Many chiefs fell in love with Loowit because of her beauty. But she paid heed to none till there came two other chiefs, Klickitat from the north, Wiyeast from the west. As she could not decide which of them to accept as her husband, they and their people went to war. Great distress came upon the people because of this fighting. Saghalie grew angry at their evil doing, and determined to punish them. He broke down the tamahnawas bridge, and put Loowit, Wiyeast and Klickitat to death. But they had been beautiful in life, therefore Saghalie would have them beautiful in death. So he made of them the three famous snow-peaks. Wiyeast became the mountain which white men call Mount Hood; Klickitat became Mount Adams; Loowit was changed into Mount St. Helens. Always, said Saghalie, they should be clothed in garments of snow. [Illustration: Looking up the Columbia from Hood River, Oregon.] Thus was the wonderful tamahnawas bridge destroyed, and the great river dammed by the huge rocks that fell into it. That caused the Cascade rapids. Above the rapids, when the river is low, you can still see the forests that were buried when the bridge fell down and dammed the waters. [Illustration: COPYRIGHT, B. A. GIFFORD Hood River, fed by the glaciers of Mount Hood.] This noteworthy myth, fit to rank with the folk-lore masterpieces of any primitive people, Greek or Gothic, is of course only a legend. The Indian was not a geologist. True, we see the submerged forests to-day, at low water. But their slowly decaying trunks were killed, perhaps not much more than a century ago, by a rise in the river that was not caused by the fall of a natural bridge, but by a landslide from the mountains. [Illustration: A Late Winter Afternoon. View across the Columbia from White Salmon to the mouth of Hood River, showing the Hood River Valley with Mount Hood wrapped in clouds.] [Illustration: COPYRIGHT, G. M. WEISTER Memaloose Island, or Island of the Dead, last resting place of thousands of Indians. The lone monument is that of Maj. Victor Trevitt, a celebrated pioneer, who asked to be buried here among "honest men."] There is a slow and glacier-like motion of the hillsides here which from time to time compels the railways on either bank to readjust their tracks. The rapids at the Cascades, with their fall of nearly forty feet, are doubtless the result of comparatively recent volcanic action. Shaking down vast masses of rock, this dammed the river, and caused it to overflow its wooded shores above. But to the traveler on a steamboat breasting the terrific current below the government locks, as he looks up to the towering heights on either side of the narrowed channel, the invention of poor Lo's untutored mind seems almost as easy to believe as the simpler explanation of the scientist. [Illustration: "Gateway to the Inland Empire." Towering cliffs of stratified lava that guard the Columbia on each bank at Lyle, Washington.]