In all this great continental barrier, throughout the changes which we have witnessed, there has been only one sea-level pass. For nearly a thousand miles northward from the Gulf of California, the single outlet for the waters of the interior is the remarkable canyon which we first saw from the distant roof of Cloud Cap Inn. Here the Columbia, greatest of Western rivers, has cut its way through ranges rising more than 4,000 feet on either hand. This erosion, let us remember, has been continuous and gradual, rather than the work of any single epoch. It doubtless began when the Cascade Mountains were in their infancy, a gap in the prolonged but low sea-dike. The drainage, first of the vast salt lake shut off from the ocean, and then of the succeeding fresh-water lakes, has preserved this channel to the sea, cutting it deeper and deeper as the earth-folds rose higher, until at last the canyon became one of the most important river gorges in the world. Thus nature prepared a vast and fruitful section of the continent for human use, and provided it with a worthy highway to the ocean. [Illustration: COPYRIGHT, KISER PHOTO CO. View from 2,300 foot elevation, west of St. Peter's Dome. The Columbia here hurries down from The Cascades with a speed varying in different seasons from six to ten miles per hour. Mosquito Island lies below, with Castle Rock opposite. Beyond, the beautiful wooded ridges rise to 4,100 feet in Arrowhead and Table Mountains, and the snowy dome of Mount Adams closes the scene, fifty miles away.] Over this beautiful region we may descry yet another dawn, the beginnings of the Northwestern world according to Indian legend. The Columbia River Indian, like his brothers in other parts of the country, was curious about the origin of the things he beheld around him, and oppressed by things he could not see. The mysteries both of creation and of human destiny weighed heavily upon his blindness; and his mind, pathetically groping in the dark, was ever seeking to penetrate the distant past and the dim future. So far as he had any religion, it was connected with the symbols of power in nature, the forces which he saw at work about him. These forces were often terrible and ruinous, so his gods were as often his enemies as his benefactors. Feeling his powerlessness against their cunning, he borrowed a cue from the "animal people," Watetash, who used craft to circumvent the malevolent gods. [Illustration: COPYRIGHT, G. M. WEISTER Oneonta Gorge, south side of the Columbia, thirty-three miles east of Portland.] These animal people, the Indian believed, had inhabited the world before the time of the first grandfather, when the sun was as yet only a star, and the earth, too, had grown but little, and was only a small island. The chief of the animal people was Speelyei, the coyote, not the mightiest but the shrewdest of them all. Speelyei was the friend of "people". He had bidden people to appear, and they "came out."