1825, JUNE. COLUMBIA RIVER 129 



believe. The natives are inquisitive in the extreme, treacherous, and will 

 pillage or murder when they can do it with impunity. Most of the tribes 

 on the coast (the ChenooJcs, Cladsaps, Clikitats, and KillimucJcs) from 

 the association they have had with Europeans are anxious to imitate 

 them and are on the whole not unfriendly. Some of them are by no means 

 deficient of ability. Some will converse in English tolerably well, make 

 articles after the European models, &c. They are much prejudiced in 

 favour of their own way of living, although at the same time will not fail 

 to eat a most inordinate quantity if offered to them. | |My canoe-men and 

 guides were much surprised to see me make an effervescent draught and 

 drink it boiling, as they thought it. They think there are good and bad 

 spirits, and that I belong to the latter class, in consequence of drinking 

 boiling water, lighting my tobacco pipe with my lens and the sun, and 

 they call me Olla-piska, which in the Chenook tongue signifies fire. But 

 above all, to place a pair of spectacles on the nose is beyond all their 

 comprehension : they immediately place the hand tight on the mouth, 

 a gesture of dread or astonishment. 



Salmon are also caught on sandy shores, where free from large stones, 

 with a draught net in the same manner as the salmon fishing in Britain. 

 The net is made of Apocynum bark, floated by pieces of wood in lieu of 

 cork. This mode is only practised where there are no rapids or projecting 

 rocks, or places to make channels for the scoop net. From the Rapids to 

 the Great Falls, distant about fifty-eight or sixty miles, the banks are 

 steep and in many places rugged. Some of the hills are very high but 

 all destitute of trees or large shrubs. The wood becomes smaller the 

 further the river is ascended. Acer is not found above the Rapids; 

 Thuya, Pinus balsamea, 1 and one species of Populus on the edges of creeks, 

 all of which gradually diminish into low scrub-wood. Sixteen miles below 

 the Falls we are no longer fanned by the huge pine stretching its branches 

 in graceful attitude over a mountain rivulet or deep cavern, or regaled by 

 the quivering of the aspen in the breeze. Nothing but extensive plains 

 and barren hills, with the greater part of the herbage scorched and dead 

 by the intense heat. I had to cross a plain nineteen miles without a drop 

 of water, of pure white sand, thermometer in the shade 97. I suffered 

 much from the heat and reflection of the sun's rays ; and scarcely can I 

 tell the state of my feet in the evening from the heat in the dry sand ; all 

 the upper part of them were in one blister. Six miles below the Falls the 

 water rushes through several narrow channels, formed by high, barren, 

 and extremely rugged rocks about two miles long. It is called by the 

 voyageurs The Dalles. On both sides of the river very singular rocks of 

 a great height are to be seen, having all the appearance of being water- 

 worn ; not unlikely they have been the boundaries of the river at some 

 former period. The present bed of the river is more than 6000 feet lower. 

 The Falls stretch across the whole breadth of the river in an oblique 

 direction, which may be about 400 yards, about 10 or 12 feet of a perpen- 

 dicular pitch. At present its effect is somewhat hid, the water being high, 

 but I am told it is fine when the river is low. The ground on both sides is 



1 Abies balsamea, Veitch, Man. Conif. ed. 2, p. 492. 



K 



