CATHLAMET
on the Columbia
By
THOMAS NELSON STRONG
UNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY
Gc
979.701
'W125
2301776
Cathlamet on the Columbia
V
•.)V^iu
Mg^
'^\mi
9HHB.' 1 ^^
":0^ ^^
1 ■ »••
' V:^U.,^
--fe; .-
' ■ ««-'
^^"
" ^^''' ■ '
^^:^ i
IKMil
^^
SACAJAWEA
Cathlamet on the
Columbia
Recollections of the Indian
People and Short Stories of
Early Pioneer Days in the
Valley of the Lower
Columbia River
% THOMAS NELSON STRONG
BINFORDS & MORT, Publishers,
PORTLAND, OREGON
Copyright 1906 by Thomas Nelson Strong
\ X
ABen County Public Librari
Ft. Wayne, Indwna
Printed in the United Slates of America
2301776
As my friend, Newman J. Levinson, Sunday editor of the Oregonian,
originally instigated the publication of these tales, and has
given me much valuable advice and assistance, this
little volume is respectfully dedicated
to him by the author
Table of Contents
Chapter
Page
I. Cathlamet .
3
II. The Indian Village .
8
III. Indian Men and Women .
15
IV. Indian Children and Boys .
20
V. The Indian Hunting
25
VI. The Forest Ways .
32
VII. The Coming and the Going
48
VIII. The Medicine Man.
58
IX. The Sweat House .
64
X. The Sins of the Fathers
70
XL The Broken Tribes.
81
XII. The White Chiefs .
88
XIII. Indian Wives
93
XIV. Keeping the Peace .
102
XV. ChiefUmtux
III
XVI. Happy Days
129
XVII. The Pioneers
137
XVIII. The Pioneer Mother
150
XIX. The Red Box
157
XX. The End . . . .
163
Preface
JVloDESTLY does the author of these tales
refer to them as perhaps of little worth; but he
has made a work which though small in com-
pass, shines with a quality that endures. It is an
unusual book. It possesses savor and sincerity,
exactness and charm. Pioneer incidents are told
with the warmth that comes of long saturated
experience. The Indian scenes are more somber,
as befits the race, but related in mellow tones
that make the almost forgotten aboriginal live.
They embody rare fads of value to the historian
and ethnologist. Over all broods the back-
ground of river and fir.
In this setting Thomas Nelson Strong was
born on March 17, 1853, of New England ante-
cedents. His father, William, came toCathlamet
as the first judge of Oregon territory; and it was
after his father's associate and friend, Thomas
Nelson, that the boy was named. Scarcely does
the author allude to this boy, and never by direct
reference. But into the boy's make-up, and the
man's, there entered indelibly both the trans-
mitted strain of a standard of culture and breed-
ing, and the influence of the surrounding for-
est, native, and frontier. It is this combination
that gives the book its abiding quality of vivid
sensitiveness and reality.
A. L. KROEBER.
Introduction
1 HE tales told in this little book came to the
writer in many ways. Some of the scenes des-
cribed he saw himself. Indians in their lodges
and canoes talked freely to him, a little boy.
Hudson Bay Factors and French voyageurs in
their declining years had many stories to tell,
and these were caught up by greedy ears. What
is here told is but a little of the gatherings of
many years of wilderness life with native hunters
and exploring parties in the Pacific Northwest.
They may be in themselves of little worth, and
yet may help future generations of our children
to better understand the life and atmosphere
of a peculiar time, to better appreciate the crim-
son and the gold, and mayhap a little of the
gray of the morning hour of the white man's
day on the Pacific Coast.
THOMAS NELSON STRONG.
XV.
Cathlamet on the Columbia
Cathlamet on the Columbia
/.
Cathlamet
ATHLAMET, on the Columbia,
was, from time immemorial, the cen-
ter of the Indian strength on the
lower river. The Indian lingered longer and the
Indian blood is more conspicuous there now
than at any other place between Portland and
the Ocean. Chinook was a mud beach, a mere
fishing station, but Cathlamet was an Indian
town before Gray sailed into the river or Lewis
and Clark passed by on their way to the sea.
Here at the last gathered and passed away the
Cathlamets, Wahkiakums, Chinooks and Cow-
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
elislcies. Here Anderson lived for a while, and
here the Hudson Bay Company, having passed
away, came Birnie, Roberts and Allan and other
old factors and clerks of the company to end
their days. It was early recognized as an Indian
center, and is the only place of the Fish Indians
to which Kamiakin condescended to send his
messengers when he was organizing the Indian
War of 1855. At its best it was the largest In-
dian settlement on the Columbia River west of
the Cascades, and from the Indian stories must
have numbered in the town itself from 500 to
1,000 people. Like all Indian towns it changed
population rapidly, and when the whites first
knew it, it probably had 300 or 400 inhabitants.
Sauvie's Island occasionally had more Indians,
but they were there only temporarily, digging
wapatoes.
CATHLAMET
Queen Sally, of Cathlamet, was the oldest
living Indian on the Lower Columbia in the late
fifties and early sixties, and her memory went
back easily to the days of Lewis and Clark when
she was a young woman old enough to be mar-
ried, which, with the Indians, meant about the
age of fourteen. Seventy years is extreme old
age for an Indian, and especially for an Indian
woman, but Queen Sally was all of this. Judg-
ing from her looks she might have been any-
where in the centuries, for never was a more
wrinkled, smoke-begrimed, wizened old crea-
ture. Princess Angeline, of Seattle, was a bloom-
ing young beauty beside her.
It gave one a far-away feeling, in regard to
the event not warranted by the years that had
passed, when from the cliiFs above Cathlamet
she pointed out the spot where the canoes of
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
Lewis and Clark were first seen. She said the
Indians had been on the watch for them for sev-
eral days, as news had come by Indian post of
the strangers from the East. Lewis and Clark
with their partv came in the afternoon or even-
ing, and were met by the Indians in their canoes
at or a little above the modern town of Cath-
lamet and escorted to the Indian village, which
was then on the slough below Cathlamet, at
about the point where the saw mill now is. How
long they stayed here she could not clearly tell.
It was evident she confused their westward and
eastward trips and also their winter stay at Clat-
sop with their stay at Cathlamet village. Twenty-
five miles to wandering Indians is a bagatelle of
too little importance to be considered in fixing
a locality. It was a time of feasting, wonder-
ment and council making. Lewis and Clark
CATHLAMET
were doubtless weary of Indians by this time,
but the strange sights they saw will never be
seen again.
//.
The Indian Village
HE village was made up of cedar
houses thirty or forty feet long and
fifteen or twenty feet wide. How they
managed to split and cut out the cedar planks,
sometimes twenty and thirty feet long, two to
three feet wide and three to six inches thick, of
which these houses were built, with the tools
they had, is a mystery. With wedges made of
elkhorn and chisels made of Beaver teeth, with
flinty rocks and with fire, they, in some way,
and at a great expenditure of labor, cut out the
boards. The houses were well built, an opening
was left along the ridge pole for the smoke to
escape and there were cracks in the walls, but,
excepting this and the door, there were no open-
8
THE INDIAN VILLAGE
ings. Unless destroyed by fire, these houses
would stand for ages, as the cedar was almost
indestructible. Each house was fitted to accom-
modate several families. Along the sides, which
might be six or eight feet high, and along the
rear wall were built beds like steamer bunks,
one above the other. From the lowest of these
bunks the floor of earth extended out like a
platform four or five feet to a depression of a
foot or two along the center of the lodge, which
was reserved for the fire place.
Fully inhabited by Indian men, women, chil-
dren and dogs, lighted up by the smoky fires,
the lodge interior looked like a witches' cave.
Men and women in all conditions as to toilet
lay sprawled on the earth platform about the
fire. In the bunks amid dilapidated fUrs were
numberless half-naked children and coyote-
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
looking dogs. Along the ceiling hung dried
salmon and strings of dried clams and roots.
The smoke circled everywhere, and gave a misty
look of vastness to the room, and through all
like a solid atmosphere was the smell, the awful
smell of the Indian lodge. Fires in an Indian
village or an occasional abandonment were re-
curring necessities in Indian life. Flesh and
blood, even of the Indian variety, could not
long abide in one Indian encampment. From
this as well as from the necessity of getting food,
it came about that the Lower River Indian lived
in his village for only small portions of the year.
