as if no eye had beheld it from the day of creation until now.”
Looking again at the falls, he saw, what he had not before noticed, a large camp of Indians on the side nearest them. Glancing across the river, he descried on a knoll on the opposite bank—what? Houses! He could not believe his eyes; could it be possible? Yes, they certainly were long, low houses, roofed as the white man roofs his. A sudden wild hope thrilled him; his brain grew dizzy. He turned to one of the Indians.
“Who built those houses?” he exclaimed; “white men like me?”
The other shook his head.
“No, Indians.”
Cecil’s heart died within him. “After all,” he murmured, “it was absurd to expect to find a settlement of white men here. How could I think that any but Indians had built those houses?”
Still, as they descended the steep zigzag pathway leading down to the river, he could not help gazing again and again at the buildings that so reminded him of home.
It was Wishram, the ancient village of the falls, whose brave and insolent inhabitants, more than a century later, were the dread of the early explorers and fur traders of the Columbia. It was built at the last and highest fishery on the Columbia, for the salmon could not at that time ascend the river above the falls. All the wandering tribes of the Upper Columbia came there to fish or to buy salmon of the Wishram fishers. There too the Indians of the Lower Columbia and the Willamette met them, and bartered the hiagua shells, the dried berries, and wappatto of their country for the bear claws and buffalo robes of the interior. It was a rendezvous where buying, selling, gambling, dancing, feasting took the place of war and the chase; though the ever burning enmities of the tribes sometimes flamed into deadly feuds and the fair-ground not infrequently became a field of battle.
The houses of Wishram were built of logs, the walls low, the lower half being below the surface of the ground, so that they were virtually half cellar. At a distance, the log walls and arched roofs gave them very much the appearance of a frontier town of the whites.
As they descended to the river-side, Cecil looked again and again at the village, so different from the skin or bark lodges of the Rocky Mountain tribes he had been with so long. But the broad and sweeping river flowed between, and his gaze told him little more than his first glance had done.
They were now approaching the camp. Some of the younger braves at the head of the Cayuse train dashed toward it, yelling and whooping in the wildest manner. Through the encampment rang an answering shout.
“The Cayuses! the Cayuses! and the white medicine-man!”
The news spread like wildfire, and men came running from all directions to greet the latest arrivals. It was a scene of abject squalor that met Cecil’s eyes as he rode with the others into the camp. Never had he seen among the Indian races aught so degraded as those Columbia River tribes.
The air was putrid with decaying fish; the very skins and mats that covered the lodge-poles were black with rancid salmon and filth. Many of the men were nude; most of the women wore only a short garment of skin or woven cedar bark about the waist, falling scarcely to the knees. The heads of many had been artificially flattened; their faces were brutal; their teeth worn to the gums with eating sanded salmon; and here and there bleared and unsightly eyes showed the terrible prevalence of ophthalmia. Salmon were drying in the sun on platforms raised above the reach of dogs. Half-starved horses whose raw and bleeding mouths showed the effect of the hair-rope bridles, and whose projecting ribs showed their principal nutriment to be sage-brush and whip-lash, were picketed among the lodges. Cayote-like dogs and unclad children, shrill and impish, ran riot, fighting together for half-dried, half-decayed pieces of salmon. Prevailing over everything was the stench which is unique and unparalleled among the stenches of the earth,—the stench of an Indian camp at a Columbia fishery.[6]
Perhaps ten of the petty inland tribes had assembled there as their starting-point for the great council at Wappatto Island. All had heard rumors of the white man who had appeared among the tribes to the south saying that the Great Spirit had sent him to warn the Indians to become better, and all were anxious to see him. They pointed him out to one another as he rode up,—the man of graceful presence and delicate build; they thronged around him, naked men and half-clad women, squalid, fierce as wild beasts, and gazed wonderingly.
“It is he, the white man,” they whispered among themselves. “See the long beard.” “See the white hands.” “Stand back, the Great Spirit sent him; he is strong tomanowos; beware his anger.”
Now the horses were unpacked and the lodges pitched, under the eyes of the larger part of the encampment, who watched everything with insatiable curiosity, and stole all that they could lay their hands on. Especially did they hang on every motion of Cecil; and he sank very much in their estimation when they found that he helped his servant, the old Indian woman, put up his lodge.
“Ugh, he does squaw’s work,” was the ungracious comment. After awhile, when the lodge was up and Cecil lay weary and exhausted upon his mat within it, a messenger entered and told him that the Indians were all collected near the river bank and wished him to come and give them the “talk” he had brought from the Great Spirit.
Worn as he was, Cecil arose and went. It was in the interval between sunset and dark. The sun still shone on the cliffs above the great canyon, but in the spaces below the shadows were deepening. On the flat rocks near the bank of the river, and close by the falls of Tumwater, the Indians were gathered to the number of several hundred, awaiting him,—some squatting, Indian fashion, on the ground, others standing upright, looking taller than human in the dusky light. Mingled with the debased tribes that made up the larger part of the gathering, Cecil saw here and there warriors of a bolder and superior race,—Yakimas and Klickitats, clad in skins or wrapped in blankets woven of the wool of the mountain sheep.
Cecil stood before them and spoke, using the Willamette tongue, the language of common intercourse between the tribes, all of whom had different dialects. The audience listened in silence while he told them of the goodness and compassion of the Great Spirit; how it grieved him to see his children at war among themselves, and how he, Cecil, had been sent to warn them to forsake their sins and live better lives. Long familiarity with the Indians had imparted to him somewhat of their manner of thinking and speaking; his language had become picturesque with Indian imagery, and his style of oratory had acquired a tinge of Indian gravity. But the intense and vivid spirituality that had ever been the charm of his eloquence was in it still. There was something in his words that for the moment, and unconsciously to them, lifted his hearers to a higher plane. When he closed there was upon them that vague remorse, that dim desire to be better, that indefinable wistfulness, which his earnest, tender words never failed to arouse in his hearers.
When he lifted his hands at the close of his “talk,” and prayed that the Great Spirit might pity them, that he might take away from them the black and wicked heart of war and hate and give them the new heart of peace and love, the silence was almost breathless, broken only by the unceasing roar of the falls and the solemn pleading of the missionary’s voice.
He left them and returned through the deepening shadows to his lodge. There he flung himself on the couch of furs the old Indian woman had spread for him. Fatigued with the long ride of the day and the heavy draught his address had made on an overtaxed frame, he tried to sleep.
But he could not. The buildings of the town of Wishram across the river, so like the buildings of the white man, had awakened a thousand memories of home. Vivid pictures of his life in New England and in the cloisters of Magdalen came before his sleepless eyes. The longing for the refined and pleasant things that had filled his life rose strong and irrepressible within him. Such thoughts were never entirely absent from his mind, but at times they seemed to dominate him completely, driving him into a perfect fever of unrest and discontent. After tossing for hours on his couch, he arose and went out into the open air.
The stars were bright; the moon flooded the wide canyon with lustre; the towering walls rose dim and shadowy on either side of the river whose waters gleamed