It was a magnificent steamboat ride in those days from Portland to Lewiston. The fare was sixty dollars; meals and berths, one dollar each. A traveller would leave Portland at five A.M. on, perhaps, the _Wilson G. Hunt_, reach the Cascades sixty-five miles distant at eleven A.M., proceed by rail five miles to the upper Cascades, there transfer to the _Oneonta_ or _Idaho_ for The Dalles, passing in that run from the humid, low-lying, heavily timbered West-of-the-mountains, to the dry, breezy, hilly East-of-the-mountains. Reaching The Dalles, fifty miles farther east, he would be conveyed by another portage railroad, fourteen miles more, to Celilo. There the _Tenino_, _Yakima_, _Nez Perce Chief_, or _Owyhee_ was waiting. With the earliest light of the morning the steamer would head right into the impetuous current of the River, bound for Lewiston, two hundred and eighty miles farther yet, taking two days, sometimes three, though only one to return. Those steamers were mainly of the light-draught, stern-wheel structure, which still characterises the Columbia River boats. They were swift and roomy and well adapted to the turbulent waters of the upper River. The captains, pilots, and pursers of that period were as fine a set of men as ever turned a wheel. Bold, bluff, genial, hearty, and obliging they were, even though given to occasional outbursts of expletives and possessing voluminous repertoires of "cuss-words" such as would startle the effete East. Any old Oregonian who may chance to cast his eyes upon these pages will recall, as with the pangs of childhood homesickness, the forms and features of steamboat men of that day; the polite yet determined Ainsworth, the brusque and rotund Reed, the bluff and hearty Knaggs, the frolicsome and never disconcerted Ingalls, the dark, powerful, and nonchalant Coe, the patriarchal beard of Stump, the loquacious "Commodore" Wolf, who used to point out to astonished tourists the "diabolical strata" on the banks of the River, the massive and good-natured Strang, the genial and elegant O'Neil, the suave and witty Snow, the tall and handsome Sampson, the rich Scotch brogue of McNulty, and dozens of others, whose combined adventures would fill a volume. One of the most experienced pilots of the upper River was Captain "Eph" Baughman, who has been running on the Snake and Columbia rivers for fifty years, and is yet active at the date of this publication. W. H. Gray, who came to Waiilatpu with Whitman as secular agent of the mission, became a river man of much skill. He gave four sons, John, William, Alfred, and James, to the service of the River, all four of them being skilled captains. A story narrated to the author by Captain William Gray, now of Pasco, Washington, well illustrates the character of the old Columbia River navigators. W. H. Gray was the first man to run a sailboat of much size with regular freight up Snake River. That was in 1860 before any steamers were running on that stream. Mr.