It is safe to say that Lewis and Clark either
found a lodge that had been little used or slept
away from the village. No sane white man, ex-
cept under stress of dire necessity, ever slept in
a fully populated Indian lodge that had been
ID
THE INDIAN VILLAGE
used continuously by them for any great length
of time.
One of the strange sights that Lewis and
Clark saw about this Wahkiakum village of
Cathlamet were the burial canoes. The last of
these were not destroyed until late in the fifties,
and when Lewis and Clark came they were very
numerous about the village and in the Colum-
bia sloughs between the Elokomon and Ska-
mokawa Rivers. The low, deep moan of the
Columbia River bar, forty miles to the west-
ward, is clearly heard at Cathlamet, and it may
be due to this that these burial canoes placed
high in the Cottonwood and Balm of Gilead
trees were always placed with their sharp-point-
ed prows to the west. With every paddle in
place, with his robes and furs about him and all
his wealth of beads and trinkets at his feet, the
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
dead Indian lay in his war canoe waiting for the
flood of life which should some day come in like
the tide from the sunset ocean.
Considering the great value of these canoes
and the time it took to build one, it almost pass-
es belief that they would be sacrificed to a simple
belief in the future life. It is exadly as though
upon the death of a multi-millionaire of our
day all of his moneys, stocks and bonds should
be buried with him, his heirs renouncing the use
of all his accumulations.
The Chinook canoe of the lower river was a
beautiful thing and was as much a home of the
Indians as was the lodge. In Alaska the Indians
had good canoes, but nothing that for size,
model and finish equaled the Indian canoe of
the Columbia. These river canoes were of all
sizes, from the one-man hunting canoe that
12
THE INDIAN VILLAGE
could easily be carried, and which required an
expert to handle, to the large cruising canoe
forty or fifty feet long and five or six feet wide,
which could carry thirty or forty people and all
their equipments. The straight up and down
lines of the stern and the bewitching curve of
the bow were very graceful, and the water lines
of bow and stern have never been excelled. The
building of one was the work of years. It was
painfully hollowed out with fire and flint and
beaver-tooth chisel, was steamed within with
red-hot rocks and water, and was stretched to
exadly the right proportion and kept in place
by stretchers strongly sewed in. It was swift,
beautiful and seaworthy. Its only weakness was
in the places where the cedar wood was cut
across the grain to give the lines of bow and
stern. Here in a heavy seaway the canoe would
13
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
always work, and from here the canoe would
sometimes split from end to end. Many a trag-
edy of the sea was due to this inherent weak-
ness, for in these and the Alaskan canoes the
Indians traveled the entire coast line of the Pa-
cific, from the mouth of the Columbia north-
ward to Sitka and southward to the California
line, and even farther, and old Indians often
told of clinging to the broken sides of the canoe
when it had split, for hours, and even days,
until the surf rolled them ashore.
H
Indian Men and Women
HE Lower River Indians had no
horses and no place to use them, but
jj dogs they had a-plenty. Why they
kept them except as sentries no one ever knew.
They were miserable creatures without courage
or hunting instincts, but no onecould come with-
in a hundred yards of an Indian lodge without
being discovered, and in this probably lay their
value to the Indian, for they were not eaten ex-
cept in cases of necessity or upon ceremonial
occasions.
The Indians in their canoes were jfine- look-
ing people. Arms, shoulders and backs were
well muscled and proportioned, and they han-
dled their poles and paddles with grace and
15
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
skill, but away from their canoes the efFed was
not so good. They almost uniformly had short,
squatty legs, sometimes made crooked by con-
tinual squatting in the canoes, and this gave
them a curiously top-heavy effect.
Compared with the Horse Indians of East-
ern Oregon and Washington they looked weak
and insignificant. They were not as warlike a
people as the Horse Indian, and in a land bat-
tle would have had but a poor chance. Intel-
lectually they were superior, and the Indians of
Eastern Oregon complained that at the Cas-
cades, where the native peoples met to trade to-
gether, they were uniformly outwitted by their
salt-water brethren. Upon the water they were
superior also, and no Indian of the plains could
handle a canoe as the Salt Water Indian could.
The women were short, squatty creatures, with a
INDIAN MEN AND WOMEN
tendency to grow fat and wrinkled when they
could get food enough to grow fat on; the wrin-
kles they acquired anyway. From fifteen to twen-
ty the Indian girl was a warm-blooded creature,
not at all bad -looking, but after this she aged
rapidly; at thirty was old, and at forty fit only
to tan buckskins and do heavy work. In their
native state very few of them lived much be-
yond fifty. The treatment of them by the In-
dian men was brutal to a degree that white wo-
men can hardly realize. Nevertheless they had
a great deal of influence, and while an Indian
in a fit of bad temper might in the evening
knock down his tired squaw and leave her lying
in the ashes by the fire, the next morning she
would be his mistress of the household as usual.
It was astonishing what good women the native
women were, and how patiently and honestly
17
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
they toiled and suffered for their worthless hus-
bands. Afterwards when the white men came,
the chance to marry one of the King George
men or Bostons was to an Indian woman a
chance to enter paradise. No white husband
was ever as bad as an Indian, and however drunk-
en and worthless the white man might be con-
sidered to be by his own people, he was a mar-
vel of husbandly virtues in the eyes of his native
wife. His word was law, and to him she was faith-
ful to the death. Long centuries of oppression
made the Indian woman thankful for even a poor
specimen of a man. Thrice happy was her lot
when she was taken for wife by a decent white
man. In her inarticulate way she greatly rejoiced
and sacrificed herself for him gladly. There are
many people in Oregon and Washington who
have Indian blood in their veins, and icw, very
i8
INDIAN MEN AND WOMEN
few, of them have ever had reason to blush for
their Indian mothers.
19
IV.
Indian Children and Boys
HE children that Lewis and Clark saw
I on the lower river were odd -looking
creatures. The babies were strapped
to boards and looked like miniature mummies
of Egyptian times, but the older ones were cease-
lessly active. They were little brown fellows with
slender legs that upheld and rapidly carried
about a protuberant stomach, apparently four
sizes too large for the legs below and the head
above. It is astonishing how much they looked
like the pictures of Brownies in our children's
picture-books. Amongst them the rate of mor-
tality was high, and they grew up with the dogs
as best they could; were fed, and in a fashion
clothed and sheltered, and that was all. As soon
20
INDIAN CHILDREN AND BOYS
as the little Indian could run about he com-
menced to hunt and fish, and in mere love of
slaughter would frequent the streams and maim
and kill the salmon coming up to spawn. The
little creek by Cathlamet was a favorite stream
of the Fall salmon, and here the little Indians
would gather and spear fish until they were
weary of the sport, and would then in mere
wantonness throw their captures on the rocks
to spoil. At thirteen and fourteen the boys would
begin seriously to hunt for game.The old Queen
Anne muskets that they had in early days would
be carefully loaded, not a grain of powder or a
single shot would be wasted, for these commod-
ities in the early days were difficult to obtain.
In his little one-man canoe the youth would
silently paddle through the sloughs looking for
ducks and geese, of which there were countless
21
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
thousands. He never attempted to shoot on the
wing, and would rarely fire at a single bird, but
would maneuver for hours to get a chance to
fire into a sitting flock at short range.
As the great flocks of wild fowl had then,
as they have now, a most exasperating habit of
lying in open water beyond gun shot, a favorite
device with the Indian was to cover his canoe
with green boughs so that it would appear to
be a mere floating heap of brush wood, and lying
in ambush under this the hunter would patient-
ly wait for hours for the birds to come near or
for a favoring wind to float him into their midst.
An Indian enjoyed killing ducks and geese in
this way. The stealthiness and the ease of it, both
appealed to him, besides it meant many birds
for one shot.
So strongly was the necessity for economy
INDIAN CHILDREN AND BOYS
in powder and shot impressed upon them that
a young Indian about fourteen years old, seeing
one day a large cougar about to cross a stream
on a log, did not fire at him from the canoe,
but crept ashore and hid himself at the end of
the log until the cougar nearly touched the end
of his gun, when he fired, and, in the words of
Western Ike,"Blowed a hole in that cougar that
a bull bat could a' flew through without teching
his wings on either side." Spoken to about the
risk he had taken the youngster said he couldn't
afford to waste a load of shot, and had to make
sure work.These old guns missed fire very fre-
quendy, and the little Indian's economy might
have cost him dear, but to his mind life was
about the cheapest of his possessions; it had
never cost him anything. For large game shoot-
ing they would frequently make a slug for their
23
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
muskets by whittling out a wooden plug the
size of the interior of the gun barrel, and with
this make a mold in damp sand, into which was
poured the melted lead. The result was a fear-
ful missile. It would not go straight for forty
yards, but as it was never fired at such a great
distance this made no difference, for by lying in
wait or careful stalking the Indian would get so
close in to his game that a miss was impossible.
