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CHAPTER II

Historical Background

LOOKING BACK

The Pacific Northwest has recently become very conscious of its history. Everywhere historic roads and trails and the campsites of famous exploring or pioneering parties are being re-marked; old blockhouses, forts of the Indian War days, early cabins, and fur trading posts are now carefully preserved or restored; and the gracious houses of the first days of wealth and leisure are re-furnished by the women of pioneer societies.

From early summer to mid-autumn, one can see in almost any town embarrassed young men going about their normal business wearing an imposing growth of whiskers, and young women swishing self-consciously down the streets in the long full-skirted dresses of another period. These are unmistakable signs of a Pageant, a Fair, a Round-up, a Jubilee, a Stampede, a Potlatch, or just a simple Celebration.

The university town of Eugene, Oregon, gives a performance every three years which might serve as a model of what a good pageant can be when a community of above-average people whole-souledly devote themselves to a spectacle intended not alone to please boosters but to give enjoyment to poets, musicians, and artists. Goodwin Thacher, the University of Oregon professor who writes the scripts, does not do just a “continuity,” he does a “poem,” a “song.” Some three thousand people and five hundred animals take part in these great outdoor performances. All the university resources are tapped, including the departments of Drama, Music, and English, and the School of Physical Education, which helps train the dancers. The Eugene Gleemen and the Women’s Choral Union take part. All the rural families from the pioneer county of Lane contribute costumes, equipment, and participants. There is no speaking, only singing, music, and pantomime; and the parade is so complete that the one criticism ever leveled at it (and old-timers can be very critical) was made by a woman from arid eastern Oregon who said that it had “everything except water-witches”—an oversight which the Eugene Register Guard was pretty sure would be corrected next time.

At these anniversary celebrations the local papers find delight in reprinting the singularly inept prophecies of certain men who fought the annexation of Oregon Territory when it was a matter of debate in the United States Senate. The eminent Mr. Daniel Webster often commands a lead paragraph with his long-remembered words of the 1840s: “What can we do with the western coast, a coast of 3,000 miles, rockbound, cheerless, uninviting and not a harbor on it? What use have we for such a country? I will never vote one cent from the public treasury to place the Pacific Ocean one inch nearer Boston than it is now.”

Senator McDuffie of South Carolina was pleased to state that he would not “give a pinch of snuff for the whole territory.” He went so far as to wish that “the Rocky mountains were an impassable barrier”; while even Senator Thomas H. Benton, Oregon’s staunch friend, considered that perhaps these rocky peaks had indeed been “placed by Providence” to mark the western limits of the States and set thus a boundary to man’s ambitions.

Many of the best minds of the period were solidly against the settling of these distant lands; but there were, fortunately, a number of simple people willing to set out on one of those almost mystical American drives in search of the promised land.

EXPLORERS BY BOAT

When the local papers publish short résumés of Northwest coast history, many accounts begin with Balboa wading into the Pacific far to the south in 1513, flag in hand, to claim all the shoreline of this unexplored ocean in the name of his country. This included the lands of the Northwest, which Balboa did not see, and it was Spain’s first claim to the territory which at one time, from her Mexican seat, she wished to annex to herself.

In the sixteenth century most of the famous European mariners were busy searching for something which did not exist except in wishful thinking, the legendary Strait of Anian, or Northwest Passage to the Orient.

About the time that Henry VIII was scandalizing Christendom with his goings-on a Spanish galleon under Bartolome Ferrelo moved cautiously up the west coast, perhaps as far as the forty-third parallel, which means that Ferrelo was the first white man to reach the latitude of Oregon. In 1579, Francis Drake, busy making life uncomfortable for the Spaniards in the name of Henry’s daughter the Virgin Queen of England—a perverse jade who wouldn’t say yes or no to the king of Spain on the subject of matrimony—sailed his famous Golden Hind along the same wild coast. Some authorities say he reached the forty-eighth parallel, which would be about on a line with the town of Everett, Washington. Others say he certainly sailed no farther than the forty-third parallel. But however far Drake got he gave as his reason for turning back a report of weather conditions which well-read native sons have been resenting ever since. Although it was June the “chaplain” to his roistering buccaneers claimed that they traveled in intense cold and snow. Residents of the Pacific Northwest, who boast of roses in January—although the land lies in the latitude of Newfoundland— quite frankly don’t believe Parson Fletcher’s story.

After Drake, Sebastian Vizcaino came in 1602 from Spain to Monterey in California and from there pushed on north the following year as far as the forty-third parallel, leaving a record of his passing in the names of such Oregon coast promontories as Cape Blanco and San Sebastian.

In the years that followed, until 1774, so far as records go—though Oregon Indian myths say otherwise—no alien eye was laid upon that roaring coastline, no outsider caught a glimpse of naked red men with deformed heads, faces painted with mica and ochre; holding their annual food gathering expeditions for fish, roots, berries; fasting and communicating with spirits; performing their mystic rites. While European nations contended for the eastern part of the New World, the western part slept in wild beauty, its snowcapped peaks unassailed, its records of geologic convulsions— exploding mountains, seas of lava, prehistoric oceans—unread by knowing eye. The hundreds of miles of waterways were disturbed only by Indians paddling their dugout canoes, chanting their minor songs on the waters of Whulge, their name for the inland sea; looking respectfully at the Mountain that was God—which no red man dared approach—or at Kulshan, the White Watcher—the Mt. Ararat of their flood legend, now known prosaically as Baker.

