The Dalles of the Columbia are simply a succession of falls and rapids, not reaching over as great a distance as the Cascades, but containing one feature much more remarkable than any thing which the Cascades afford, and indeed, so far as I know, found nowhere else.

The Columbia above the Dalles is still a first-class river, comparable in depth and width, and in the volume of its water, only with the Lower Mississippi or the Amazon.  It is a deep, rapidly-flowing stream, nearly a mile wide.  But at one point in the Dalles the channel narrows until it is, at the ordinary height of the river, not over a hundred yards wide; and through this narrow gorge the whole volume of the river rushes for some distance.  Of course water is not subject to compression; the volume of the river is not diminished; what happens, as you perceive when you see this singular freak of nature, is that the river is suddenly turned up on its edge.  Suppose it is, above the Dalles, a mile wide and fifty feet deep; at the narrow gorge it is but a hundred yards wide—­how deep must it be?  Certainly it can be correctly said that the stream is turned up on its edge.

The Dalles lie five or six miles above Dalles City; and you pass these rapids in the train which bears you to Celilo early the next morning after you arrive at Dalles City.  Celilo is not a town; it is simply a geographical point; it is the spot where, if you were bound to the interior of the continent by water, you would take steamboat.  There is here a very long shed to shelter the goods which are sent up into this far-away and, to us Eastern people, unknown interior; there is a wharf where land the boats when they return from a journey of perhaps a thousand miles on the Upper Columbia or the Snake; there are two or three laborers’ shanties—­and that is all there is of Celilo; and your journey thither has been made only that you may see the Dalles, and Cape Horn, as a bold promontory on the river is called.

What I advise you to do is to take a hearty lunch with you, and, if you can find one, a guide, and get off the early Celilo train at the Dalles.  You will have a most delightful day among very curious scenery; will see the Indians spearing salmon in the pools over which they build their stages; and can examine at leisure the curious rapids called the Dalles.  A party of three or four persons could indeed spend several days very pleasantly picnicking about the Dalles, and in the season they would shoot hare and birds enough to supply them with meat.  The weather in this part of Oregon, east of the Cascade range, is as settled as that of California, so that there is no risk in sleeping-out-of-doors in summer.