A bear slain in this way looked after his decease
as if he had been hit by a section of Mount
Hood in some "Battle of the Gods."
24
V.
The Indian Hunting
PPOSITE Cathlamet in the Colum-
bia River is Puget Island, named by
^^^^^ Vancouver's exploring party on its
first trip up the Columbia, in 1792, and here
the Indians hunted the deer in the low, marshy
lands along the sloughs. In the early times, be-
fore they used guns, the bow and arrow were
sometimes used, but generally the hunts were
elaborate affairs and long lines of skirmishers
drove the frightened deer into the inclosures or
pitfalls, but after the traders came with guns
and gunpowder, the same wary tactics and care-
ful stalking were employed in deer hunting as
in the pursuit of other wild game.
Across the river, beyond its two channels and
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
Puget Island, was high land again, and here is
one of the most beautiful pieces of forest and
one of the most striking slopes in all of the Coast
Mountains. Commencing at Cathlamet Head,
the unbroken ridge sweeps easterly to a point
back of Westport, and between it and the Ne-
halem River, for miles, the hunter travels in a
great fir forest and up a gentle slope until he
reaches an elevation of about three thousand
feet, and sees the Columbia River to the north
and east, the Nehalem River to the south and
the Pacific Ocean to the west. Looking at it
across the river from the hill in Cathlamet by
the Birnie house, the sweeping outline of this
long slope presents one of the most graceful
and impressive scenes on the Lower Columbia.
Here Wholiky and Scarborough and all the
mighty hunters of the Lower Columbia hunt-
26
THE INDIAN HUNTING
ed the elk and the bear and the long aisles of
those magnificent woods have seen some stirring
sights.To watch one of these thorough hunters
track an elk was always a fresh delight. For hours
he would go uphill and down and out and in,
in devious wanderings. Here a little twig mis-
placed or a leaf pressed down, signs too faint for
the inexperienced to even notice, would tell him
when and where the great beast had passed.
No bloodhound ever followed the track more
persistently. After hours, perhaps, of this kind
of work, the signs would grow clearer and easier
to follow, and the hunter's eyes would grow
keen and hot, step by step he would increase
his speed, and piece by piece he would drop his
wrappings and clothes. It was said of Indian
Dick that he rarely had any clothes, to speak of,
on at the death, and yet so perfect was his wood-
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
land instinct that he would afterwards retrace
his tracks for miles and gather up every article.
It almost seemed as if the hunter had the
sense of smell possessed by hunting dogs, but
the Indians disclaimed this capacity and to their
familiar hunting friends talked freely about the
way they found the trail. One thing that helped
them was that they were familiar with the lay
of the ground and knew the runways and habits
of the animals and could very nearly guess where
any particular one was bound.
Where an elk had been feeding it was very
difficult to follow him, and sometimes the In-
dian would make a short cut to find out where
he had left his feeding grounds, and this made
it occasionally necessary to look up the back
track, but ordinarily it was a straight-away stalk
for miles through the brush and heavy timber,
28
THE INDIAN HUNTING
and the hunter generally followed in the exact
trail of the animal.
At the beginning of a chase an Indian hunter
like Wholiky or Indian Dick would often ven-
ture a prediction as to where the chase would
end. "We catch him on Rocky Hill little way
over there," or "on little creek," or elsewhere,
and usually there was where he was found.
On ordinary ground the track could be read-
ily followed and on hard rocky soil there was al-
ways enough dust or vegetation to retain some
trace of the passage of so heavy an animal as a
deer, elk or bear; a dislodged pebble, a turned
leaf or a crushed blade of grass was enough.
The marvelous thing about it was the quick-
ness and accuracy with which these slight signs
would be seen and interpreted. A white hunter
following his Indian friend had plenty of time
29
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
to watch the process, and it was as interesting
as the working out of a great puzzIe.To an or-
dinary white man who knew little of the woods
or of hunting, it was magic pure and simple.
The closing in of the native hunter on his
game was a stirring thing to watch. Long cen-
turies of hunting with bows and arrows, feeble,
short-range weapons, had bred into the Indian
the habit of getting close up, and his having a
gun made no difference with his habit.
Carrying his body low crouched so that it
seemed to glide along the ground like a snake,
placing each step with noiseless certainty and
going through the underbrush as quietly as a
fish in water, the stealthy panther- like quality of
the Indian here showed at its best, for, close to
his prey, fairly vibrating with ten$e and subdued
energy, the Indian of the chase was a very dif-
30
THE INDIAN HUNTING
ferent looking creature from the Indian of the
lodge.
On one occasion Indian Wholiky in the wood
and heavy underbrush of the Nehalem Moun-
tains crept up so close to a black bear that only
the thickness of a tree separated them. Poor
bruin was astonished and dead in the same mo-
ment. The black bear in his chosen habitat of
thick brush is one of the most unapproachable
of animals by stalking, and poor bruin had a
right to be astonished.
31
VI.
The Forest IV ays
I E W people appreciate how different
the forest home of the Indians of the
Lower Columbia was from the habi-
tat of other Indian peoples and what effect this
had upon them. Cathlamet was situated on the
bank of the Columbia River and was in a mere
notch cut out of one of the most remarkable
forests in the world.
For hundreds of miles to the North, East,
South and West, the Douglas fir, now called in
the trade by the commonplace name of Oregon
pine, covered the earth with a green mantle two
to three hundred feet in thickness.
The growth of one of these forests was as
good an example of the opulence of nature as
32
THE FOREST WAYS
could anywhere be found. Over the bare ground
caused by a burn or windfall thousands of the
cones of the fir tree would be scattered from the
adjoining forest. Chattering pine squirrels and
birds and the winds would carry the seeds. The
next year the ground would be green with tiny
trees, little fairy things of which there might be
dozens to every square yard. In four or five years
the ground would still be green, but the carpet
of verdure would be perhaps six or seven feet
deep, and of the little tiny trees perhaps nine-
teen out of twenty would have been crowded to
death, and so dense would be the surface of this
green carpet that the lower limbs of the little
trees, and many of the little trees themselves,
shut out from all light, would be dying and fall-
ing away. For two hundred years the process
would go on, each young tree vigorously reach-
33
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
ing upward to keep its head in the sunshine but
making no attempt to reach out sideways, for
this was hopeless. Only the stronger trees sur-
vived the struggle and thousands died each year
shut out from light and life by their stronger
brothers. The lower branches dropped off farth-
er up every year as the green pile of the fir car-
pet was lifted higher and higher on the vigor-
ous young stems. In perhaps fifty or a hundred
years from the time the seed dropped on the
ground there would be a compact young forest
of beautiful timber fit for the masts and spars
of ships, each tree eighteen or twenty -four in-
ches through at the ground, gomg straight up
into the air a beautiful straight shaft of nearly
the same size a hundred feet without a branch
or leaf, and then for fifty or one hundred feet
tapering to the top and leafing out into the sun-
34
THE FOREST WAYS
shine. When the forest was fully grown this
green mass of leafage would be two or three
hundred feet from the ground, and the great
stems of the trees six and eight feet in diameter,
would stand like great brown corrugated col-
umns one hundred or one hundred and fifty
feet without a limb.
Looked at from above, from the top of some
high hill, for instance, this continuous forest ap-
peared like a great green carpet spread evenly
over a great sea of mountains, and it extended
over hill and valley for thousands of square
miles along the Pacific Ocean. Looked at from
beneath, the forest vistas looked much like the
groined aisles of some great cathedral with
sweeping lengths to be measured by miles in-
stead of feet.
Since the coming of the white man uncount-
35
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
ed millions of feet of lumber have been cut from
this forest and fires have in places ravaged it and
yet so immense is its extent and so vigorous is
its power of renewal that it is today to the cas-
ual sightseer the same unbroken forest that it
has been from the beginning.