In 1774 Spain roused herself for another effort on the Pacific to consolidate her claims there. She sensed a threat in Russian activity far up the Northwest coast and in the gradual pushing overland of the fur companies from Hudson’s Bay. Up the west coast then sailed Juan Perez, bringing back little of value except word that the northern Indians would seem to have had white communication since they had iron trinkets in their possession. Perez was followed in 1775 by Bruno Heceta who formally claimed the Northwest lands for Spain and who brought back a report of turbulent discolored water off the shore to the north which was probably the Columbia resisting the Pacific with a fierceness so pronounced that it took years for mariners to fight their way into her waters. Neither of these two Spanish mariners got as far north as Alaska, where the Danish captain Vitus Bering, in service to the fabulous Tsar Peter, had already discovered the sea otters, destined to play such a significant part in Northwestern development.

It was left to Englishmen to publicize the big trade discovery on the west coast. As a result of the travels of Captain James Cook, who came out in 1776 from London, word got back of fortunes in furs to be had in this part of the world. On the return journey Cook’s ship stopped at Canton and the sailors discovered that the Chinese would pay fabulous sums for the shabby sea otter furs they had bought from the Nootka Sound natives for sundry metal oddments like old coat buttons and drawer handles.

In spite of Cook’s discovery it took some years for trade to get brisk on this distant coast. No names need concern us in this period except that of John Meares, since it is through him, as Philip Parrish has said in Before The Covered Wagon, “that the current of history runs.” Meares is famed for a number of things, including the launching on this bleak northern shore of the first boat to be built on the Pacific coast; built moreover by fifty Cantonese—the first Chinese laborers to be brought to this country. Word of Meares’s activities up north got about among the Mexican and California Spaniards, and they sent a company north to seize ships, build forts, and in general make it plain to the British that these waters belonged to Spain. Meares heard of it in China and took home a full and angry report to London. It almost caused a European war. Meares insisted that he had purchased Nootka Sound—so named by Captain Cook who spelled it as he thought the Indians pronounced it—and there was no one to prove that he hadn’t, so in the end after some hot words and musket brandishing Spain relinquished her claims. The Nootka Sound Controversy brought Captain George Vancouver up the coast, as representative for England, and Vancouver can never be forgotten here because he managed to give geographic names that have stuck all these years: the mountains Rainier and Baker, Hood Canal, the islands of Whidby and Vashon, Port Townsend and Port Orchard, Admiralty Inlet, Bellingham Bay, and Howe Sound. Vancouver’s lieutenant, William Broughton, named a point on the Columbia River for his master and gave the snowcap he saw in the distance the name of Mt. Hood.

While Spain and England were arguing over their rights, these western waters had begun to give anchorage to Yankee ships whose crews also bartered for furs in summer and wintered in Hawaii. The stage was slowly being set for that markedly bloodless quarrel by which mighty expanding England and the still insignificant but ambitious United States were to determine whose country this Pacific Northwest really was.

THE RIVER OF FABLE THAT REALLY EXISTED

For many years it seemed likely that the tale of a mighty westward-flowing river, rising in a mountain of shining stones and emptying into the great sunset ocean, was but another compound of Indian myth and white man’s dreamings. Perhaps no river in history has enjoyed so much enshrouding of mystery as the Columbia, long called the Oregan or Oregon—a name whose genesis is lost.

There was a Yazoo chief named Moncacht-apé who—sometime during the middle of the eighteenth century—got bored with his restricted life in the valley of the Mississippi and set out to verify tales he’d heard of great oceans to the east and west. He went first to see the Atlantic and reported to a French explorer, who has told his tale for posterity, that his “eyes were too small for his soul’s ease.” He then set off promptly to find the great western body of salt water. He said he got to the Pacific by way of a great westward-flowing river, and if one believes the tale at all it seems likely that this was the Columbia.

Even while the British were still looking for that long-sought Northwest Passage by way of Hudson’s Bay, a Connecticut captain named Jonathan Carver had returned from extensive travels in the interior of America with tales of a great river which he called the Oregan—a name he claimed to have got from Indians. Carver had maps, too, somewhat fanciful ones, and he took his maps and his tales and his mysterious river name with him to London, where perhaps he imagined he would have a better audience. Carver averred that the British planned to send an expedition down this river and establish forts at its mouth. But Captain Cook’s unwitting discovery of fortunes in furs had already begun to turn a tide of mariners toward the Northwest coast. Unhappily for England’s plans the American colonies decided to break their bonds with the mother country and it remained for a Boston fur trader, Robert Gray, to immortalize himself in 1792 by discovering the fabled river—and naming it for his hardy little craft, the Columbia.

Gray, undaunted by the names Cape Disappointment and Deception Bay, with which the explorer Meares left record of his failure to find the River of the West, succeeded in putting his little ship over the bar that hid with such wild fury of foam and wave the spot where the Columbia met the Pacific. Gray sailed twenty-five miles upriver, hoisted the American flag, and planted some Pine Tree shillings in the soil. Vancouver sent an expedition under Broughton up the stream much farther than Gray had gone, to lend weight to England’s possible claims. But the fact that Gray—though only a fur trader without government authority—had been there first was to prove helpful later in establishing America’s colonization rights by virtue of “discovery” rights.

EXPLORERS ON FOOT

No expedition by foot across uncharted terrain can compare in human interest with an American expedition of 1804 and 1805 made by two Virginia gentlemen (one with chronic melancholia), a party of twenty-nine ill-assorted men, and Sacajawea, an Indian woman won for small change in a gambling game. This was the Lewis and Clark expedition which the farsighted president, Jefferson, organized to explore the western part of the American continent, to which he thought the United States had as good a right as any other country. Shrewd Mr. Jefferson concealed his real intentions under a display of interest—quite sincere but secondary—in mastodon bones, botanical specimens, and commercial treaties with the Indians, but he apparently had it in his mind to get Americans into the valley of the Columbia in order to add some “rights by exploration” to that “right by discovery” which Gray’s river trip was believed to be.

