becomes vague
generalization.

My heart sank within me as the landscape compelled me to be gloomy
like itself. It was not the first time I had perused the region
under desolating auspices. In a log barrack I could just discern
far beyond the river, I had that very summer suffered from a
villain malady, the smallpox. And now, as then, Nature harmonized
discordantly with my feelings, and even forced her nobler aspects
to grow sternly ominous. Mount Hood, full before me across the
valley, became a cruel reminder of the unattainable. It was
brilliantly near, and yet coldly far away, like some mocking bliss
never to be mine, though it might insult me forever by its scornful
presence.

Evidently it was while held captive by the "villain malady" that Winthrop learned from the Indians the legend of The Dalles, which he told so well that to paraphrase it would be folly. Here I give it, as extracted from the thumb-marked little book whose publication date is 1863:

The world has been long cycles in educating itself to be a fit
abode for men. Man, for his part, has been long ages in growing
upward through lower grades of being, to become whatever he now may
be. The globe was once nebulous, was chaotic, was anarchic, and is
at last become somewhat cosmical. Formerly rude and convulsionary
forces were actively at work, to compel chaos into anarchy and
anarchy into order. The mighty ministries of the elements warred
with each other, each subduing and each subdued. There were
earthquakes, deluges, primeval storms, and furious volcanic
outbursts. In this passionate, uncontrolled period of the world's
history, man was a fiend, a highly uncivilized, cruel, passionate
fiend.

The northwest was then one of the centres of volcanic action. The
craters of the Cascades were fire-breathers, fountains of liquid
flame, catapults of red-hot stones. Day was lurid, night was
ghastly with this terrible light. Men exposed to such dread
influences could not be other than fiends, as they were, and they
warred together cruelly, as the elements were doing.

Where the great plains of the Upper Columbia now spread, along the
Umatilla, in the lovely valley of the Grande Ronde, between the
walls of the Grand Coulee, was an enormous inland sea filling the
vast interior of the continent, and beating forever against
ramparts of hills, to the east of the desolate plain of the
Dalles.

Every winter there were convulsions along the Cascades, and gushes
of lava came from each fiery Tacoma, to spread new desolation over
desolation, pouring out a melted surface, which, as it cooled in
summer, became a fresh layer of sheeny, fire-hardened dalles.

Now as the fiends of that epoch and region had giant power to harm
each other, they must have of course giant weapons of defence.
Their mightiest weapon of offence and defence was their tail; in
this they resembled the iguanodons and other "mud pythons" of that
period, but no animal ever had such force of tail as these terrible
monster fiendmen who warred together all over the Northwest.

As ages went on, and the fires of the Cascades began to accomplish
their duty of expanding the world, earthquakes and eruptions
diminished in virulence. A winter came when there was none. By and
by there was an interval of two years, then again of three years,
without rumble or shock, without floods of fire or showers of
red-hot stones. Earth seemed to be subsiding into an era of peace.
But the fiends would not take the hint to be peaceable; they warred
as furiously as ever.

Stoutest in heart and tail of all the hostile tribes of that
scathed region was a wise fiend, the Devil. He had observed the
cessation in convulsions of Nature, and had begun to think out its
lesson. It was the custom of the fiends, so soon as the Dalles
plain became agreeably cool after an eruption, to meet there every
summer and have a grand tournament after their fashion. Then they
feasted riotously, and fought again until they were weary.

From a photograph by Weister Co., Portland, Ore.]

Although the eruptions of the Tacomas had ceased now for three
years, as each summer came round this festival was renewed. The
Devil had absented himself from the last two, and when, on the
third summer after his long retirement, he reappeared among his
race on the field of tourney, he became an object of respectful
attention. Every fiend knew that against his strength there was no
defence; he could slay so long as the fit was on. Yet the idea of
combined resistance to so dread a foe had never hatched itself in
any fiendish head; and besides, the Devil, though he was feared,
was not especially hated. He had never won the jealousy of his
peers by rising above them in morality. So now as he approached,
with brave tail vibrating proudly, all admired and many feared him.

