the base.  This we called Beacon Rock.  Just below is an Indian village of nine houses, situated between two small creeks.  At this village the river widens to nearly a mile in extent; the low grounds become wider, and they as well as the mountains on each side are covered with pine, spruce-pine, cottonwood, a species of ash, and some alder.  After being so long accustomed to the dreary nakedness of the country above, the change is as grateful to the eye as it is useful in supplying us with fuel.  Four miles from the village is a point of land on the right, where the hills become lower, but are still thickly timbered.  The river is now about two miles wide, the current smooth and gentle, and the effect of the tide has been sensible since leaving the rapid.  Six miles lower is a rock rising from the middle of the river to the height of one hundred feet, and about eighty yards at its base.  We continued six miles further, and halted for the night under a high projecting rock on the left side of the river, opposite the point of a large meadow.

“The mountains, which, from the great shoot to this place, are high, rugged, and thickly covered with timber, chiefly of the pine species, here leave the river on each side; the river becomes two and one-half miles in width; the low grounds are extensive and well supplied with wood.  The Indians whom we left at the portage passed us on their way down the river, and seven others, who were descending in a canoe for the purpose of trading below, camped with us.  We had made from the foot of the great shoot twenty-nine miles to-day.  The ebb tide rose at our camp about nine inches; the flood must rise much higher.  We saw great numbers of water-fowl, such as swan, geese, ducks of various kinds, gulls, plovers, and the white and gray brant, of which last we killed eighteen.”

Chapter XVII —­ From Tidewater to the Sea

Near the mouth of the river which the explorers named Quicksand River (now Sandy), they met a party of fifteen Indians who had lately been down to the mouth of the Columbia.  These people told the white men that they had seen three vessels at anchor below, and, as these must needs be American, or European, the far-voyaging explorers were naturally pleased.  When they had camped that night, they received other visitors of whom the journal makes mention:—­

“A canoe soon after arrived from the village at the foot of the last rapid, with an Indian and his family, consisting of a wife, three children, and a woman who had been taken prisoner from the Snake Indians, living on a river from the south, which we afterward found to be the Multnomah.  Sacajawea was immediately introduced to her, in hopes that, being a Snake Indian, they might understand each other; but their language was not sufficiently intelligible to permit them to converse together.  The Indian had a gun with a brass barrel and cock, which he appeared to value highly.”