, and concluded, that,
if there was any river, it must be unnavigable, from shoals and reefs.
He had made up his mind, that all the streams flowing into the Pacific
between the fortieth and forty-eighth parallels of latitude were mere
brooks, insufficient for vessels to navigate, and not worthy his
attention.

Capt. Grey, who reached the place shortly after, with keener observation
and deeper in-sight, saw the indications of a great river there, and
after lying outside for nine days, waiting a favorable opportunity to
enter, succeeded in doing so on the 11th of May, 1792, being the first
to accomplish that feat, and explored the lower portion of it. He gave
to the river and to the southern point the names they now bear.

Vancouver failed in the same way to discover the Fraser, the great river
of British Columbia, although he actually entered the delta of the
river, and sailed about among the sand-banks, naming one of them
Sturgeon Bank; while the Spanish explorers, who were there about the
same time, recognized the fact of its existence far out at sea, in the
irregular currents, the sand-banks, the drift of trees and logs, and
also in the depression in the Cascade Mountains, which marks its
channel.

In 1805 Lewis and Clarke, who reached the mouth of the Columbia that
year, found that the Indians called the river "_Shocatilcum_" (friendly
water).

Tourists have not yet discovered what a wonderful country this is for
sight-seeing, fortunately for us. On our passage up the Columbia, after
leaving Portland, we sat for two or three days, almost alone, on the
deck of the steamer, with nothing to break the silence but the deep
breathing of the boat, which seemed like its own appreciation of it; and
sailed past the great promontories, some of them a thousand feet high,
and watched the slender silver streams that fall from the rocks, and
felt that we were in a new world,--new to us, but older and grander than
any thing we had ever seen.

We were shown a high, isolated rock, rising far above the water, on
which was a scaffolding, where, for many generations, the Indians had
deposited their dead. They were wrapped in skins, tied with cords of
grass and bark, and laid on mats. Their most precious possessions were
placed beside them, first made unserviceable for the living, to secure
their remaining undisturbed. The bodies were always laid with the head
toward the west, because the _memaloose illahie_ (land of the dead) lay