Myths and Legends of Our Own Land, vol 8 | Page 3

the devil urged a lesson from the
growing peace and joy of nature, and prayed the fiend men to desist
from killing and eating each other and live in love.
With a howl of rage at such a proposal they set upon him, tossing their
tails in such a threatening manner that he deemed it best to be off, and
as his hoofs clattered over the country his brain was busy in devising an
escape. Nearing the mountain bulwarks of an inland sea, whose
breakers' rhythmic roar he heard above the yells of his pursuers, a hope
came into his head, and new vigor into his tail, though you might have
thought the latter accession was not needed, for his tail was of
prodigious length and strength. He whirled this limb aloft and beat it on
the earth. A chasm opened at the stroke, and the devil skipped across to
the safe side of it.
Safe? No; for the fiend men in advance took the leap and came beside

him. The tormented one could thrash any two of them at once, but he
was not equal to a thousand. He brandished his weapon once more and
it fell with a crash. Earth shook, dust arose in clouds, and a deeper cleft
than before yawned through the valley. Again the fiend men tried to
reach him, and, though the gap was bigger and many fell into it,
hundreds made the jump and overtook him. He must make one more
attempt. The tail revolved for a third time, and with the energy of
despair he flailed the ground with it.
A third ravine was split through the rock, and this time the earth's crust
cracked away to the eastward, giving outlet to the sea, which came
pouring through the canon, breaking rocks from mountains and
grinding them to powder in its terrific progress. Gasping with fatigue,
the unhappy one toiled up a hill and surveyed his work with satisfaction,
for the flood engulfed the fiend men and they left no member of their
race behind them.
When they had all been happily smashed or drowned, the devil skipped
lightly over the channels he had cut and sought his family, though with
a subdued expression of countenance, for his tail--his strength and
pride--was bruised and broken beyond repair, and all the little imps that
he fathered to the world afterward had little dangling tails like
monkeys' instead of megatheriums', and in time these appendages
disappeared. But what was the use of them? The fiend men they had
fought against were dead and the rising race they could circumvent by
subtler means. The inland sea drained off. Its bed is now the prairie,
and the three strokes of the devil's tail are indelibly recorded in the bed
of the Columbia at the Dalles. And the devil never tried to be good
again.

CASCADES OF THE COLUMBIA
When the Siwash, as the Northwestern Indians called themselves, were
few, Mount Hood was kept by the Spirit of Storms, who when he shook
his robe caused rain or snow to fall over the land, while the Fire Spirit
flashed his lightnings from Mount Adams. Across the vale between
them stretched a mighty bridge of stone, joining peak to peak, and on
this the Siwash laid his offering of salmon and dressed skins. Here, too,
the tribal festivals were kept. The priestess of the arch-Mentonee, who
fed the fire on the tribal altar "unimpassioned by a mortal throb"--had

won the love of the wild tamanouses of the mountains, but she was
careless alike of coaxing and threats, and her heart was as marble to
them.
Jealous of each other, these two spirits fell to fighting, and, appalled by
the whirl of fire and cloud, of splintering trees and crumbling rocks, the
Indians fled in terror toward the lowlands, but she, unhurt and
undaunted, kept in her place, and still offered praise to the one god. Yet
she was not alone, for watchful in the shadow of a rock stood a warrior
who had loved her so long, without the hope of lovers, that he, too, had
outgrown fear. Though she had given him but passing words and never
a smile, his own heart was the warmer and the heavier with its freight,
and it was his way to be ever watching her in some place where she
might not be troubled by the sight of him.
The war waxed fiercer, and at last the spirits met at the centre of the
arch, and in roar and quake and deluge the great bridge swayed and
cracked. The young man sprang forward. He seized Mentonee in his
arms. There was time for one embrace that cheated death of sorrow.
Then, with a thunder like a bursting world, the miles of masonry