Jefferson’s interest in this remote land was probably given impetus by the enthusiasms of an unusual character named John Ledyard whom he met in Paris while serving as ambassador. Ledyard was a well-born adventurer who, though American, had served under English flags and had made the trip with Captain Cook when the possibilities of the fur trade were first perceived. When Jefferson knew Ledyard, he was full of a plan to cross Europe and Siberia to Kamchatka, enlist there on a Russian trader, desert ship somewhere on the west coast, and come back on foot to the American colonies. Poor Ledyard died before he accomplished any of his plans, but he is believed to have sowed in Jefferson’s mind the first seed of the idea of an overland expedition.

The Lewis and Clark trip cost twenty-five thousand dollars and took two years. The leaders left a journal which, oddly enough, had to wait one hundred years for publication. This journal remains one of the great chronicles of human endurance and sound psychological practices under trying conditions. Clark had his negro, York, with him and York was a famous dancer. His solo numbers never failed to please the Indians they encountered en route. In fact York’s black skin, Lewis’s red hair, the company’s possession of such miraculous objects as a compass, a magnet, and a spyglass, played no small part in aweing the Indians into hospitality whenever Sacajawea’s helpful family connections weren’t enough to smooth the way. The company also had a violinist and the violin survived the trip out and back and was often pressed into use to raise the spirits of the men when they flagged from weariness. There were certain medicine show aspects to this important early expedition; the dancing, the freaks, and the distribution by Lewis to the Indians of ointments, eye wash, and Rush’s pills. Lewis and Clark observed Christmas as best they could. Even at Fort Clatsop in sodden weather when they were ridden with fleas, and the only food was moldy elk’s meat, bad fish, and a few roots, they exchanged gifts. Sacajawea, or “Janey” as the Journals sometimes refer to her, gave Clark two dozen white weasel tails, while Lewis offered fleece underwear, and all the men received either tobacco or handkerchiefs.

When Meriwether Lewis got back to the States and made his report to the president, a good part of it was taken up with an analysis of the conditions for fur trading in the far west, and to suggestions as to where and how to establish centers for carrying on a business which was bound to grow increasingly profitable as the use of furs ceased to be a luxury—possible only for the very rich in Europe—and began, instead, to be a fashion.

FURS

In the early years of the fur trade on the west coast the deck of the vessel was the place of business. Bold seamen and traders wove a strange and colorful embroidery of old and new, East and West; London, Canton, Boston, St. Petersburg, Nootka Sound, and the Sandwich Islands. There were chiefs from Owyhee, as Hawaii was then known (a name still to be found in Oregon geography), and Indian chiefs with the wanderlust who exchanged visits. One Nootka Sound dignitary returned to his people from a visit to China wearing a queue into which had been braided so many copper handles from saucepans and frying pans that he could scarcely stand upright. He also had bits of metal sewed to all possible parts of his garments and he set foot on his native soil carrying a large skillet, snatched from the indignant cook in the galley at the last moment. He disembarked a millionaire, for in those days the northern Indians prized metal above all things.

What to trade with the Indians for their furs was a matter of great import to the early men in the Far West, and it remained so, long after the trade had been organized into a land business with posts established in the Northwestern wilderness. Yankee traders, who were a little more on the freelance side, used whiskey to their subsequent discredit and in marked contrast to the Hudson’s Bay Company, which, under the canny John McLoughlin ruling at Fort Vancouver from the 1820s to the 1840s, absolutely forbade it as an article of trade. It is said that when the first Indians on the coast tasted firewater—presumably given to them by Vancouver’s man Broughton—they were so astonished and ashamed of the way they felt that they ran into the bushes and hid until they recovered. But aversion did not last long. To this day it is against the law to sell an Indian liquor, and whether it is true that he is congenitally unable to handle it or has just never been allowed to learn how to take care of it, one would hesitate to say. Newspapers frequently print stories of the death of Indians from some fancy concoctions they make for themselves with which to while away the rainy evenings of winter. The Muckleshoot Indian Reservation near Auburn, Washington, had a number of deaths recently from some cocktails of “Antifreeze” shaken up with huckleberry and blackberry juices from the summer harvest.

The Yankee “mountain man,” after a successful day of exchanging drinks for furs, sometimes found it necessary at night to establish a sober guard over his own person. This guard was required from time to time to fire off his gun to prove that he was still in possession of his faculties. Waking up to find himself in a circle of dead Indians was apparently not too novel an experience for this early commercial traveler.

Tobacco was always a good medium of exchange with the red men. Little mirrors and boxes of paint were in great favor also, for even the fiercest braves thought nothing of sitting in the sunlight making up their faces. Although the shrewd and redoubtable “Father of Old Oregon,” John McLoughlin, managed by a combination of good works and fox-like cunning to keep the Yankee traders pretty well out of the Hudson’s Bay domain, he was not always completely successful. In The White Headed Eagle Richard Montgomery tells of the visit at Vancouver of Captain William McNeill, of the Boston Brig Llama, who brought in a cargo of gimcracks which McLoughlin knew at once, with sinking heart, would have an irresistible appeal to the Indians: brightly painted jumping jacks, whistles, and wooden soldiers. The Indians seem to have learned extremely slowly how to trade with the whites. Long after the fur business had dwindled and disappeared, an Indian would do almost anything from committing murder to cutting a cord of wood for a brightly painted tin pail.

