The Des Chutes was safely forded by the teams, under the direction of an Indian guide, and the women and children were taken across it in a canoe.
The wild and broken desolation of the plains now gave way to vast alluvial uplands,—dry, owing to the season, but giving promise of great prosperity for future husbandmen. Ntunerous gulches intersected the otherwise unbroken level, upon which the teams would often conie without warning; therefore travel was difficult and progress slow.
"If the season were not so far advanced, I'd like to stop over at The Dalles and visit the mission,'* said Captain Ranger; "but a storm is threatening, and it will never do to risk such an experience in the Cascade Mountains."
"Quite right you air!" exclaimed a mountaineer, who visited the train avowedly in search of a wife. None of the women or girls saw fit to accept the negotiations proposed; but his advice as to a coming storm was good. The train, in seeking to slip through the mountains by the way of Barlow's Gap,—a road made passable for teams by the indefatigable labors of an honored pioneer, whose name it perpetuates,—was halted just in time to prevent a disastrous ending.
Captain Ranger's worn and famishing cattle were reinforced at Barlow's Gap by two yokes of fat oxen sent to the rescue by an immigrant of 1850,—a grand and enterprising preacher of the gospel, who, all unknown, even to himself, was a striking example of a working parson, imbued with the practical idea of what constitutes a "Church of the Big Licks." Not that he was pugnacious, but he was philanthropic and practical and enterprising; and many are the beneficiaries of his industry and skill who have long survived his ministry, and date their material progress in Oregon, as well as their spiritual welfare, to this practical promoter of an every-day religion.
