Umatilla was then a river town, of two or three hundred houses, mostly frame. It was still the chief point of departure from the Columbia for Idaho and Montana, though Wallula--25 miles farther up--was beginning to compete for this. Trade and travel that season had not been large, and the whole region there complained of dullness and stringency. The _Metropolitan_ was a fair hotel, with a goodly supply of eastern and California papers, and seemed like a palace after our long "roughing it" from the Missouri to the Columbia. It was well patronized, especially by babies; and I do think they were the worst _enfans terribles_ I ever saw. One doting mamma asked L. if he did not think her red-eyed, puffy-faced youngster "a _dear_ little cherub;" and though he smiled approvingly, of course, he subsequently vowed he should think better of King Herod hereafter. The town already boasted one weekly newspaper, a public school-house, and two young churches, with a goodly complement of saloons and restaurants. Of course, the patent-medicine venders had long since reached it. "S. T. 1860 X. Drake's Plantation Bitters," was emblazoned on every dead-wall, "in characters of living light," as it had been from New York there. The year before I had observed it all through the South, in over ten thousand miles of travel there; and here it was again, mysterious and blatant, at the head of navigation on the Pacific Coast. So, we had found it all through the Rocky Mountains, at Salt Lake, and Boisè, as inevitable as the stage-station and post-office; and the design was the same huge cabalistic characters always. Another advertisement accompanied us regularly across the Plains to the Rocky Mountains; but "S. T. 1860 X. etc.," followed us to the Columbia and beyond, and everywhere seemed as universal as the air--as omnipresent as sunlight. Indians were seen on the streets occasionally, but they were usually in the last stages of dissipation and degradation. They ought to be forbidden all such border towns, as their life there ends only in ruin. The white population consisted chiefly of Oregonians and Californians, of every shade of character. The Micawber type, of course, was not wanting. One afternoon, while writing in my room, a seedy individual, whom we had met at Wells' Springs, sauntered in, and, after some conversational skirmishing, solicited, "the loan of five dollars." He had been keeping a "hotel," he said, up in Owyhee, but the miners hadn't paid up their board-bills, and he was now "dead-broke," on his way back to Puget Sound. He would give his due-bill, and would certainly remit to me at San Francisco, but really couldn't tell exactly when! He claimed to be "a son of old Massachusetts, sir," and from Boston at that. But as he was odorous afar of "needle-gun" whiskey, the Hub, I suspect, would have haughtily repudiated him!