The Indians learned slowly but they had their own shrewdness. Tales survive of feasts given to traders of the American Fur Company in which dog, attractively “cooked to a jelly,” was the pièce de résistance. Fortunately the trader could hire a proxy to eat his meal without giving offense to his hosts, and along with the passing of the dish of dog flesh to this proxy there always went a gift, or bribe, of tobacco. One writer hints that the Indians might have figured out something for themselves: “They knew that but few traders would eat dog meat and anticipated the gift of tobacco.”

One comes to enjoy stories of the Northwest Indian with his tongue in his cheek. An Indian who respectfully offered twenty horses for his pick of a family of beautiful white girls crossing the plains in 1842 was amazed to find the father affronted. The interpreter was righteously unctuous in his explanation that white men did not sell their women. The logical red man came back with the remark that he had observed that white men frequently bought Indian girls for their wives and he didn’t see why the custom wasn’t reciprocal.

In the early years of the fur trade, and for some time after, the wives and women companions of white men were inevitably Indian women. McLoughlin, who played host at Vancouver in frontier splendor to all international travelers of the period, was married to an Indian woman, the widow of Alexander McKay, an Astor partner who died in the massacre on the Tonquin. Although from all accounts a most remarkable woman, Mrs. McLoughlin played no role of chatelaine in her husband’s feudal stronghold. This was a wholly masculine world.

The days of McLoughlin were the great ones of the fur trade. The Hudson’s Bay Company was an organization so ancient, so haughty, and so powerful that early pioneers suggested that its initials might well have stood for “Here Before Christ.” The Brigade of Boats came down the Columbia every June with the French Canadian voyageurs singing as they paddled in all their brilliant finery, donned near the end to effect a musical comedy finish to long weeks of grilling travel, beginning far to the north, working slowly south and west by canoe and horse.

Although the Hudson’s Bay Company was the oldest fur company in the New World (its charter for “gentlemanly” exploitation going back to 1670) it was third in the rich Pacific Northwest field, arriving there in the 1820s. The North-West Fur Company of Canada had already planted posts in Old Oregon as early as 1807 and explored the western territory; and there was also John Jacob Astor’s ill-starred, romantic attempt in 1811 to found a great fur company at the mouth of the Columbia.

The Astor ship Tonquin under a choleric captain named Jonathan Thorn had a dark history. Many of the crew were lost when the stubborn officer tried to launch boats on the treacherous Columbia bar. Later, farther to the north, the ship’s decks were the scene of the bloody massacre of all the crew by angry Indians who did not care for the captain’s high-handed manners. In the end the ship itself was blown to bits, whether by accident, by the Indians, or by a wounded member of the crew who perished at the scene of his revenge, no one can say for sure.

The Astor land expedition was no better favored by fortune. Members of this group under Wilson Price Hunt endured hardships which become fearsomely credible when one looks into the yawning vast maw of the Snake River, down which they attempted to come by canoe, or when one rides through that beautiful and formidable landscape through which they afterwards passed without food or guides. Particularly when one journeys among the strange formations of the John Day country—still bearing the name of a member of the expedition—does one understand how poor John Day himself went mad from his experiences.

The Astor enterprise which gave Washington Irving material for his book Astoria had three articulate clerks who have left us some important sources of Northwest history: Alexander Ross, Fur Hunters of the Far West; Gabriel Franchère, Narrative of a Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America; and Ross Cox, Adventures on the Columbia River. Ross Cox immortalized himself by taking a noonday nap from which he awoke to find his companions gone. He was lost thirteen days in the Spokane country, and survived to tell the tale, which pretty well established a record for that country at that time. The Dorion Woman, sometimes represented in Pendleton Round-up pageantry, was an Indian woman who as a member of the Astor Overland party deserves to rank near Sacajawea for her bravery and endurance. When all the men of the group with whom she was traveling were killed—including her husband, the interpreter—she led her two children on horseback nine days through deep snow, found a lonely spot in the Blue Mountains, and made a camp where she spent two winter months. She killed the horse and the three of them lived on that in a hut of branches and moss packed with snow. She got out in the spring after a fifteen day walk, carrying the children most of the way, with little to eat for a week and nothing for the last two days.

All the ambitious plans of Astor and the hardships and endurance of the men who undertook to bring his plans to materialization came to an end in 1812 when America and England went to war, and the Astor partners sold out to the North-West Company. In turn the North-West Company amalgamated with the Hudson’s Bay Company, and thus this latter name is inseparably connected with early Oregon history.

FAITHS

In reading any Northwest history it is impossible to escape the story of the delegation of Flatheads and Nez Percés who heard of Christianity through the words of a wandering missionary group of Iroquois and set out in 1831 to St. Louis in search of “Black Robes” to teach them the elements of a new religion, or as the Protestants asserted, seeking the “Book of Heaven.” Although these Indians were said to be looking for Catholic fathers, the first specific answer to their call came from the Methodists who sent Jason Lee to Oregon in 1834 with the expedition of an ill-fated Boston merchant named Nathaniel Wyeth.

Everyone went to Vancouver in those days, since the Hudson’s Bay Post was the one great supply center, and Lee was no exception. McLoughlin, looking favorably on missionary enterprise, persuaded Lee to remain on the western side of the Cascades. It was not long before Lee envisioned the future of this fertile untouched land, and saw the need for American settlers. Indeed, the early missionary nucleus has been accused of emphasizing the earthly promise of the new territory rather than the celestial promise which they were supposed to hold out to the Indians.

