The winters are long and intensely cold, often 30° Fahr. below zero, the snow lying deep for at least six months. Birds migrate, most of the rodents and the bears hibernate, and such animals as remain to brave the biting cold, retire where it is very difficult and often impossible to hunt or trap them. In a small lodge, made of hides or rushes, as far from windproof as a sieve would be; wrapped in miserable mantles (simply skins sewn together, or ragged blankets, bought of the Hudson’s Bay Company), cowering and shivering over the smouldering logs, are a family of savages. The nipping blasts and icy cold forbid their venturing in pursuit of food; flesh they could not cure during the summer, for they have not salt, and sun-drying is insufficient to preserve it. A miserable death, starved alike by cold and hunger, must be the fate of this, and of all Indian families away from the seaboard, but for salmon: sun-dried, it preserves its heat and flesh-yielding qualities unimpaired; uncooked, they chew it all day long, and frequently grow fat during their quasi-hybernation. The waterways are thus made available for the transport of coals and provisions necessary to keep the life-stove burning, floated free of freight up to the very doors of the Indian’s wigwam. The way he harvests this store, and preserves it for winter use, we shall see as we follow the course of the salmon in their ascent of the Columbia river. The Cascades, where the salmon first meet with a hindrance to their upward course, is a lovely spot. The vast river here breaks its way through the Cascade Mountains, a mountain-gap unequalled, I should say, in depth and extent, by any in the world. Some parts are massive walls of rock, and others wooded slopes like to a narrow valley. One can hardly imagine the possibility of so great a change in climate, and consequently vegetation, as there is betwixt this place and the Dalles, only a few miles farther up the river. I have left the Dalles when the ground was covered with snow, and within a distance of forty miles entered this gap, and found the climate to be that of summer. The sloping forests brightly green, shrubs of various sorts, tropical in appearance, immense ferns, the emerald moss clothing the rocks, over which dozens of waterfalls, unbroken for a thousand feet, tumble from the hills into the river —all together make up a scene of beauty and rich luxuriance, unlike any other part of the river.