So, all day long, troop after troop crossed the river to the island, emerging like shadows from the smoke that seemed to wrap the world,--each with its sickly faces, showing the terrible spread of the pestilence; each helping to swell the great horror that brooded over all, with its tale of the sick and dead at home, and the wild things seen on the way. Band after band the tribes gathered, and when the sun went down the war-chief's obsequies took place.
[Illustration: _Multnomah's Death-canoe._]
It was a strange funeral that they gave Multnomah, yet it was in keeping with the dark, grand life he had lived.
A large canoe was filled with pitch and with pine-knots,--the most inflammable materials an Oregon forest could furnish. Upon them was heaped all that was left of the chief's riches, all the silks and velvets that remained of the cargo of the shipwrecked vessel lost upon the coast long before. And finally, upon the splendid heap of textures, upon the laces and the damasks of the East, was laid the dead body of Multnomah, dressed in buckskin; his moccasins on his feet, his tomahawk and his pipe by his side, as became a chief starting on his last journey.
Then as night came on, and the smoky air darkened into deepest gloom, the canoe was taken out into the main current of the Columbia, and fire was set to the dry knots that made up the funeral pyre. In an instant the contents of the canoe were in a blaze, and it was set adrift in the current. Down the river it floated, lighting the night with leaping flames. On the shore, the assembled tribe watched it in silence, mute, dejected, as they saw their great chief borne from them forever. Promontory and dusky fir, gleaming water and level beach, were brought into startling relief against the background of night, as the burning vessel neared them; then sank into shadow as it passed onward. Overhead, the playing tongues of fire reddened the smoke that hung dense over the water, and made it assume distorted and fantastic shapes, which moved and writhed in the wavering light, and to the Indians seemed spectres of the dead, hovering over the canoe, reaching out their arms to receive the soul of Multnomah.
"It is the dead people come for him," the Willamettes whispered to one another, as they stood upon the bank, watching the canoe drift farther and farther from them, with the wild play of light and shadow over it. Down the river, like some giant torch that was to light the war-chief along the shadowy ways of death, passed the burning canoe. Rounding a wooded point, it blazed a moment brilliantly beside it, and as it drifted to the farther side, outlined the intervening trees with fire, till every branch was clearly relieved against a flaming background; then, passing slowly on beyond the point, the light waned gradually, and at last faded quite away.