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 has proved to be worth to our country more than all the money that has been given to missionary enterprises.

Should the Puget Sound cities become the great ports of Asia, and the ships of commerce drift from Seattle and Tacoma over the Japan current to the Flowery Isles and China; should the lumber, coal, minerals, and wheat-fields of Washington, Oregon, Montana, and Idaho at last compel these cities to rival New York and Boston, the populous empire will owe to the patriotic missionary zeal of Dr.Whitman a debt which it can only pay in honor and love.