Behind this barrier, what revolutions are recorded! The inland sea, at first a huge body of ocean waters, becomes in time a fresh-water lake. In its three thousand feet of sediment, it buries the fossils of a strange reptilian life, covering hundreds of thousands of years. Cycle follows cycle, altering the face of all that interior basin. Its vast lake is lessened in area as it is cut off from the Utah lake on the south and hemmed in by upfolds on the north. Then its bed is lifted up and broken by forces of which our present-day experiences give us no example. Instead of one great lake, as drainage proceeds, we behold at last a wide country of many lakes and rivers. Their shores are clothed in tropical vegetation. Under the palms, flourish a race of giant mammals. The broad-faced ox, the mylodon, mammoth, elephant, rhinoceros, and mastodon, and with them the camel and the three-toed horse, roam the forests that are building the coal deposits for a later age. This story of the Eocene and Miocene time is also told in the fossils of the period, and we may read it in the strata deposited by the lakes. [Illustration: COPYRIGHT, KISER PHOTO CO. The Columbia near Butler, looking across to Multnomah Falls.] [Illustration: Captain Som-Kin, chief of Indian police, Umatilla reservation.] [Illustration: Multnomah Falls in Summer and Winter. This fascinating cascade, the most famous in the Northwest, falls 720 feet into a basin, and then 130 feet to the bank of the Columbia below. PHOTOS COPYRIGHT, KISER] Age succeeds age, not always distinct, but often overlapping one another, and all changing the face of nature. The Coast Range rises, shutting in vast gulfs to fill later, and form the valleys of the Sacramento and San Joaquin in California and the Willamette in Oregon, with the partly filled basin of Puget Sound in Washington. Centering along the Cascade barrier, an era of terrific violence shakes the very foundation of the Northwest. Elevations and contours are changed. New lake beds are created. Watersheds and stream courses are remodeled. Dry "coulees" are left where formerly rivers flowed. Strata are uptilted and riven, to be cross-sectioned again by the new rivers as they cut new canyons in draining the new lakes. Most important of all, outflows of melted rock, pouring from fissures in the changing earth-folds, spread vast sheets of basalt, trap and andesite over most of the interior. Innumerable craters build cones of lava and scoriæ along the Cascade uptilt, and scatter clouds of volcanic ashes upon the steady sea winds, to blanket the country for hundreds of miles with deep layers of future soil.