Theodore Winthrop

“ 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. ”

“ I felt a warm puff upon my cheek, and the nose of Klale the Trusty bent over me inquisitively.
The situation was now systematically explained. I was my old self, on the old earth wholly satisfactory, whether desirable or not. Let us at least know where we stand, — what are our facts; then, if there is anything to be done with ourselves, or made of our facts, we can make the attempt.
Something toward self-restoration may be done even by a passive, supine weakling, lying among bunch-grass, on a solitary prairie, leagues away from a house,— an unpromising set of circumstances. ”

“ Earth seemed to be subsiding into an era of peace. But the fiends would not take the hint to be peaceable; they warred as furiously as ever.
Stoutest in heart and tail of all the hostile tribes of that scathed region was a wise fiend, the Devil. He had observed the cessation in convulsions of Nature, and had begun to think out its lesson. It was a custom of the fiends, so soon as the Dalles plain became agreeably cool after an eruption, to meet there every summer and have a grand tournament after their fashion. Then they feasted riotously, and fought again until they were weary. ”

“ More than a hundred miles away on the transcontinental journey, more than a hundred miles away on the sea, these noble isolated snow-peaks are to a traveller memorials of the land he has left, or beacons, firmer than a pillar of cloud, of a land whither he goes.
Again I thought of the influence of this most impressive scenery upon its future pupils among men. The shape of the world has controlled or guided men’s growth; the look of the world has hardly yet begun to have its effect upon spiritual progress. ”

“ Unless our breakage is voluntary, determined, and habitual, we shall mend. Not behind corpulent bottles, purple, crimson, and blue, in a shop where there is a putty-faced youth with a pestle and a redolence of rhubarb, are kept the great agents of Nature, — our mother, father, — who as mother gives us life, and as father warns, flogs, cures, and guides us with severe tenderness. Air, light, and water are the trinity of simple remedies, not sold in the shops, for making a marred man new and whole again. These three medicines were liberally provided near my fainting fit on the prairie. ”

“ A valley of anarchy, — a confession that harmony of the elements was hopeless here, and that the toil of Nature for cycles working a world out of chaos, had failed, and achieved only a relapse into ruin, drearier than chaos. ”

“ With my senses newborn, my first discovery of external facts was the illimitable heaven, bright with evanescent wreaths of clouds, white and virginal. Whether, then, this were a new world where I had awakened, or the world of my ancient tenancy, I knew that the well-known laws of beauty reigned, and I need not here apostatize from old loves and old faiths. Life went on slowly reviving, drawing vigor from the air, and action, the token of life, became a necessity. ”

“ 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. ”

“ While the loop of the lasso hung poised, the black had sprung through it unerringly — straight through its open circle, — touching it only to spurn with his hindmost hoof, and then with the excitement of his success he burst forward, and took the lead of all that wild throng, dashing on like the wind. ”

“ Each bubble was so crowded with reflections from the zenith, that it must share its bursting sympathy, and marry with every bubble it overtook and touched, until it became so full of fantasies that it must merrily explode and be resolved into a drop and a sunbeam. ”

“ All five of us, the grazers three, the snorer one, and the one drowsy watcher, still trembled with the penetrating chill of drizzle on the bleak mountain-top. We might not have the instinctive cheerfulness, child and nursling of sunshine, but we soon, by way of substitute, made an inspiriting discovery, — the trail. ”

“ Civilized mankind has never yet had a fresh chance of developing itself under grand and stirring influences so large as in the Northwest.
“Yah wah, enetee,” said Fudnun, pointing to a great surging hill a thousand feet high, “mitlite skookoom tsuk, k’Lumby tsuk; there, across, is the mighty water, Columbia River.”
One more charge up this Titanic bastion, and I could fairly shout, Victory! and Time beaten in the race by a length! Up, then, my squad of cavalry. Clamber up the grassy slope, Klale the untiring. ”

“ Multitudes of agents have always been at work to poison and dwarf poets and artists in those inspiring regions of earth where nature means they shall grow as naturally as water-lilies by a lake, or palms above the thicks of tropic woods. ”

“ 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 fiend-men who warred together over all the Northwest.
As ages went on, and the fires of the Cascades began to accomplish their duty of expanding the world, earthquakes and eruptions diminished in virulence. A winter came when there was none. ”

“ The Dalles — Their Legend Klale the ardent, Gubbins the punchy, Antipodes the lubberly, had not stampeded far in their panic when the great pine-tree torch fell crashing through the woods. Fudnun easily recovered them by the light of dawn, — three horses well fed and well rested, three sinewy nags, by no means likely to be scant of breath through Falstaffian fatness, but yet stanch, and able to travel the last thirty or forty miles of my journey, before nightfall.
Prayerful for sunrise and sun-born ardors in that dull dawn were horses and men. Cold is a bitter foe of courage ”

“ There is magnetism in society, even a Fudnun’s. Strength came quicker to my flaccid tissues. I thought of my journey’s end, not far off, and toiled up that dread ascent into my saddle. Klale trudged along, and soon perceiving that I swayed about no more, and, instead of, clinging with both hands to my saddle, sat upright and held the bridle, he paced gradually into his cradling lope. ”

“ There are no absolutely wild horses in the Northwest. All the cavalier Indians have their numerous bands of horses, broken and unbroken, and wild enough, following the nomad movements of the tribe. It is a rough, punchy, hardy stock, utterly unkempt and untaught, but capable of taking care of itself, and capable also, according to the law of barbarism, of producing chance individuals of size, strength, and beauty. ”

“ At the highest water there are other minor channels, but generally this continental flood is cribbed and compressed within its three chasms suddenly opening in the level floor, each chasm hardly wider than a leap a hunted fiend might take.
In fact, the legend of this infernal spot asserts a diabolical origin for these channels in the Dalles. I give this weird and grotesque attempt at explaining strange facts in Nature, translating it into more modern form.
The Legend of the Dalles The world has been long cycles in educating itself to be a fit abode for men. ”

“ Bucephalus is worth a first-class squaw, or possibly two of those vexatious luxuries of a cheaper grade. Rosinantes go about five to the squaw. Papa gets the price; not as in civilization, where, when a squaw sells herself for a Bucephalus, a brougham, and a black coachman, she keeps and uses the equivalent. ”

“ Mothers in civilization will be pleased to compare these with their current rates.
Skloo’s prairie and the region thereabouts merits tenants more numerous than stray bands of mustangs. Succulent bunch-grass grows there in plenty for legions of graminivora to fatten on as they take gentle, wholesome exercise over the hillocks. ”