McLoughlin encouraged the American missionaries presumably because they were allies, standing also firmly for law and order, discipline, and obedience among the Indians. England sent out a Reverend Herbert Beaver (“very appropriate name for the fur trade,” as Peter Skene Ogden remarked) to the Vancouver settlement, but he and McLoughlin never got on well. The Reverend Beaver could not bring himself to accept the marriage of white men and Indian women; wrote tattletale letters to the Aborigines Protection Society of London; and in general made himself such a nuisance to McLoughlin that the chief factor gave him a spontaneous caning in the courtyard one day. The caning was the impulsive result of the Reverend Beaver’s reply to the doctor’s question as to why he was sending such unflattering reports to London: “Sir, if you wish to know why a cow’s tail grows downward I cannot tell you; I can only cite the fact.”

While the Methodist mission was beginning to flourish in the Willamette Valley, the Presbyterians sent one Dr. Samuel Parker to study the spiritual needs of the American Indian. With him came a religious-minded young physician, Dr. Marcus Whitman, a name destined to dominate in human interest all other names in the field of pioneer missionaries due to the tragedy which overtook this young man and his beautiful wife. They were killed by the Indians, along with a number of children, invalids, workers, and settlers near the mission they had established at Waiilatpu.

The dramatic episode of their death is not wholly accountable for the exalted status of the Whitmans in the Northwest pioneer pantheon. Many disputants have argued about the aims and importance of Whitman’s famous “ride” to the East coast in the winter of 1842 and ’43. Some say the trip was made only because he wished to save his mission from the threat of discontinuance. Others argue that he “saved Oregon” by going to Washington to see President Tyler and Secretary of State Daniel Webster and persuading them of this outpost’s eventual importance to the union. It is certain that he did outline a plan for establishing supply stations along the emigrant trail and submit it to the War Department where it was discovered in the files some forty years later.

In spite of the overwriting and the bitter arguments of which they have been the subject, the Whitmans still have a heart-touching appeal: the delicately nurtured Narcissa, dying so terribly in the wilderness; the impulsive and perhaps even foolhardy but certainly conscientious Marcus, bringing on himself and his wife and companions an ill-merited dark fate. Everything conspired against these good people. An epidemic of measles killed off many of the Indians, who laid the blame at the doctor’s door. The effects of a simple purgative inserted in watermelons to prevent stealing were of no help either. Moreover the Indians did not care for the untheatric ritual of the Presbyterians and longed to have the more colorful rites of the Catholic Church. Even after the massacre such a homely incident as an Indian’s overeating of dried peach pie in the mission kitchen among the survivors, almost occasioned fresh tragedy; the acute nature of the stomachache leading the greedy red man to conclude that he had been poisoned.

A moving account has survived of those last dark days at the mission at Waiilatpu, told by Catherine Sager who was thirteen at the time, a cripple who had fallen under a wagon wheel while crossing the plains. After months of physical agony and tragedy—both her parents died on the journey—she had been adopted into the Whitman home along with her six brothers and sisters. This eyewitness has told how Whitman was tomahawked from behind as he sat in the kitchen; how Mrs. Whitman, already wounded, was carried out of the house on a settee, only to be shot to death in the yard.

Mrs. Whitman, warned by her husband of the seriousness of the situation, leaving her supper untouched the night before the massacre, and going away by herself to weep where no one could see her, becomes to the reader a prototype of all pioneer women in hostile country accepting their fate with resignation. One thinks of the words she wrote as a bride on the way out to Oregon, when they came to the beautiful Grande Ronde country: “This morning lingered with Husband on the top of the hill that overlooks Grand Round for berries—always enjoy riding alone with him especially when we talk about home friends. It is then the tedious hours are sweetly decoyed away.” And again when they are debating the possibility of taking the seven orphaned Sagers, including the five months, ill, undernourished youngest, she thinks perhaps of her own child drowned when very small: “Husband thought we could get along with all but the baby—he did not see how we could take that, but I felt that if I must take any I wanted her as a chain to bind the rest to me.” . . . And now it is night and she and her husband are both dead. The little thirteen-year-old adopted Sager is left to tell the rest of the story:

“I had always been very much afraid of the dark, but now I felt that the darkness was a protection to us, and I prayed that it might always remain so. I dreaded the coming of the daylight; . . . I heard the cats racing about and squalling. . . . I remember yet how terrible the striking of the clock sounded. Occasionally Mr. Kimball [a wounded man] would ask if I were asleep. . . .”

In the morning: “The children . . . renewed their calls for water. Day began to break, and Mr. K. told me to take a sheet off the bed and bind up his arm, and he would try and get them some. I arose stiff with cold, and with a dazed uncertain feeling . . . I said, ‘Mother [Mrs. Whitman] would not like to have the sheets torn up.’ Looking at me he said, ‘Child, don’t you know your mother is dead, and will never have any use for the sheets?’ I seemed to be dreaming . . . I took a sheet from the bed and tore off some strips, which, by his directions, I wound around his arm. He then told me to put a blanket around him, as he might faint on the way and not be able to get up, and would suffer from the cold. Taking a pair of blankets from the bed, I put them around him, tying them around the waist with a strip off the sheets. I then placed his hat on his head and he went downstairs. We waited long for him, but . . . we never saw him again alive.”

Later in the day, the Indians arrived and went off again and when the house seemed empty the children ventured downstairs. “The Indians had spread quilts over the corpses. Mary Ann, my sister, lifted the quilt from Dr. Whitman’s face, and said, ‘Oh girls, come and see father.’ We did so and saw a sight we will never forget.”

The final episodes of the Whitman story cover the captivity of the women and children, the killing of invalids in their beds. Girls of likely age were appropriated by the chiefs; one in particular, Lorinda Bewley, going down in history for her spirited resistance to her fate; a resistance, which, in the end, availed her little, except that two chiefs contended for the honor of having her; and while the Cayuse went off to get a wagon and rope to transport the fiery girl, a Umatilla came and took her away.

