To view this great picture gallery of history and physiography, we may have the choice of nearly every method of travel, horseback, afoot, by team (though the waggon roads are not continuous), or by train, on either bank. The river himself offers his broad back for any kind of craft. Several swift and elegant steamers make daily trips between Portland and The Dalles, passing through the Government canal and lock at the Cascades. Launches, scows, sailing craft of almost every kind, are in constant movement, loaded with every sort of commodity. Of all the means of transit, however, we will, if you please, float down the stately stream in our well-tried skiff. Independent as the Coyote god Speelyei when he used to pass up and down the river, transforming presumptuous beasts or mortals into rock at will, we will drift with the current, partaking of the very life of the rich and multifarious nature about us. We can pause as we wish on jutting crag or fir-crowned promontory or at the foot of spouting cataract. We can camp for the night beneath some wide-spreading pine, and breathe the balsamic fragrance of the "continuous woods." We can trace the historic stages of bateaux or canoes or immigrant flatboats, and open and shut the camera at will amid the open volumes of our heroic age of discovery and settlement, or the yet vaster and grander epoch of Nature's creative day. No palace car or even floating palace of steamer for us when we can have two or three days of such unalloyed bliss in an open skiff moving at our own sweet will. We shall find here a marked change in the movement of the river as compared with its prevailing character in the five hundred miles from the British line to The Dalles. The impetuous might above has become transformed into a slow and stately majesty. With the exception of the five miles at the Cascades round which the canal passes, the river below The Dalles is deep and calm, seldom less than a mile in width. Of the almost numberless objects at which we level eye and camera, we can here describe but few.