months at the camp-fires; they rode by
fisheries where spear and net were rotting beside the canoe upon the
beach. And the dead--the dead lay everywhere: in the lodges, beside
the fisheries, along the trail where they had been stricken down while
trying to escape,--everywhere were the ghastly and repulsive forms.

The spirit of the few survivors was broken, and they made little
resistance to the invaders. Mongrel bands from the interior and the
coast settled in the valley after the lapse of years; and, mixing with
the surviving Willamettes, produced the degenerate race our own
pioneers found there at their coming. These hybrids were, within the
memory of the white man, overrun and conquered by the Yakimas, who
subjugated all the Indians upon Wappatto Island and around the mouth
of the Willamette in the early part of the present century. Later on,
the Yakimas were driven back by the whites; so that there have been
three conquests of the lower Willamette Valley since the fall of the
ancient race,--two Indian conquests before the white.

The once musical language of the Willamettes has degenerated into the
uncouth Chinook, and the blood of the ancient race flows mixed and
debased in the veins of abject and squalid descendants; but the story
of the mighty bridge that once spanned the Columbia at the Cascades is
still told by the Oregon Indians. Mingled with much of fable, overlaid
with myth and superstition, it is nevertheless one of the historic
legends of the Columbia, and as such will never be forgotten.

* * * * *

One word more of Cecil Gray, and our tale is done.

The Shoshone renegade, who resolved at Cecil's death to become a
Christian, found his way with a few followers to the Flat-Heads, and
settled among that tribe. He told them of what he had learned from
Cecil,--of the Way of Peace; and the wise men of the tribe pondered
his sayings in their hearts. The Shoshone lived and died among them;
but from generation to generation the tradition of the white man's God
was handed down, till in 1832 four Flat-Heads were sent by the tribe
to St. Louis, to ask that teachers be given them to tell them about
God.

Every student of history knows how that appeal stirred the heart of
the East, and caused the sending out of the first missionaries to
Oregon; and from the movement then inaugurated have since sprung all
the missions to the Indians of the West.

Thus he who gave his li