Down the years it is hard to realize the terrifying effect of the murder of the Whitmans at Waiilatpu on the Oregon settlers at that time. They were only a handful of people in an unfamiliar country; and they realized that if the miscreants went unpunished no isolated community would be safe in the future. Organizing an army, equipping it and outfitting it, was a very difficult task in 1847 in a country which was still loosely organized, without adequate supplies—where indeed “wheat and promises” were legal tender. Furthermore there was good reason to believe that their own government— the United States—was coolly indifferent to their fate. Nevertheless they dispatched Joe Meek, the hardy mountain man, overland from Oregon to the capital three thousand miles away to bear the news of the tragedy; an embassy under Jesse Applegate set out for California to ask help but had to turn back because of the impassable snows in the Siskiyous; there was no vessel going out to San Francisco all that winter; the only boat out of the Columbia was one bound for Hawaii which carried the news there and explained the emergency.

After a winter campaign of great hardship and many months of dickering, some Cayuses were hanged in Oregon City for the murder of the Whitmans. There seems doubt—as there was always doubt at Indian executions— whether these were really the guilty ones. Ironically enough it was the Catholic fathers who attended them to the scaffold.

The success of the Catholic missionaries among the Indians would seem to have been a matter of psychological understanding of the Indian nature. Priests were credited with such utterances as “Noise is essential to the Indian’s enjoyment” and “Without singing the best instruction is of little value.” A Catholic priest invented the Catholic ladder, a diagram of the mysteries of the church presented in simple chronological order by which the competitive red man could measure his advance in piety. On special occasions like Easter the Indian was allowed to express his pleasure in his adopted white deity after his own fashion, and did so with green boughs, plumes, drums, bells, and occasional counterpoint of piercing yells.

The Catholic insistence on the objectifying of the mysteries undoubtedly made a deep appeal to the Indian with his worship not only of the Great Power but of lesser powers—any object which carried a quality of the supernatural. A Catholic missionary in the early days reported finding in one Indian tribe, in the high arid lands to the east, a spotted calico shirt and a white robe. These sacred objects had been obtained from a white man whom the Indians had seen wearing the garments, which they took to be respectively the manitou of the spotted disease (smallpox) which had killed such alarming numbers of them, and the manitou of the snow. Possession of these rare objects was obtained by the barter of a number of their best horses, and for many years the sacred articles were carried to the place of ritual and there worshipped with the smoking of the great medicine pipe— an offering to earth, sun, and water—and with appropriate dancing and singing. By this worship the Indians hoped to prevent the return of the disease and to bring a snow heavy enough to push the buffalo down from the mountains.

The Indians liked instances of the intervention of the white man’s Higher Spirit in matters of daily life; and the successful crossing of the Columbia bar in a great storm in the forties gave the priest and six nuns aboard the vessel a special distinction as bearers of magic power.

The early Catholic fathers were often men of cultivation and remarkable strength of character. Among them the names of Blanchet and de Smet stand first. Both men endured untold hardships with great courage and vigor. Both made trips to Europe to arouse interest in this remote part of the world and brought back bands of nuns and priests for the new field. Of de Smet it is said that his travels, at a time in history when travel entailed nothing but endurance, totaled from seven to nine times round the earth. He crossed the Atlantic nineteen times, made one trip round the Horn and two by way of Panama. He once fasted thirty days before taking a sixty-mile snowshoe trip for which he needed to reduce his weight, and when threatened by a hostile Indian was able to knock the weapon from his hand, throw him, and give him a sound beating with a riding whip, which summary treatment brought the Indian as a convert to the church.

De Smet was also a man of delicate sensibilities, particularly susceptible to the charms of nature and able to express his feeling for it in such phrases as “the rock-hung flower” and, with reference to his own desert home in the drylands of this territory, “a little Arabia shut in by stern Heaven-built walls of rock.” Although he mourned the Indians’ inability to discard their superstitions he is himself reported to have considered a severe illness the punishment for his “too carnal admiration of nature.”

Although the old missions have sunk into ruins, the few descriptions that remain of these oases of garden and brook in the midst of a wild uncultivated country convey a slumbrous charm. In the correspondence of the wife of General Stevens, the first governor of the Territory of Washington, there is such a description of the mission St. Joseph d’Olympia:

“I also had a boat built in which I made excursions down the Sound. About two miles down there was a Catholic mission, a large dark house or monastery, surrounded by cultivated land, a fine garden in front filled with flowers, bordered on one side, next the water, with immense bushes of wall flowers in bloom; the fragrance resembling the sweet English violet, filling the air with its delicious odor. Father Ricard, the venerable head of this house, was from Paris. He had lived in this place more than twenty years. He had with him Father Blanchet, a short thickset man, who managed everything pertaining to the temporal comfort of the mission. Under him were servants who were employed in various ways, baking, cooking, digging and planting. Their fruit was excellent and a great rarity, as there was but one more orchard in the whole country. There was a large number of Flatheads settled about them, who had been taught to count their beads, say prayers, and were good Catholics in all outward observances; chanted the morning and evening prayers, which they sang in their own language in a low, sweet strain, which, the first time I heard it, sitting in my boat at sunset, was impressive and solemn. We went often to visit Father Ricard, who was a highly educated man, who seemed to enjoy having some one to converse with in his own language. He said the Canadians used such bad French.”

There is something haunting about the thought of the governor’s lady, a homesick New England gentlewoman, floating with her Indian paddler on the waters of Puget Sound at sunset, in the sight of the eternal snowcaps and the high densely wooded hills, listening to the Flatheads chanting the hymns of the Catholic church under the leadership of a cultivated French priest.