This was the home and the hunting ground
of the Indian of the Lower Columbia. Some
parts of it he knew well but into other parts he
would not go, and it was curious to see how the
places where game and food were plentiful be-
came familiar ground while the other places
were invested with superstitious terrors. Along
the rivers where canoes could go the Indian was
at home, and along some of the prairies and
smaller streams of the Willamette Valley, Indian
villages and homes were established, but the for-
est itself was untouched and except where it was
36
THE FOREST WAYS
hunted in was unknown and feared by the In-
dians.
Thunder storms are of rare occurrence in the
Valley of the Columbia and hence the Indians
were very much impressed by them when they
did occur.
Jim Crow Mountain, near Brookfield, was a
rough piece of country in which the hunting
was poor. It was ^"^Mesatchie Illihee," and so in
time the Indians conneded together what they
thought was cause and effect. Jim Crow Moun-
tain obtained the reputation of being a thunder
blasted distrid and as being the chosen resting
place of the gigantic Thunder Bird who so ter-
rified the poor Indians with the flashings of its
eyes and the mighty roll and thunder of its dark
wings.
A part of the Upper Valley of theWenatchee
37
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
above the lake had also the reputation amongst
the Indians of the neighborhood of being"Mes-
atchie Illihee" and of being the haunt of evil
spirits. The first surveying party of the whites
that went through identified the evil spirits in
clouds of mosquitoes, which at times made the
place uninhabitable and undesirable by either
men or game. ''Mesatchie Illihee" meant only
rough, bad or difficult country, but the Indian
ghosts and hobgoblins seemed to like this kind
of country, for they were always located in it by
the Indian story tellers.
The forest was so vast that the multitude of
animals and birds that roamed through and
lived in it were completely out of sight, and it
was quite a common experience for the early
explorers and surveyors to travel through it for
weary days without seeing more than a pine
38
THE FOREST WAYS
marten or a chattering squirrel. Lewis and Clark
in their expedition followed the rivers and this
and good fortune and judgment was all that
saved the party from disaster, for hunters well
equipped but unacquainted with the woods,
have starved in these great forests.
The Indians tried no experiments and unless
compelled wandered into no unknown country,
and the old Indian trails on the Lower Colum-
bia were few in number.There was a well known
way for the Indians and Indian canoes from
Chinook River to the Naselle and thence to
Shoalwater Bay and another from Shoalwater
Bay to Grays Harbor.There was an Indian trail
from the waters of the Cowlitz River to Puget
Sound and another around the Cascades of the
Columbia; and in the Willamette Valley, owing
to its more open character, horses were used
39
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
and there were a great many trails to different
points.
The trails used by the Indians who did not
use horses were always made by the tramping of
feet and were never cut out or graded in any
way.They practically always went up the sharp
points of the hills and along the backbones of
the ridges, and this was done to avoid fallen
timber.
Thirty- five years ago a young hunter was
searching for deer in the little range of moun-
tains between the Willamette Slough and the
Tualitin Plains. It was an idle, easy hunting,
more for the love of wandering than for the
desire of killing, and in the Summer evening
he sat down to rest and look around. Something
peculiar about a vista in the woods attracted his
attention and he observed it closely. Apparent-
40
THE FOREST WAYS
ly an old trail, it tempted him to wander along
it. For miles and miles it kept its course and soon
it was clear that here was the old Indian trail
from theTualitin Plains to the Columbia River
at Sauvie's Island. Overgrown with moss, cov-
ered with leaves and mold, it was still the old
trail that in olden times had been trodden by
thousands of moccasined feet. There were no
choppings or blazed trees along it, and even the
roots of the trees rounded and rubbed by the
clmging clasp of soft, flexible feet showed plain-
ly that they had not been trodden or marred by
the heavy foot-gear of the white man. Every foot
of the location and every sinuous turn of the
old highway bespoke its origin and use. It was
the old and fading signature of a dead people.
So dim and spectral and yet so unmistakable,
it was the rising of an Indian ghost.
41
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
Following along the shadowy trail, he soon
reached the summit, from where he saw before
him the valley of the Lower Columbia. The
mountains to the Eastward, the great river in
the foreground, the Willamette Valley stretch-
ing to the Southward and many miles of river
and forest lighted up by the evening sunlight.
As the evening deepened the young hunter
could by a very easy stretch of the imagination
see along the path lines of bent Indian squaws,
each carrying on her back by a strap about her
forehead a heavy load, and some, too, with lit-
tle babies in their funny little bound- up pack-
ing cases, and trooping merrily at their heels,
the little elf- like, copper -colored children and
the wolfish dogs, and occasionally with these,
and yet apart as became his dignity, an Indian
warrior foot- loose and comfortable.
42
THE FOREST WAYS
It was a long procession and it had passed
and repassed that way for hundreds of years, and
now only the trail was left, but the trail told
many things to any one who could see.
To understand the Indian migration you
must know what they are traveling for, because
the Indian life was spent in traveling. In this
case apparently these Indians had not traveled
this road for war or sight-seeing or pleasure. It
had only been the old quest of food.
Immediately below the sightseer from this
point lies Sauvie's Island, stretching for fifteen
or twenty miles down the Columbia River, and
this island, famous in the history of the Hudson
Bay Company and of the pioneers, was a garden
of the wapato, the Indian potato. The lakes and
overflowed lands were green with its many ar-
row-shaped leaves, and here every Autumn the
43
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
Indians used to gather for the purpose of har-
vesting it, and the stores so obtained helped to
feed them through the Winter.
On the river was also the gathering place for
drying and smoking salmon. The Cascades on
the Columbia and the Falls of the Willamette
at Oregon City were great gathering places in
the salmon season, but there were plentyof other
streams where the salmon could be caught. It
was preserved by drying and smoking, and from
an Indian encampment in the olden time an
odor used to float down the wind that was so
pungent and characteristic that it could almost
be seen. No real and truly pioneer who ever lived
near the Indians can to this day catch the slight-
est whiffy of ancient fish without seeing in fancy
the Indian lodges.
The Indians near the Coast made trips to the
44
THE FOREST WAYS
ocean for the native cranberry and for clams.
These later were dried and smoked and so cured,
with an abundant sprinkling of sand, were prob-
ably the most indestructible food known.
AlonCT or near the Coast were also the fav-
o
oritc hunting grounds for elk. The meat of the
elk and deer was cut in strips and dried over the
fire, making what was known as jerked meat.
Farther up the river the sweet, glutinous root
of the camas was dried and packed for Winter
food.
The black bear is a cunning berry eater, and
there is no more curious woodland sight than
that of this big bear sitting upon his haunches
drawing down huckleberry bushes and with
flexible lips and tongue picking off the tiny ber-
ries one by one; but even the black bear is a dul-
lard in gathering berries compared with the In-
45
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
dian woman. They knew every berry bush and
patch anywhere within reaching distance and
knew just how and when to gather them, and
Olallies (berries) formed a great part of the
Indian food supply.
To the people who knew it the forest was a
magnificent granary of food, and perhaps one
of the most pitiful stories of the West is that of
a party of Eastern men fleeing panic-stricken
from anticipated starvation, leaving their com-
rades to die by the way, because a little snow
flurry and a little hunger met them in the woods.
The mountains and the great forest were strange
and terrifying to them. Had they been Indians
or Western and forest- trained men they would
have come out at their leisure, hungry and thin,
half starved and hollow down to their boots,
perhaps, but still all together.
46
THE FOREST WAYS
So far as Indian tradition goes there was never
any famine amongst the native tribes of the
Lower Columbia. When Azrael took his chosen
from amongst these Indians to the Happy Hunt-
ing Grounds he walked with them along other
death -trails than the dreary one of starvation.
47
VIL
The Coming and the Going
HERE did the Indian of the Colum-
bia River come from?
^^1 Crab Creek, on the great plain of
the Columbia, in Eastern Washington, is one of
the most remarkable streams in the Northwest.
At its source near Medical Lake it is a mere
brook, and here, in 1870, there were trout, little
fingerlings, by the hundreds. A few miles to the
Westward the stream disappeared in sand and
basaltic rock. Again a few miles below it came
to the surface a larger stream than at first, and
with larger trout. For 100 miles went this pe-
culiar stream in this way, now sinking and now
rising, every reach of open water stocked with
trout of appropriate size, until at a point a little
48
THE COMING AND THE GOING
below Moses Lake, south of the Grand Coulee
and 20 or 30 miles from the Columbia River,
it finally disappeared in a waste of sand and
rock. Thirty years ago in its lower reaches fat
half-pound trout went in schools, and as the en-
gineers of the Northern Pacific Railroad passed
by they had much argument as to how the trout
got there, and as to how the right-sized fish got
in the right -sized streams. But the question is
still unsolved.
