"Well, it said that Captain Reynolds of the army saw that eagle nest on the cottonwood tree on the island in 1866, and he thought it like enough was Lewis's eagle. And then in 1872 T. P. Roberts, in his survey, was just below those falls, and a big eagle sailed out from its nest in the old broken cottonwood, on the island below the falls, and it tackled him! He says it came and lit on the ground near him and showed fight. Then it flew around, not ten feet away, and dropped its claws almost in his face. He was going to shoot it. One of his men did shoot at it. Well, I suppose some fellow did shoot it, not long after that. I'd not like to have the thought on my mind that I'd been the man to kill the Meriwether Lewis black eagle." Rob spoke seriously, and added: "Yet in Alaska the government pays a fifty-cent bounty on eagle heads, and they killed six thousand in one year--maybe several times that, in all, for all I know--because the eagles eat salmon! Well, that didn't save the salmon. The Fraser River, even, isn't a salmon river any more; and you know how our canneries have dropped." "Poor old eagle!" said Jesse. "Well, for one, I refuse to believe that this is the Big Portage. Nothing to identify it." "Not much," admitted Rob. "Not very much now. The falls that Roberts named the Black Eagle Falls are wiped out by the dam. The island is gone, the cottonwood is gone, the eagle and his mate are gone. That's the uppermost fall of the five. It's inside the city limits, where we are now." "She was just twenty-six feet five inches of a drop," said the exact John. "Clark measured them all, the whole five of them, with the spirit level. They call the little fellow, only six feet seven inches, the Colter Falls, after John Colter, one of the expedition--only Lewis and Clark didn't name it at all, for Colter hadn't become famous then as the discoverer of the Yellowstone. "Lewis liked the big Rainbow Fall about the best of the lot--it was so clean cut, all the way across the river. He named that one, and it stuck. He named the Crooked Falls, too, and that stuck. It must have been natural for somebody to name the Great Falls, because the drop there is eighty-seven feet and three-fourths of an inch, as Clark made it with his little old hand level. But they didn't name the big fall, though they did the Crooked, which is only nineteen feet high." "Lewis saw the rainbow below this fall," said Jesse. "Of course, that's why he named it. We could go down the stair easily and see it, if we wanted to. If it's the same rainbow, and if it's still there, the only reason is they couldn't melt up the rainbow and sell it, somehow. I don't want to see it. I don't care about all the smelters. I want my old cottonwood tree and my island and my eagle!