[Illustration: Where the Oregon Trunk Railway crosses the Columbia. "The river rolls between banks of barrenness"
Copyright 1912 by Kiser Photo Co., Portland, Ore.]
Evidently it was while held captive by the "villain malady" that Winthrop learned from the Indians the legend of The Dalles, which he told so well that to paraphrase it would be folly. Here I give it, as extracted from the thumb-marked little book whose publication date is 1863:
The world has been long cycles in educating itself to be a fit abode for men. Man, for his part, has been long ages in growing upward through lower grades of being, to become whatever he now may be. The globe was once nebulous, was chaotic, was anarchic, and is at last become somewhat cosmical. Formerly rude and convulsionary forces were actively at work, to compel chaos into anarchy and anarchy into order. The mighty ministries of the elements warred with each other, each subduing and each subdued. There were earthquakes, deluges, primeval storms, and furious volcanic outbursts. In this passionate, uncontrolled period of the world's history, man was a fiend, a highly uncivilized, cruel, passionate fiend.
The northwest was then one of the centres of volcanic action. The craters of the Cascades were fire-breathers, fountains of liquid flame, catapults of red-hot stones. Day was lurid, night was ghastly with this terrible light. Men exposed to such dread influences could not be other than fiends, as they were, and they warred together cruelly, as the elements were doing.
Where the great plains of the Upper Columbia now spread, along the Umatilla, in the lovely valley of the Grande Ronde, between the walls of the Grand Coulee, was an enormous inland sea filling the vast interior of the continent, and beating forever against ramparts of hills, to the east of the desolate plain of the Dalles.
Every winter there were convulsions along the Cascades, and gushes of lava came from each fiery Tacoma, to spread new desolation over desolation, pouring out a melted surface, which, as it cooled in summer, became a fresh layer of sheeny, fire-hardened dalles.
Now as the fiends of that epoch and region had giant power to harm each other, they must have of course giant weapons of defence. Their mightiest weapon of offence and defence was their tail; in this they resembled the iguanodons and other "mud pythons" of that period, but no animal ever had such force of tail as these terrible monster fiendmen who warred together all over the Northwest.