Here the boat stops; for you are here at the lower end of the famous Cascades, and you tranship yourself into cars which carry you to the upper end, a distance of about six miles, where again you take boat for Dalles City.
[Illustration: MAP OF PUGET SOUND AND VICINITY.] The Cascades are rapids.

The river, which has ever a swift and impetuous current, is nearly two miles wide just above these rapids.

Where the bed shoals it also narrows, and the great body of water rushes over the rocks, roaring, tumbling, foaming--a tolerably wild sight.

There is nowhere any sudden descent sufficient to make a water-fall; but there is a fall of a good many feet in the six miles of cascades.
These rapids are considered impassable, though I believe the Indians used sometimes to venture down them in canoes; and it was my good fortune to shoot down them in a little steamer--the _Shoshone_--the third only, I was told, which had ever ventured this passage.

The singular history of this steamboat shows the vast extent of the inland navigation made possible by the Columbia and its tributaries.