The Log School-House on the Columbia | Page 3

waste, as to Wordsworth's unspiritual
wanderer:
"A primrose by the river's brim, A yellow primrose was to him, And it
was nothing more."
She was secretly pleased at Gretchen's wonder and surprise at the new
country, but somehow she felt it her duty to talk querulously, and to
check the flow of the girl's emotions, which she did much to excite. Her
own life had been so circumscribed and hard that the day seemed to be
too bright to be speaking the truth. She peered into the sky for a cloud,
but there was none, on this dazzling Oregon morning. The trail now
opened for a long way before the eyes of the travelers. Far ahead
gleamed the pellucid waters of the Columbia, or Oregon. Half-way
between them and the broad, rolling river a dark, tall figure appeared.
"Gretchen?"

"What, mother?"
"Gretchen, look! There goes the Yankee schoolmaster. Came way out
here over the mountains to teach the people of the wilderness, and all
for nothing, too. That shows that people have souls--some people have.
Walk right along beside me, proper-like. You needn't ever tell any one
that I ain't your true mother. If I ain't ashamed of you, you needn't be
ashamed of me. I wish that you were my own girl, now that you have
said that you love me more than anybody else in the world. That
remark kind o' touched me. I know that I sometimes talk hard, but I
mean well, and I have to tell you the plain truth so as to do my duty by
you, and then I won't have anything to reflect upon.
"Just look at him! Straight as an arrow! They say that his folks are rich.
Come out here way over the mountains, and is just going to teach
school in a log school-house--all made of logs and sods and
mud-plaster, adobe they call it--a graduate of Harvard College, too."
A long, dark object appeared in the trees covered with bark and moss.
Behind these trees was a waterfall, over which hung the crowns of
pines. The sunlight sifted through the odorous canopy, and fell upon
the strange, dark object that lay across the branching limbs of two
ancient trees.
Gretchen stopped again.
"Mother, what is that?"
"A grave--an Indian grave."
The Indians bury their dead in the trees out here, or used to do so. A
brown hawk arose from the mossy coffin and winged its way wildly
into the sunny heights of the air. It had made its nest on the covering of
the body. These new scenes were all very strange to the young German
girl.
The trail was bordered with young ferns; wild violets lay in beds of
purple along the running streams, and the mountain phlox with its

kindling buds carpeted the shelving ways under the murmuring pines.
The woman and girl came at last to a wild, open space; before them
rolled the Oregon, beyond it stretched a great treeless plain, and over it
towered a gigantic mountain, in whose crown, like a jewel, shone a
resplendent glacier.
Just before them, on the bluffs of the river, under three gigantic
evergreens, each of which was more than two hundred feet high, stood
an odd structure of logs and sods, which the builders called the Sod
School-house. It was not a sod school-house in the sense in which the
term has been applied to more recent structures in the treeless prairie
districts of certain mid-ocean States; it was rudely framed of pine, and
was furnished with a pine desk and benches.
Along the river lay a plateau full of flowers, birds, and butterflies, and
over the great river and flowering plain the clear air glimmered. Like
some sun-god's abode in the shadow of ages, St. Helens still lifted her
silver tents in the far sky. Eagles and mountain birds wheeled,
shrieking joyously, here and there. Below the bluffs the silent
salmon-fishers awaited their prey, and down the river with paddles
apeak drifted the bark canoes of Cayuses and Umatillas.
[Illustration: _Indians spearing fish at Salmon Falls._]
A group of children were gathered about the open door of the new
school-house, and among them rose the tall form of Marlowe Mann,
the Yankee schoolmaster.
He had come over the mountains some years before in the early
expeditions organized and directed by Dr. Marcus Whitman, of the
American Board of Missions. Whether the mission to the Cayuses and
Walla Wallas, which Dr. Whitman established on the bend of the
Columbia, was then regarded as a home or foreign field of work, we
can not say. The doctor's solitary ride of four thousand miles, in order
to save the great Northwest territory to the United States, is one of the
most poetic and dramatic episodes of American history. It