In some such fashion men speculate upon
the orgin of the Pacific Coast aborigines. How
came this people to be scattered along the coast
and in the interior, each one in his proper habi-
tat, and who were the Adam and Eve of the
Chinooks and Cathlamets? It is an endless sub-
jed, for they were apparently a people to them-
selves and resembled no others, and perhaps the
49
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
answer of Chief Moses, of the Wenatchees, is
as good as any. Riding by this self- same Crab
Creek in leisurely fashion one Summer day, he
was asked how the trout got in. With an in-
dulgent smile for the youthful ignorance that
prompted such a question, the old chief an-
swered: "Mika ticka cumtux caqua ucook tenas
salmon chawco copa tenas chuck? Na, na, chawco,
nesica tillicum be nesika cumtux yaca quansum mit-
lite. " (You want to know how the little salmon
got into the little creek? No, no, they didn't get
in. My people know, and I know, that they have
always been there.)
Another curious question has to do with the
scanty native population of Western Oregon
and Washington when first known by the white
men. The range was limitless and food abund-
ant beyond measure. The country could have
50
THE COMING AND THE GOING
supported easily five times the number of native
people that were on it. These Indians always
claimed that they were once a populous and
powerful people, but that in some way they had
provoked the Divine anger and been destroyed,
and this claim is undoubtedly based upon fact,
and on this question, although there are uncer-
tainties regarding the manner of the decimation
of the Indians of the Willamette and Lower Co-
lumbia Rivers, we have something definite to
go on. This decimation began before the first
white settlers came, and was largely finished be-
fore 1830. None of the histories give any idea
of the number of Indians who inhabited this
region before historic times, and this can only
be conjectured, but it is certain that once a com-
mensurate Indian population filled Western
Oregon from the Cascade Mountains to the
51
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
Pacific Ocean. Every aged Indian told stories of
a time when the rivers were lined with villages
and floated many canoes.
At Marr's Landing, about three miles below
Castle Rock, on the Columbia, the river has in
the last few years been washing away what is
known as the island, and has uncovered the site
of old Indian camp fires.These stretch in a long
line up and down the beach. They are covered
with two or three feet of loam, and on this fir
trees a hundred years old have grown. As many
as fifteen or twenty stone hammers have been
found about a single fireplace, and these old
charred fires are preserved as they were 200 years
ago. One pathetic little relic found amongst the
big stone hammers was a tiny little hammer and
pestle, evidently playthings of an Indian child.
On Archer Mountain, a mile or two west, are
52
THE COMING AND THE GOING
what appear to be ancient fortifications that
would have required many warriors to man. No
village of this magnitude was known there by
white men. In the days of Lewis and Clark there
was only a scattering settlement near Castle
Rock, and a migratory trading band at the Cas-
cades.
The Indian flint fadlory at the Clackamas
River suggests a large population, and Cath-
lamet was always a greater city of the dead than
of the living. Between the Elokomon and the
Skamokawa the sloughs were lined with the
burial canoes of the dead, and as only disting-
uished men were so buried, this stood for a very
large population, probably greater than that of
the Bella- Bella Indian Village in British Colum-
bia. These canoe burials were ancient to say the
least. Cedarwood is almost indestructible, and
53
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
no living Indians knew the name or lineage of
the dead or resented the resurrection that the
white children accomplished in searching for
Indian ornaments.They tumbled the bones out
of the bed of loam and leaves that had gath-
ered over them, and they were the bones of a
hundred years gone. In sport the children put
them together and speculated upon what man-
ner of men they were, and the Indian children
joined in the game, for the dead were the old,
old people.
Below the Indian village the ground was black
and the plough turned up countless skulls and
bones with flints and Indian arrowheads, be-
speaking long ocaipation and a numerous pop-
ulation.
Long before 1800 the Indian had evidently
reached the height of his power and prosperity.
54
THE COMING AND THE GOING
and when the white man came was already on
the way to extinction.
The waning of the Indian power of the Lower
Columbia is shrouded in mystery. Young In-
dian girls told the story of it in hushed whis-
pers, and the old Indians spoke of it reludantly.
Had the Death Angel come in bodily form they
could not have been more impressed. The wail
for the dead, so they said, was heard all along
the rivers, and no one even hoped for life when
the slaughter was on.
The Indians named the chief instrument of
destruction the "Cole sick." With the white man
came the smallpox and the measles, but the
"Cole sick" was neither of these. About 1820
and 1830 epidemics of the old disease swept
among the remaining Indians, and historians
are puzzled to give it a name.
55
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
One suggests that fever and ague came with
the settlers, but theValley of the Columbia was
never a fever and ague country and the pioneers,
however malaria stricken at the beginning, must
have been thoroughly disinfeded by their long
trip across the plains. Others say that the turn-
ing up of the soil by the Hudson's Bay people
at the farms at Fort Vancouver released malaria
from the soil and this caused the epidemic, but
the disease was here before the farms, and it was
impossible that a disease which raged over hun-
dreds of square miles could have come from so
trivial a cause. It may have been the modern la
grippe striking an unprotected people. What-
ever it was no more potent angel of death ever
visited an afflicted people.
The white man had no need of war or vio-
lence in his dealings with these Indians, nor did
56
THE COMING AND THE GOING
he employ them, for the "Sahalee Tyee," the
Indian god, had struck before him.
After 1800 the smallpox, measles and con-
sumption were always busy, and a death in the
Indian village was a common thing. There was
no doctor at Cathlamet, and in pitiful depend-
ence upon their superior skill the Indians used
to come to James Bimie and William Strong,
the only white settlers there, and ask for med-
icine, which was always given them, although
it was no inconsiderable burden to supply it.
But sickness in an Indian lodge was not to
be checked by medicines.
57
VIII.
The Medicine Man
'^^j N addition to these medicines In-
^'f^f dians of the higher circles had In-
°p^. dian medicine men. A sick Indian,
a smoky lodge, a hundred Indians beating the
roof with poles to a monotonous chant and
dance, and a temporary maniac manipulating
the sufferer with rattles and Indian trumpery,
it was weird medical work, and soon transferred
the Indian of the higher circles to the select circle
of Abraham's bosom.
The Indian war dance has for the last one
hundred years been practically unknown on the
lower river. Occasionally some feeble effort was
made to imitate it, but nothing was ever done
that could for one moment be compared with
58
THE MEDICINE MAN
the wild rush and frenzy of a genuine war dance
about the campfires of the Spokanes and Cay-
uses. These were performances to stir the blood
and raise the hair. Nowhere along the seacoast
were there any war dances to speak of. Even
among the Hydahs, Tlinklits and Chilcats of
Alaska the war dance was a spiritless, tame af-
fair. The medicine dance, however, an entirely
different thing, was at its best among the Coast
tribes.
There were reports of Indian lodges in West-
ern Oregon that were two hundred and twenty-
four feet long, but this is probably an exagger-
ation, and a lodge sixty or seventy feet long
must have been a large one. In such a lodge in
case of sickness of some distinguished person,
would be gathered at night a hundred or more
Indians. In the sunken place in the middle of
59
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
the lodge cleaned out for this purpose, and be-
tween the two end-fires would be placed upon
a mat the sufferer lightly covered with furs.
Around the sides and ends of the lodge in
double and triple ranks, each with a pole in his
hands, would be placed every available Indian
man, woman and child.
In Cathlamet the white children would some-
times join in and were always welcome. At a
given signal from some master of ceremonies,
the dance would commence by everybody, at
first slowly, but afterwards more quickly, jump-
ing up and down in their places to a loud chant
of yo-o-o, yo-o-o, yo, the first two long drawn
out and the last sharply cut off and shouted al-
most explosively. No one stirred from his po-
sition except monotonously to jump up and
down with the pole held upright in both hands
60
THE MEDICINE MAN
in front of him, so that the movement brought
it into contad with the low roof in perfect time
with the chant and the jumping, the move-
ments being so timed that the poles struck the
roof all together with the final "yo." The noise
was deafening and the lodge would shake in
every timber.
