514

A NIGHT AT MEACHAM'S.

[1865. in the darkness, passing several other emigrants despairingly mired. At last, blinking lights, through the deep, pine woods, indicated our approach to Meacham's, a large, cheery log station on the summit, where, with twenty passengers from the west, with a roaring fire, a wholesome supper, late newspapers and comfortable beds, we passed the night.

At daylight we pressed on, in an open wagon. The roads had become impassable for coaches, and abounded in vehicles inextricably imbedded in mud. Emerging from the woods, we looked down upon the vast, bare, straw-colored valley of the Snake, dappled with sun and shade; and upon far, dim Walla Walla, the most populous town of Washington Territory. That evening (the fifth) we reached Umatilla, two hundred and ninety miles from Boise. In summer the trip is made in two days and-a-half. Thence I took steamer down the beautiful Columbia, spending

1865.]

DOWN THE BEAUTIFUL COLUMBIA.

515

one day at the pleasant town of Dalles, beside the boiling, whirling, surging river. From this point Bierstadt painted his Mount Hood. For nearly one hundred miles on the Columbia we see the noble mountain towering up grandly, with dark base and snowy scalp, though at the nearest point it is forty miles away. It is chiefest of a dozen isolated peaks rising from the backbone

of the Cascade Range. Its hight is variously given at from fourteen thousand to seventeen thousand feet. It has been disturbed by several eruptions, simultaneously with earthquakes at San Francisco and other points down the coast.

At Portland, on the first of December, I found roses in full bloom in the open air. During my stay in the pleasant city, the steamer Pacific arrived, after a passage of six days from San Francisco. She had experienced some of the perils of winter navigation on this hostile coast. The weather was a continuous gale, and the ship crowded. She had no mate on board; and her pilot died during the trip. For three days and nights the passengers were shut in the cabin; no one could keep the deck save on hands and knees; and the master, Captain Burns, never left the

516 LEWIS AND CLARK'S OLD CAMPING-GROUND. [1865. wheel. Once he was compelled to turn and run before the storm for eighty miles. Being nearly out of coal, he could not go back

FLATHEAD INDIANS.

to San Francisco; and the appalling bar at the mouth of the Columbia was so rough that he could only cross at imminent peril. Again and again he approached it; but the sea raged so madly that he dared not go on. At last, as children shut their eyes before plunging into cold water, he made a desperate attempt, and by good fortune suc ceeded in guiding the ship over in safety.

By the return trip of the Pacific I went down the river, past Astoria, past the second winter-encampment where daring old Lewis and Clark rested when half their wonderful journey was accomplished. In their notes, taken here, they report:

'The practice of flattening the head by artificial measures during infancy prevails here and among all the nations we have seen west of the Rocky Mountains; whereas to the east of that barrier the practice is perfectly unknown. This Columbus noted when he first landed in America. Soon after birth the child's head is placed between boards tightly strapped, and kept there ten or twelve months. The operation is so gradual as not to be attended with pain. The heads of children are not more than two inches thick about the upper edge of the forehead; and still thinner when first released from the bandage. The heads of adults are often a straight line from the nose to the top of the forehead.

The flowing of the great river to the sea has been sung by Mrs. Frances Fuller Victor, in a strain worthy of the inspiring theme:

The blue Columbia, sired by the eternal hills

And wedded with the sea,

O'er golden sands, tithes from a thousand rills,
Rolled in lone majesty-

1865.] OUR QUARTZ REGIONS FULL OF INTEREST. 517

Doubly pleasant seemed the kindly greetings and the cheerful comforts of San Francisco, after these long mountain wanderings. But our wild quartz regions are ever full of interest to the thoughtful visitor. Their early settlers have braved Indians and elements, endured hard fare, hard work, long banishment from civilization and from home. His spirit must be poor indeed, who can see in this nothing more than narrow greed for gold. With honorable ambition for pecuniary success, it blends that marvelous pioneer instinct which in thirty years has carried our freedom and our flag from the Mississippi to the Pacific-conquered half a continent for the future home of fifty millions of self-governed people, speaking the same language, obeying the same laws, acknowledging the same religion, of divine love and human brotherhood.

518

THE TELEGRAPH ALWAYS A MIRACLE. [1865.

CHAPTER XLII.

ON a December afternoon I left San Francisco by a little steamer which plies across the bay and winds up Petaluma creek or bayou -a channel crooked as a corkscrew, and often too narrow for a boat to turn around in, or for one to pass another.

Spending the night at Petaluma, the head of navigation, I strolled into the telegraph office for an evening chat with Dr. Lovejoy, the superintendent—a relative of Elijah P. Lovejoy, who was murdered by a mob at Alton Illinois in 1837, be cause he persisted in discussing slavery through his weekly religious newspaper. . Now, when we go all over the world to find marble white enough for those who fell later, why have we no memorial of that young hero who gave the flower of his days, capacity of high order, and finally life itself, in defense of the right to speak and to print?

During our conversation, the operator, hearing a misdirected dispatch for me passing over the wires to Healdsburg, caught it on the wing, and transcribed it. The telegraph is a perpetual miracle. No familiarity however long, makes it prosaic. How rarely its confidences are violated! Yet daily the most important and delicate messages are sent for thousands of miles, where every operator on the line may hear them passing.

To what curious skill it trains the ear! An expert telegrapher stands in the middle of a room where twenty instruments are tapping out messages from as many different places, and easily reads by sound, any one of them, not in the least confused by the rest. Once, in a disagreement, the Cincinnati Gazette was cut off from the dispatches of the Associated Press. But still when important news came over the wires, the Gazette always obtained and printed it.