"_Tuum, tuum_," said the Indians to Cecil, in tones that imitated the roar of the cataract. It was the "Tum" of Lewis and Clark, the "Tumwater" of more recent times; and the place below, where the compressed river wound like a silver thread among the flat black rocks, was the far-famed Dalles of the Columbia. It was superb, and yet there was something profoundly lonely and desolate about it,--the majestic river flowing on forever among barren rocks and crags, shut in by mountain and desert, wrapped in an awful solitude where from age to age scarce a sound was heard save the cry of wild beasts or wilder men.
"It is the very river of death and of desolation," thought Cecil. "It looks lonely, forsaken, as if no eye had beheld it from the day of creation until now."
Looking again at the falls, he saw, what he had not before noticed, a large camp of Indians on the side nearest them. Glancing across the river, he descried on a knoll on the opposite bank--what? Houses! He could not believe his eyes; could it be possible? Yes, they certainly were long, low houses, roofed as the white man roofs his. A sudden wild hope thrilled him; his brain grew dizzy. He turned to one of the Indians.
"Who built those houses?" he exclaimed; "white men like me?"
Cecil's heart died within him. "After all," he murmured, "it was absurd to expect to find a settlement of white men here. How could I think that any but Indians had built those houses?"
Still, as they descended the steep zigzag pathway leading down to the river, he could not help gazing again and again at the buildings that so reminded him of home.
It was Wishram, the ancient village of the falls, whose brave and insolent inhabitants, more than a century later, were the dread of the early explorers and fur traders of the Columbia. It was built at the last and highest fishery on the Columbia, for the salmon could not at that time ascend the river above the falls. All the wandering tribes of the Upper Columbia came there to fish or to buy salmon of the Wishram fishers. There too the Indians of the Lower Columbia and the Willamette met them, and bartered the _hiagua_ shells, the dried berries, and _wappatto_ of their country for the bear claws and buffalo robes of the interior. It was a rendezvous where buying, selling, gambling, dancing, feasting took the place of war and the chase; though the ever burning enmities of the tribes sometimes flamed into deadly feuds and the fair-ground not infrequently became a field of battle.