After this had gone on with increasing en-
thusiasm for a half hour or so and the patient
was supposed to be sufficiently prepared and
the evil spirit properly alarmed, a terrific noise
would be heard in the darkness outside, and
suddenly the medicine man and four or five
assistants would come bounding through the
door with howls and yells into the smoky in-
terior. They looked like fiends, bodies naked,
faces covered with a hideous mask, over which
towered a frightful headdress, and in their
6i
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
hands rattles, large cumbersome things deco-
rated with teeth and feathers. This dress varied
with different people and different medicine
men, but the one idea was to make it as hideous
and awe-inspiring as possible so as to impress
and frighten the demons who had wrought the
evil witchcraft upon the sufferer. Not for one
moment did the dancing, chanting or pound-
ing cease or vary in its monotony.
The medicine man howling dismally, circled
with great leaps and bounds about his patient,
in sporting phrase, ''sparring for an opening" to
get to close grips with the evil spirit. Finally his
chance came. The spirit, invisible to all but him,
had been caught off his guard. He rushed in,
seized the sick man, and with hands and teeth
attempted to drag from him the demon that
tormented him. In the contest the patient was
62
THE MEDICINE MAN
tossed and roughly handled, for Indian devils
come out reluctantly.
The performance lasted for hours, taking
the greater part of the night and the assemblage
was wrought up to frenzy; but the treatment
stopped only because human nature could en-
dure no more. With the smoke, noise and gen-
eral atmosphere the interior of the lodge be-
came unbearable and the physical strain was too
great to be longer endured.
Sustained and soothed by this struggle with
the evil one in his body, the sick man himself
with patience and before many days generally
gave up the ghost.
63
IX,
The Sweat House
HEY had another device that for
quick dispatch was superior even to
the personal treatment of the med-
icine man, and this was the Indian sweat house.
No Indian man in his native state voluntarily
or for the sole purpose of cleansing himself ever
took a bath. He trusted to the rain or to the
necessary swimming, to passing through the
wet woods and grass or to mere dry attrition
for all the personal cleanliness he deemed nec-
essary. It created a sensation in the highest social
circles of the Chinooks, therefore, when Dun-
can McDougall caused his Indian bride- elect
to be thoroughly soaked and washed prelimi-
nary to the marriage ceremony, and the fact
64
THE SWEAT HOUSE
was considered of so much importance that his-
tory has gravely recorded it as one of the notable
circumstances that attended that notable wed-
ding.
History, however, in giving so much prom-
inence to this fact, has done injustice to the In-
dian woman. She was by instindt more decent
than her Indian master and under favoring cir-
cumstances was neat and clean. To her a bath,
although rare, was not an unknown thing, and
therefore the sweat house was not ordinarily for
her.
To the masculine Indian, however, a hot
bath seemed the greatest sacrifice he could make
to the deities that ruled disease and death, and
so it happened far back in the history of the
race that some aboriginal genius with a talent
for inventing great sacrifices invented and
65
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
brought into use the Indian sweat house, They
were not much used on the Columbia River
near the ocean, but on the Cowlitz and Lewis
Rivers, all along the Valley of the Willamette
and on the Upper Columbia and its tributaries
sweat houses were everywhere to be seen. They
were little, mound-shaped structures like a flat,
old-fashioned bee-hive, were perhaps four feet
in height and five feet in diameter, the size and
form varying a little in different localities, and
were constructed on the banks of the cold run-
ning streams.They were made of willow branch-
es, loosely intertwined after the fashion of a
great basket upside down, without any opening
except a hole in front of just sufficient size for
a man to crawl in.
After the willow work was completed it was
daubed over with clay, making an almost im-
66
THE SWEAT HOUSE
pervious hut.The inside dimensions were care-
fully calculated so as to accommodate one man,
crouched into the smallest possible compass,
with the necessary apparatus for a vapor bath,
and the manner of its use was simple. After
heating a number of large stones almost if not
quite red hot the Indian, naked as the day he
was born, and with a vessel of water, would
crawl in and take the stones in also. Closing the
door up tightly he would pour water on the hot
stones until he was almost parboiled with the
hot steam. After bearing this as long as he could
the Indian would crawl out and without any
preparation would plunge into the running
stream. In this manner would be accomplished
the second great medical treatment of the In-
dian.
This course was taken for any illness or in-
67
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
disposition, and would be taken even in mid-
winter, it not being an unusual thing for a sick
Indian after such a vapor bath to plunge into
the water while snowflakes were whirling in the
air and ite running in the river. Where the in-
disposition was slight or due only to an un-
cleanly life, the Indian would survive the treat-
ment and be even benefited by it, and it was
these cases that maintained its credit as a "good
medicine" in the eyes of the tribe.
With measles, smallpox and other diseases
of similar character it was almost sure to cause
speedy death, but as the Indian did not dis-
criminate and with cheerful patience took it for
jrranted that the afflicted one if he died was
fated to death anyway, it did not discredit the
remedy.
Occasionally an Indian would kill a medicine
68
THE SWEAT HOUSE
man, or, as was once done by a sorrowing chief
of the Klickitats, lasso the unsuccessful dodor
about the neck and with the lasso fast to the
saddle bow, ride his horse at full speed until
the medical head was separated from the body,
but no fault could be found with the sweat
house, which maintained its credit as a sover-
eign remedy until many years after the coming
of the whites, and this accounts for the fact
that measles amongst the Indians was about as
deadly as the smallpox.
69
X.
The Sins of the Fathers
flTH the white man came whisky
and death hand in hand, and with
him came the subtle laws under
which nature punishes infractions of its moral
code, and these laws struck at the very source
of life of the Indian people,
Lucy Quillis, one of several of the name, for
it passed from one to another, was the little nurse
in the white family. She was carefully taught,
clothed and cared for. But in those days you
might just as well have put a pretty little tiger
cat in pantelets. On her part, with the very best
intentions, she taught her infant charges the
Chinook language, how to gamble in Indian
fashion, and some other thines.
70
THE SINS OF THE FATHERS
When she was fifteen or sixteen years old,
after the fashion of the young girls of her race,
she fled from the house with her lover, a most
unworthy scamp, and so began the life which
ended a few years later in all that was left of
poor Lucy, a mangled, battered body, being
gathered up from the floor of the madhouse
and buried. The "madhouse" of the Lower Co-
lumbia and of Puget Sound was not in pioneer
days a lunatic asylum or a female seminary, only
a judicious combination of the two with un-
limited whisky thrown in.
The Indian woman of the Northwest Pacific
Coast was not a flower- garlanded maiden or a
frivolous French soubrette or Light o' Love, as
so many Indian romances depict her.There was
in her from childhood up a certain gravity and
sober earnestness which was the natural result
71
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
of her sober, hard-working hfe. For unnum-
bered centuries the burden of the toil and res-
ponsibility of her people had been upon her
shoulders, and so far as she had anything to
think with, she was a thoughtful, earnest wom-
an. Inarticulate and coy in the expression of her
feeling to a degree that imposed upon people
who did not know of the fires that glowed be-
neath, she was in reality alive and earnest and
had great capacities for joy and suffering. Above
all things she was a simple, law-abiding creature.
In the tribe, as a maiden, she obeyed without
question the moral code such as it v/as, of her
people. Married to an Indian husband she was
his slave, and married to a white man and made
acquainted with his moral law, for his wife, she
would have passed through fire, torture and
death before she would have gone one step out
72
THE SINS OF THE FATHERS
of the straight path in which he desired her to
walk.
There is not on record in Oregon history a
single case of an unfaithful Indian wife of a
decent white man, and in view of this one can-
not recall some particulars of the history of those
early times without a shudder or without taking
a firmer hold upon a belief in a future life in
which the crooked ways of this world may be
made straight, for God seemed to deal harshly
with the Indian woman.
The spectre of the Eve of St. John when he
spoke to "Smaylho'mes lady gay," spoke to
understanding ears, and when he laid his burn-
ing fingers on her fair arm with the declaration:
"That lawless love is guilt above,
This awful sign receive"
and left there the scorched brand of guilt he
73
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
branded wanton frailty, but God's Angel of
Punishment in his dealings with many Indian
women laid his hand on innocent victims and
no law proteded them, no voice warned them,
and they did not even know for what they were
stricken.
It is difficult for the white men and women
of this day to conceive of the Indian code of
morals or to appreciate how perfectly it fitted
their wandering life or to understand how trust-
fully and innocently the young Indian woman
met the white strangers when they came. No ex-
ploring or hunting party, however difficult or
arduous the journey, ever lacked Indian women
to go with it, and no white man had any diffi-
culty at any time in obtaining a companion for
his camp or home, nor from the Indian point
of view was there anything indelicate or im-
74
THE SINS OF THE FATHERS
moral in this. It was the old custom of their
race come down unquestioned from Adam and
Eve and had the full sanction of parents and
friends.
