The river trip will be found a very pleasant diversion after the long railway ride, and a day’s sail down the majestic Columbia is a memory-picture which lasts a life-time.  It is eighty-eight miles by rail to Portland, the train skirting the river bank up to within a few miles of the city.  By river, it is forty-five miles to the Upper Cascades, then a six-mile portage via narrow-gauge railway, then sixty miles by steamer again to Portland.  The boat leaves The Dalles at about 7 in the morning, and reaches Portland at 6 in the evening.  The accommodations on these boats are first-class in every respect; good table, neat staterooms, and courteous attendants.

This tour is planned for those who may wish to start from Portland by the Union Pacific Railway.  Take the evening train from Portland to The Dalles.  Arriving at The Dalles, walk down to the boat, which lies only a few yards down stream from the station.  Sleep on board, so that you may be ready early in the morning for the stately panorama of the river.  Another plan is to give a day to the interesting country in the near vicinity.  The Dalles proper of the Columbia begin at Celilo, fourteen miles above this point, and are simply a succession of rapids, until, nearing The Dalles Station, the stream for two and a half miles narrows down between walls of basaltic rock 130 feet across.  In the flood-tides of the spring the water in this chasm has risen 126 feet.  The word “Dalles” is rather misleading.  The word is French, “dalle,” and means, variously, “a plate,” “a flagstone,” “a slab,” alluding to the oval or square shaped stones which abound in the river bed and the valley above.  But the early French hunters and trappers called a chasm or a defile or gorge, “dalles,” meaning in their vernacular “a trough”—­and “Dalles” it has remained.  There is a quaint Indian legend connected with the spot which may interest the curious, and it runs something on this wise, Clark’s Fork and the Snake river, it will be remembered, unite at Ainsworth to form the Columbia.  It flows furiously for a hundred miles and more westward, and when it reaches the outlying ridges of the Cascade chain it finds an immense low surface paved with enormous sheets of basaltic rock.  But here is the legend: 

The legend of the dalles.

In the very ancient far-away times the sole and only inhabitants of the world were fiends, and very highly uncivilized fiends at that.  The whole Northwest was then one of the centres of volcanic action.  The craters of the Cascades were fire breathers and fountains of liquid flame.  It was an extremely fiendish country, and naturally the inhabitants fought like devils.  Where the great plains of the Upper Columbia now spread was a vast inland sea, which beat against a rampart of hills to the east of The Dalles.  And the great weapon of the fiends in warfare was their tails, which were of prodigious size and terrible strength.  Now, the wisest, strongest, and most