Leaving The Dalles in the morning, a splendid panorama begins to unfold on this lordly stream—­“Achilles of rivers,” as Winthrop called it.  It is difficult to describe the charm of this trip.  Residents of the East pronounce it superior to the Hudson, and travelers assert there is nothing like it in the Old World.  It is simply delicious to those escaped from the heat and dust of their far-off homes to embark on this noble stream and steam smoothly down past frowning headlands and “rocks with carven imageries,” bluffs lined with pine trees, vivid green, past islands and falls, and distant views of snowy peaks.  There is no trip like it on the coast, and for a river excursion there is not its equal in the United States.

The Isle of the dead.

Twelve miles below “The Dalles” there is a lonely, rugged island anchored amid stream.  It is bare, save for a white monument which rises from its rocky breast.  No living thing, no vestige of verdure, or tree, or shrub, appears.  And Captain McNulty, as he stood at the wheel and steadied the “Queen,” said: 

“That monument?  It’s Victor Trevet’s.  Of course you never heard of him, but he was a great man, all the same, here in Oregon in the old times.  Queer he was, and no mistake.  Member of one of the early legislatures; sort of a general peacemaker; everybody went to him with their troubles, and when he said a lawsuit didn’t go, it didn’t, and he always stuck up for the Indians, and always called his own kind ‘dirty mean whites.’  I used to think that was put on, and maybe it was, but anyhow that’s the way he used to talk.  And a hundred times he has said to me, ’John, when I die, I want to be buried on Memaloose Isle.’  That’s the ’Isle of the Dead,’ which we just passed, and has been from times away back the burial place of the Chinook Indians.  It’s just full of ’em.  And I says to him, ‘Now, Vic., it’s fame your after.’  ‘John,’ says he, ’I’ll tell you:  I’m not indifferent to glory; and there’s many a big gun laid away in the cemetery that people forget in a year, and his grave’s never visited after a few turns of the wheel; but if I rest on Memaloose Isle, I’ll not be forgotten while people travel this river.  And another thing:  You know, John, the dirty, mean whites stole the Indian’s burial ground and built Portland there.  Everyday the papers have an account of Mr. Bigbug’s proposed palace, and how Indian bones were turned up in the excavation.  I won’t be buried alongside any such dirty, mean thieves.  And I’ll tell you further, John, that it may be if I am laid away among the Indians, when the Great Day comes I can slip in kind of easy.  They ain’t going to have any such a hard time as the dirty whites will have, and maybe I won’t be noticed, and can just slide in quiet along with their crowd.’