Nevertheless to this trustfulness and inno-
cence the terrible physical punishment that had
been evolved for a race of men who had been
educated for centuries was ruthlessly applied,
and to make the situation still more unhappy
and apparently unjust, no remedial or palliative
agencies were known to the victims. The cruel
thing about the early history of Oregon was
that the trader came so long before the mission-
ary that death's work was largely done to the
Indian woman before either knowledge or help
could come to her.
One of the saddest sights of early days was
that of young Indian women driven out of the
75
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
lodges to live or die as best they could alone in
the woods. The other Indians would be fright-
ened at their sickness and in their fear knew no
pity. Occasionally an old woman or a grand-
mother, whose life was considered of little value
either to herself or her people, would go out
with the stricken one and care for her.
Such girls would patiently live apart in some
little hut or wickie-up and without a word of
complaint would care for themselves as they best
could. The pioneer white women were in the
habit of taking out food and such simple rem-
edies as they could think of to these poor crea-
tures, and not knowing the nature of their ill-
ness or daring to come close to them, would
place it upon a convenient stump to which the
sick girl would come when her friend had with-
drawn a little, and then the two would cheer-
76
THE SINS OF THE FATHERS
fully visit together with ten or twenty yards of
pure air between them.
Ordinarily, when white persons were about,
when death came, the dead were decently buried,
but occasionally the interment was as fearRil as
the sickness, and this was true of the victims
of any disease that the Indian feared was in-
fectious.
One Winter evening a good old missionary,
telling in reflective mood his experiences on the
Northern Coasts in a smallpox epidemic, told
of sending Kathla, a young Indian girl who had
contraded the disease, to a hut far outside the
Indian village on a point in the bay where her
old grandmother went with her as nurse, and
how every morning he went in his canoe to a
point of tide -washed rocks near their hut, and
not daring on account of his people to go near-
11
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
er, shouted out his instructions and left there
their food and simple remedies.
The missionary then wandered off in his
story into a general description of that awful
time; how twelve canoes laden with Indians
seeking help camped on an island in the bay
and after some weeks only one canoe went pad-
dling away; and hov/, when the scourge had
passed, he sent out trusty men immune to the
sickness and bid them bury the dead who were
lying about in the forest with orders afterwards
to destroy their own clothing and go a -hunting
for six months longer before returning to the
village, so as not to bring the infection back
with them.
The old missionary told of one old Indian
who had contracted the smallpox and who in-
sisted upon having his grave dug in advance
78
THE SINS OF THE FATHERS
and his bed placed over it so that he could drop
handily into it when he died, and added, in a
chuckle, that the old Indian did not die after
all and the grave was wasted, and then he lapsed
into silence, forgetting that he had left Kathla's
story incomplete, until some one asked about it.
With an effort of the memory recalling the
circumstances, the good man answered as if it
were an ordinary occurrence of those old days:
"Kathla and her grandmother, poor crea-
tures! Oh, the wolves took them!"
This is the seamy side of Indian life and the
process of extinction of the Indian was grim in
spots, but strange as it may seem, this period of
fifty or one hundred years during which the
natives of the Lower Columbia were passing
away, was not on the whole an unhappy time
for them. The Indian took life day by day and
79
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
did not worry for the future. Sheltered and with
enough clothes and food he was happy. The in-
dividual was never seriously sick but once.The
life and the medical system insured this and
the fear of death was not in them.
One of the most pathetic characteristics of
all the Indians on the Pacific Coast was their
submission to what seemed the mevitable. A
sick Indian gave up at once and died with no
more fear or apparent suffering than if he were
falling asleep, and his relatives buried him with
low wailings, the sorrow of which died out with
the echo.
To this day in Alaska the dying Indian will
talk of his own coming death with a gentle pa-
tience that seems to cast out all fear.
80
XL
The Broken Tribes
NE of the effects of this earlier deci-
mation of the people was a scatter-
ing of all of the Indians of the Lower
Columbia River Valley. They fled from their
homes and temporarily settled in any place that
provided them with the means of livelihood or
that promised exemption from the plague that
afflicted them. Inthis way the Cathlamets, whose
home was originally upon the Oregon side of
the Columbia River, below Puget Island, after
wanderings that are not recorded, finally settled
upon the present site of Cathlamet and near the
place of the ancient Indian town, and from this
people the modern town derives its name.
The Wahkiakums, who lived in the ancient
8i
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
Indian village on the Elokomon Slough, near
Cathlamet, returned to the ancient to wnsite after
the panic was over, but only to leave it shortly
after the coming of the Lewis and Clark expe-
dition. This people gave their name to the
County of Wahkiakum, within which Cath-
lamet is situated. What final catastrophe com-
pelled the Wahkiakums to leave their ancient
village is not known, but charred timbers and
burned and blackened soil on the site of the old
town point almost certainly to fire as the final
scourge ofthe Indians on the Elokomon Slough.
These fragments of the Wahkiakum and
Cathlamet peoples took up their homes together
on the main Columbia River about one mile
East of the old Indian village. Here they built
their cedar houses and founded what is now the
modern village of Cathlamet.
82
THE BROKEN TRIBES
What took place near Cathlamet must have
taken place all over Western Oregon. Panic-
stricken for the time the native people wan-
dered about for several years, and fragments
only of the ancient tribes returned to their old
seats.
With this dispersion came an almost total
disappearance of the tribal bonds and relation-
ships. Every little settlement became a law to
itself, and in Western Oregon there were no
sharply defined tribal ties or boundaries. These
peoples, as the white men came in, were grad-
ually given the names of the localities in which
they were found, or, as often happened, the lo-
cality was given the name of the principal In-
dian man who was found there, and afterwards
the resident people were known by the same
name. Thus, Wahkiakum was a chief of the
83
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
Cathlamets, and yet two tribes have apparently
derived their names, one from the chief and one
from the locality. These two tribes came to-
gether, and the double name, Wahkiakum-
Cathlamet, is now perpetuated in the modern
County of Wahkiakum and Village of Cath-
lamet. The building up of Indian names for
modern use was a wondrous process, and no
man knows just how it was done.
The Chinooks, Clatsops, Cathlamet- Wahki-
akums and Coweliskies, with the native people
of the Lower Willamette Valley, in this later
period, roamed up and down the Columbia and
Willamette Rivers between the Cascades of the
Columbia and the Falls of the Willamette on
the East, and the ocean on the West, and in-
dividuals of any tribe took up their residence
at any place that pleased them, and in this way
84
THE BROKEN TRIBES
a good deal of mingling of the Indians took
place.
With this dispersion of the Indians came an
absolute failure in chieftainship. From 1800 on
to the end it is remarkable how barren the lower
river was of chiefs.
Comcomly, of the Chinooks; Chenamus, of
the Clatsops; Wahkiakum, of the Cathlamets,
and Umtux, of the Coweliskies, are the only
four borne in remembrance, and of these Wahki-
akum is known from a line or two in Washing-
ton Irving and as the founder of Cathlamet,
while Umtux emerges from obscurity only by
reason of his tragical end at the battle-ground
back of Fort Vancouver during the Indian war
of 1855-56.
Comcomly was more nearly a chief than any
other Indian on the Columbia West of the Cas-
85
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
cades, and this Duncan McDougall recognized
in 1813 when he married one of his daughters.
Many other Indians are named as chiefs in the
books, and some of them may have had some
claim to the title, but early historians called any
principal man of the natives a chief. In fact,
from the time ofCartier's voyage, in 153 5, when
a quaint old historian, writing of the Indian
town of Hochelaga, on the St. Lawrence, speaks
of meeting an Indian, "one of the principal lords
of the said city," to 1608, when in the Long
Wigwam of Wesowocomoco, the mighty Em-
peror Powhattan, was divested of his greasy
raccoon robe and gowned and crowned in kingly
style by the English, up to the present time,
very erroneous ideas have prevailed in regard to
the power and authority of Indian chiefs.
In time of war they were allowed a little
86
THE BROKEN TRIBES
authority, but not much. In Eastern Oregon,
where chiefs were plenty, they were without
authority in time of peace, beyond the influence
of their personal wealth and character, and on
the lower river the villages were without law or
authority from any native source.