This mission was last used by a family of Olympia pioneers who spent a winter in the seventies within its moldering walls. The family remembered it chiefly for its gloom, the fact that the walls had few windows and those built high because of the priests’ wish not to have the Indians distracted by the outside world when at their prayers; and also to make it difficult for arrows or stray missiles to find their way inside.

HOMEMAKERS

In the 1840s emigrant wagon trains began to unfurl their white sails on the prairies of the Middle West and start their laborious creaking way westward. Occasionally descendants of these hardy folk insist that Grandma said it was all just one long picnic; but this seems a little hard to believe. A Pendleton newspaperwoman who rode in a prairie schooner from La Grande to Pendleton with a group of “pioneers” in the year 1938 assured me that the torture of the movement even on a paved road was almost more than she could bear for two days.

Getting wagons into the last reaches of this new country was an achievement, first attempted by Marcus Whitman who persisted in taking on a wagon from Fort Hall against the expert advice of fur traders. He actually succeeded in getting it as far west as Fort Boise, but he could hardly have imagined what a tide of emigration was to follow in its wake. By the time the tide was at its full Marcus Whitman was dead of an Indian tomahawk.

Through three decades and well into the fourth people crossed the plains into Oregon. The story of their travels makes an oft-repeated but still compelling saga of heroism in the face of Indian massacres, cholera epidemics, dried-up water holes, one day stopovers for women to give birth. It is not easy to determine what brought these beglamored people into the vast western unknown. Certainly there were plenty of stay-at-homes to call them insane when they did it.

But there were other men whose enthusiasm more than made up for the skepticism of their fellows. As far back as 1822 attention had been drawn to the Oregon country by John Floyd of Virginia who, in the House of Representatives, made a report on American rights in the distant lands west of the Rockies and hinted that colonization there was bound to take place. Mr. Bailies of Massachusetts envisioned a canal from the Atlantic to the Pacific which would prevent the eventual colonies in this territory from breaking away into an independent unit and setting up a government of their own. Mr. Bailies, who enjoyed a good rich phrase with the best of his contemporaries, said that he would “delight to know that in this desolate spot, where the prowling cannibal now lurks in the forest, hung round with human bones and with human scalps, the temples of justice and the temples of God were reared, and man made sensible of the beneficent intentions of his creator.”

Oregon bills kept coming up in Congress throughout the twenties while the first diplomatic dickerings over British versus American rights to the North Pacific coast began to take place in London. In 1829 Hall J. Kelley, a Harvard graduate and a writer of school books, organized the “American Society for Encouraging the Settlement of the Oregon Territory” and in 1832 set out for the western lands himself by way of New Orleans and Mexico. In California he had the misfortune to fall in with Ewing Young who in turn had the misfortune to be considered, by the mighty McLoughlin at Vancouver, a horse thief, and poor Kelley was not received as well as he had hoped to be. It was, however, Kelley who helped to influence Wyeth to outfit his remarkable, if ill-fated, expeditions, and Wyeth in turn stirred many people to interest, including the impressionable young James Russell Lowell who remembered all his life the sensations he felt when his fellow townsman set off westward on the great adventure.

In the thirties the missionaries began their slow process of colonization. Their reports helped to keep the Oregon Question alive in the minds of those “back home.” President Jackson sent Lieutenant W. A. Slacum on the first official visit to Oregon. Slacum made a thoroughgoing and favorable report to Congress in 1837, recommending that we firmly hold out against Britain and demand the land as far as the forty-ninth parallel at least, lest the States should lose the fine waterways of Puget Sound. Slacum’s report brought the matter of Oregon’s admission to the States before Congress once more, and it remained there through the next ten years.

All the Congressional agitations, the speeches and reports, the stories in newspapers, the letters home from missionaries, began their slow and powerful infiltration through the people who were to pioneer this remote section. Around middle-western fireplaces, at corn huskings and quilting bees, Oregon began to be the most exciting topic of conversation. People discussed the fertility of the Willamette Valley, the advantages of the Columbia River for commerce, the great forests and the salmon-filled streams. Times had been hard in the frontier country and people were restless. Slavery was beginning to cause agitation. Above all there was that characteristic American wish to move out into the unknown. People in the sheltered midwestern valleys caught fire from the pictures of a great poetic landscape to the west; a landscape of vast plains, high mountains, swift turbulent rivers, and, at the farthest reach, a great ocean. Some few were also undoubtedly influenced by a patriotic wish to keep Great Britain from acquiring the land and the waterways explored for the United States by Lewis and Clark and Robert Gray.

The settlers were for the most part men interested in establishing homes, clearing land, raising cattle. The emigration of 1843 is particularly memorable because from this group—along with the settlers who had come in prior to that year—was composed the membership of the famous “wolf meeting” in the Willamette Valley. This was a gathering of settlers to discuss ways of protecting their herds from predatory animals; and during the meeting a resolution was adopted “that a committee be appointed to take into consideration the propriety of taking steps for the civil and military protection of the colony.” This was followed by the Champoeg meeting of May 2, 1843, at which picturesque Joe Meek forced into the open the opposing wishes of the French-Canadian settlers—still bound by sentiment to the Hudson’s Bay Company—and the newcomers from the States. With his height, his great voice, and his commanding gestures with his coonskin cap he succeeded in getting the two extra votes needed to organize a provisional government the American way, and became a figure for murals and town park statues down the years.

