Heaven pity the _poor_ and old, for man has little for them that casts even a glimmer of hope, save on their waiting tombs!
The scene changes, and we stand on the deck of a river steamer with its prow pointed eastward.
For hours we have steamed along in the shadows of the Cascade mountains, through deep, dark cañons, with walls so high that the smoke-stack of our little boat seemed like a pipe-stem. “Puny thing” it is. Yet it bears us over boiling eddies and up rapids that shoot between high rocks like immense streams of silver from the great furnace of creation.
We are startled at the sound of the whistle on our deck, and grow anxious when the nearest cañon answers back, and still another takes up the sound, and the echo turns to its original starting-point, and finds its own offspring talking back in fainter voice, until it dies away like the rumbling of some fast-retreating train rushing through the open field or wooded glens.
Soon we are on board the thundering train, whirling away toward the upper cascades, swinging around curves and beneath ledges, and overhanging the rushing floods hundreds of feet below. As we fly swiftly along, the conductor, or some one familiar with this cascade country, points out the battle-grounds where the red men fought white men for their homes. The battle was a fierce one, and lasted several days, when the Indians withdrew.
There are traditions yet among Indians and white settlers; and it is related that in former times the Indians who lived along the banks of the Columbia were employed to assist the white men in transporting goods over the portages (or carrying places), and they were ill-treated by their employers, and their rights disregarded.
The invasion of the country was not the most grievous complaint. They were furnished whiskey, were debauched, and corrupted as a people, until virtue was unknown among their women; the men themselves selling their wives and daughters for the basest purposes. Degraded, polluted, and in despair, they sought to wreak vengeance on their seducers.
If those who debased them were the only victims, no just condemnation could be pronounced against them.
There is a feeling of respect for the man, though a savage he may be, who defends his home, and resents imposition even at the risk of life. But humanity revolts against the butchery of innocent persons, no matter what the color may be, or the cause of provocation of race against race.