The Devil drew near, and took the initiative in war, by making a
peace speech.

"Princes, potentates, and powers of these infernal realms," said
he, "the eruptions and earthquakes are ceasing. The elements are
settling into peacefulness. Can we not learn of them? Let us give
up war and cannibalism, and live in milder fiendishness and growing
love."

Then went up a howl from deviltry. "He would lull us into crafty
peace, that he may kill and eat safely. Death! death to the
traitor!"

And all the legions of fiends, acting with a rare unanimity, made
straight at their intended Reformer.

The Devil pursued a Fabian policy, and took to his heels. If he
could divide their forces, he could conquer in detail. Yet as he
ran his heart was heavy. He was bitterly grieved at this great
failure, his first experience in the difficulties of Reform. He
flagged sadly as he sped over the Dalles, toward the defiles near
the great inland sea, whose roaring waves he could hear beating
against their bulwark. Could he but reach some craggy strait among
the passes, he could take position and defy attack.

But the foremost fiends were close upon him. Without stopping, he
smote powerfully upon the rock with his tail. The pavement yielded
to that titanic blow. A chasm opened and went riving up the valley,
piercing through the bulwark hills. Down rushed the waters of the
inland sea, churning boulders to dust along the narrow trough.

The main body of the fiends shrunk back terror-stricken; but a
battalion of the van sprang across and made one bound toward the
heart-sick and fainting Devil. He smote again with his tail, and
more strongly. Another vaster cleft went up and down the valley,
with an earth quaking roar, and a vaster torrent swept along.

Still the leading fiends were not appalled. They took the leap
without craning. Many fell short, or were crowded into the roaring
gulf, but enough were left, and those of the chiefest braves, to
martyr their chase in one instant, if they overtook him. The Devil
had just time enough to tap once more, and with all the vigor of a
despairing tail.

He was safe. A third crevice, twice the width of the second, split
the rocks. This way and that it went, wavering like lightning
eastward and westward, riving a deeper cleft in the mountains that
held back the inland sea, riving a vaster gorge through the
majestic chain of the Cascades, and opening a way for the torrent
to gush oceanward. It was the crack of doom for the fiends. A few
essayed the leap. They fell far short of the stern edge, where the
Devil had sunk panting. They alighted on the water, but whirlpools
tripped them up, tossed them, bowled them along among floating
boulders, until the buffeted wretches were borne to the broader
calms below, where they sunk. Meanwhile, those who had not dared
the final leap attempted a backward one, but wanting the impetus of
pursuit, and shuddering at the fate of their comrades, every one of
them failed and fell short; and they too were swept away, horribly
sprawling in the flood.

As to the fiends who had stopped at the first crevice, they ran in
a body down the river to look for the mangled remains of their
brethren, and, the undermined bank giving way under their weight,
every fiend of them was carried away and drowned.

So perished the whole race of fiends.

As to the Devil, he had learnt a still deeper lesson. His tail
also, the ensign of deviltry, was irremediably dislocated by his
life-saving blow. In fact, it had ceased to be any longer a needful
weapon! Its antagonists were all gone; never a tail remained to be
brandished at it, in deadly encounter.

So, after due repose, the Devil sprang lightly across the chasms he
had so successfully engineered, and went home to rear his family
thoughtfully. Every year he brought his children down to the
Dalles, and told them the terrible history of his escape. The fires
of the Cascades burned away; the inland sea was drained, and its
bed became a fair prairie, and still the waters gushed along the
narrow crevice he had opened. He had, in fact, been the instrument
in changing a vast region from a barren sea into habitable land.

One great trial, however, remained with him, and made his life one
of grave responsibility. All his children born before the
catastrophe were cannibal, stiff-tailed fiends. After that great
event, every newborn imp of his was like himself in character and
person, and wore but a flaccid tail, the last insignium of
ignobility. Quarrels between these two factions embittered his days
and impeded civilization. Still it did advance, and long before his
death he saw the tails disappear forever.

Such is the Legend of The Dalles,--a legend not without a moral.

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In the Oregon CountryChapter III: The Land of Legends

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