Thus once again the American method of forming a “government by compact” took place: “We the people of Oregon Territory for purposes of mutual protection and to secure peace and prosperity among ourselves agree to adopt the following laws and regulations until such time as the United States of America extend their jurisdiction over us.” One cannot read the concluding words of the message of the executive committee elected in this wilderness in 1844 without being moved: . . . “and in conclusion, we desire to impress your minds that although the colony is small and its resources feeble, yet the life, rights and liberties of an individual here are of equal value to him as to one in the city of Washington or London. And it is a duty which devolves on you and on us to use as much discretion, vigilance and caution in maturing and adopting measures for promoting the interests of the little colony, as if we expected our names and acts would be enrolled in the pages of history, or inscribed on pillars of stone when our day and generation shall have passed away.”

Jesse Applegate, the “sage of Yoncalla,” drew up in 1845 a revised draft of the first governmental laws, and under this for four years the “sturdy, sober, order-loving pioneers” conducted their lives.

No American colonists went north into the state which is now called Washington until after the Oregon emigration of 1844. This emigration numbered among its members an intelligent and well-to-do Quaker, named George Bush—considered a mulatto by early settlers, but according to family records of East Indian descent—and a tough-fibred Kentuckian, Michael Simmons. These men and their families wintered north of the Columbia and eventually explored around Puget Sound and took up claims not far from the present town of Olympia.

The Hudson’s Bay Company had had a flourishing farm on Nisqually flats for some years but there were no other settlements and the general opinion was that England intended to claim the lands north of the Columbia. The prolonged and rather dubious negotiations between Daniel Webster, as secretary of state, and Lord Ashburton, a special British commissioner, have led many people to claim that Webster was quite willing to relinquish northern “Oregon” to Great Britain, if Great Britain would force Mexico to sell us California.

A good deal of bitter feeling about the Oregon Question seemed to focus itself in communities in the Mississippi Valley. In 1843 one hundred delegates met in Cincinnati for an “Oregon convention” and there adopted a resolution to the effect that the United States had a right to the western country “between the parallel of forty-two degrees on the south and fifty-four on the north.” This was the origin of the famous “Fifty-four Forty or Fight” slogan which elected the Democrat, James K. Polk, to the presidency in 1844 and which was finally settled in 1846 after an outbreak of hostilities with Britain was narrowly averted by making the forty-ninth parallel the northern boundary.

Immediately after the settlement of the quarrel with England the Oregon colonists expected to be welcomed into the Union with open arms, but they had inserted into their provisional constitution a clause which read that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime” should ever be permitted in their territory. This roused the opposition of such Southern leaders as Calhoun, and the Congressional session of 1846–47 closed without providing in any way for this new colony.

The Whitman massacre had stirred the Oregon settlers and forced them to a sharpened realization of their need for help from the home government. During that famous winter of 1848 Joe Meek had been dispatched to Washington with news of the colonists’ plight. His great virility, masculine good looks, frontier clothes, tall tales, and way with the ladies—aided slightly no doubt by kinship with President Polk—had all of Washington at his feet from the moment he entered the genteel Willard Hotel in his rough costume and announced to the timid clerk that he was “Minister Plenipotentiary and Envoy Extraordinary from all Oregon to the United States of America.” The Whitman massacre was thus in no small measure responsible for the passing of the bill to make Oregon a Territory in 1848.

After this period three major events built up the Pacific Northwest and gave it its present character: the gold discoveries in California, Idaho, Montana, and British Columbia; the settlement of the Indian wars; the coming of the railroads.

Discovery of gold in California changed that state’s history almost overnight, bringing it from a feeble position of rivalry with the Territory of Oregon to one of easy dominance. The adventurous Forty-Niners have assumed a place in American history which many historians consider they ill deserve in comparison with the more sober missionaries, explorers, traders, and settlers who opened up the Oregon country. Even the Oregon Trail became for many the California Trail, but in recent years the northern states have begun to realize how easy it is for them to compete in glamour of history and beauty of landscape with their highly publicized southern neighbor.

Many of the men who did not go south from Oregon to make a fortune in the goldfields made it by staying home and supplying roaring San Francisco with timber for buildings and all kinds of farm produce, as well as oysters and fish. The Puget Sound region, having also prospered indirectly by the California gold discoveries, grew strong enough to seek independence from the Oregon settlers—claiming that their interests were quite separate—and in 1853 became the Territory of Washington and a state in 1889. Their first governor was General Isaac I. Stevens who had been sent out to survey for a western railroad. Railroads were to play the next great role in the settlement of these lands.

The great days of the Columbia River boat traffic, with the boom period in the mining areas of the Inland Empire, opened up the eastern drylands to settlers other than missionaries who found this country far more beautiful and promising than they had been led to believe. They discovered that animals eating the apparently dead dry grass grew sleek and fat, that there were possibilities in dry farming, that irrigation from adjacent streams created magical fertility. Encroachment on the lands of the proud Indians of this section led to wars and treaties and the forming of reservations.

The railroads were—and still are—a storm center to western people. Their building had been at one time a “sectional issue between the North and the Cotton South” so that southern leaders successfully blocked the establishment of roads to the west until after the outbreak of the Civil War. After the war California, with its spectacular prosperity, was served first, but through the late sixties, the seventies, eighties, and nineties, the railroads began to reach their iron fingers into the Arcadian northern lands. There then appeared on the western scene such great organizers and wily schemers as Henry Villard and Jay Cooke, and a little later James J. Hill and E. H. Harriman. Fortunes were made and lost, towns destroyed or created by the stroke of a pen. Bitter court contests and public name-callings followed in the wake of the westward push of the iron rails.

In the twentieth century the history of the Pacific Northwest has been very largely the history of all of the United States, with certain natural differences growing out of geographical position, lateness in development (making both for advantages and disadvantages), and the discovery and utilization of local resources. Such aspects of the Northwest have been considered in this book through such individual communities as most clearly set them forth.