During the latter days of Indian Cathlamet,
Quillis was the principal man of the village, and
had the largest lodge and family, and in earlier
times would have been called a chief, but poor
Quillis squabbled and scrambled with his broth-
er Indians on terms of perfect equality, and if
a canoe was to be hired or any contrad made,
his word was no better than that of anyone else.
87
XII.
The White Chiefs
HILE this confusion was at its height
a new element came in, so wedded to
the Indian life that it became part
and parce of it, and lived and died with it.
When in 1670 the"Governor and Company
of Adventurers of England trading into Hud-
son's Bay," commenced to trade as the Hud-
son's Bay Company with North America, they
had no purpose of founding a dynasty, and yet
that is what they did: the dynasty of the chiefs
of the Indian people.
Good old Dr. John McLoughlin, at Van-
couver, was in all essential things a chief of the
Indian people. His authority on the Columbia
West of the Cascades was absolute, and it ex-
88
THE WHITE CHIEFS
tended with varying power over the entire region
North of California and West of the Rocky
Mountains. His word was law to a lawless peo-
ple, and the great chief was known as such
among all the Indians. He had all the character-
istics of a chief — a quick temper, an arbitrary
will and the heart and the head of a governor
of men. He lived in impressive pomp, and all
down the river the story of the stately halls and
the wealth and magnificence of Fort Vancouver
was told by Indian to Indian with bated breath.
The present generation can never fully re-
alize that Fort Vancouver was once in this North-
west country, the court of a King, and that poor
Indians wandering chieftainless and alone
looked to it as a center of power, culture and
wealth. In the lodges of Cathlamet, the Indian
mothers told their children of the wonderful
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
place and of the wealth of red blankets, of gay
silk handkerchiefs and of powder and shot and
provisions that were to be found in its store-
houses.
The affedion and respect of the Indians for
McLoughlin was quickened by the fad of his
having a wife of the Indian blood, who bore
herself in her relations to her husband and the
world as the wife of an Indian chieftain should.
How much of the blood of this good woman
was French or Scottish and how much Ojibway
Indian nobody knows, but she carried herself
as an Indian woman, and when visitors were at
Fort Vancouver, effaced herself in true Indian
fashion; loved and respeded of her husband and
of every one, she, according to common report,
never presumed at Fort Vancouver to sit at her
husband's table in the presence of strangers, and
90
THE WHITE CHIEFS
in this, according to Indian notions, was only
rendering due respect to her lord and master.
No requirement of Indian etiquette was
more imperative than this, that an Indian
woman should not be seen eating with her hus-
band. It v/as her duty to wait upon and serve
him, and afterwards provide for herself. It made
no difference how wealthy she v/as, or how
many servants she might have to wait upon
her, she never presumed to put herself upon an
equality with her husband or to be served be-
fore him.Thiswasnotan invariable rule, as more
tlian one Indian woman took her place at the
head of her white husband's table and there
welcomed his guests, but this was not common
and was generally confined to Indian women
married from tribes East of the Rocky Moun-
tains.
91
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
There are wives of the Indian blood now liv-
ing on the Lower Columbia whose husbands
are well-to-do, influential men, who are loved
and respected of their husbands, who have the
respect of the communities in which they are
known, and who live handsomely and well, yet
who will not to this day sit at their own boun-
tiful and well-appointed tables with their hus-
band and his guests. This native shyness and
reserve it is almost impossible for the native
women to give up, and it enhanced Dr. Mc-
Loughlin's dignity in the eyes of the natives
that his wife treated him as a chief.
92
XIIL
Indian Wives
HE relation of the white chiefs of
the Hudson's Bay Company with
native women presents a point of
vivid interest in Indian history. For twenty years
Fort Vancouver, like all other Hudson's Bay
posts, was the home of fair- faced men and dark-
faced women.
There is no doubt as to the standing of the
women. They had been wedded in the ancient
and orderly fashion of their people and in the
forum of conscience were as much married as
ever Queen Victoria was. They knew that their
husbands could dismiss them at any time, but
this was the ancient and inalienable right of the
husband according to Indian ideas, and so with-
93
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
out a thought or care for the future they gladly
gave themselves to their white masters and
made loving and dutiful wives, and being used
to the country and at home, made very effective
helpmeets. The men accepted them upon the
same terms and not one man in ten dreamed at
first of the relation becoming a permanent one.
They were not of the class of the settlers, and
each man expeded in due time to return to
England and there marry and found a family.
Some of them did dismiss their Indian wives.
There were two ways of doing this. One was
to pass the wife, often with a bonus of goods
or furs, over to some other white man; and this
although a cruel process, was much more mer-
ciful than the other, which was to send the
woman back to her own people.
No one who has ever seen an Indian wife
94
INDIAN WIVES
of a white man sent back to her people ever
wanted to see such a thing again. Sorrowfully
gathering up her little belongings, lingering over
the task as long as possible, the poor dumb
creature would finally come to the last parting.
Without outcry or struggle she would try to
accept her fate. One or two good-bye kisses, for
the Indian women under the training of the
white men soon learned to kiss, and then with
her little bundles she would make her way back
to the lodges.
For days and weeks she would bring little
gifts of berries and game and lay them on her
husband's doorstep, and for days and weeks
would haunt the trading post or humbly stand
near her husband's house, where he could see
her, not daring to ask to be taken back, only
hoping that his mood might change and that
95
CATHLAMET ON THE COLU^]BIA
she might again be restored to her old place.
Resolute men broke down under the strain
of such partings and took back their dusky
wives for better or for worse until death should
them part.
With the higher class of Hudson's Bay man
the original marriage relation was very rarely
dissolved. Little by little the light shone in upon
him. Seeing at last clearly what he had done
and strengthened by love of wife and children
after many soul struggles, he faced his duty
nobly, and calling in the minister took upon
himself the marriage vows that bound him as
well as the woman.
Dr. McLoughlin was married after the Eng-
lish fashion in 1836, eleven years after he and
his wife had come to Fort Vancouver. Sir James
Douglas was married at the same time, while
96
INDIAN WIVES
another prominent Hudson Bay man and his
wife were joined together in the white man's
fashion by the same minister that married their
daughter to her husband and at the same time.
Romance treats it lightly, but whole tragedies
of self-renunciation were bound up in many of
these marriages.
Before McLoughlin came to Oregon anoth-
er servant of the Hudson's Bay Company had
been exercising all the functions and authority
of a chief of the Indians. James Birnie was in
every respect an interesting charader, and had
great influence with the Indians of the Colum-
bia River, and from 1846 to his death in 1864
he lived and with his wife reigned at Cath-
lamet. He conneded himself with the Hud-
son's Bay Company at Montreal, and three
years later, in 1820, established a Hudson's Bay
97
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
Company post at The Dalles. He was at Fort
Simpson in British Columbia, where one of the
islands outside the harbor now bears his name,
and afterwards was in charge of Fort George,
now Astoria, at the mouth of the Columbia
River.
In 1846 he severed his connection with the
Hudson's Bay Company and settled in Cath-
lamet, the first white man to make a home
there. Here he and his wife ruled in state and
conducted what was in all essential particulars
a post of the Hudson's Bay Company. The
square Hudson's Bay store just east of the
present steamboat landing at Cathlamet still
stands. At least it is in the same position and is
of the same shape, but clapboards and paint
have given it a modern appearance. The old
Birnie house was on the crest of the hill just
INDIAN WIVES
back of the store. Like McLoughlin, Mr. Birnie
had an Indian wife, brought with him from the
Red River Indians of the East; but she, unlike
Mrs. McLoughlin, bore herself with all the self-
assertion of an English dame of long pedigree.
She entertained in her own home and sat at
the head of her own table, and no social center
in those days in all the country was more fash-
ionably attended than that of Mrs. Birnie.
Once only in the year did she resume her In-
dian character, and that was for her annual trip
to Shoal water Bay for elk meat, clams and
cranberries.
Mrs. Birnie's canoe was one of the wonders
of the lower river. No larger one in the mem-
ory of Indians had ever been seen there. It was
said that it could carry seventy people. In the
fall of the year this canoe, manned by twenty
99
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
or thirty Indian men and women, with all their
belongings and household furniture aboard,
would start seaward from Cathlamet.
Mrs. Birnie, all fire and energy, would be in
command, and no woman on the river could
command better.To the dip of the paddles and
the Indian chant, the big canoe, enforcing res-
pect everywhere, would pass the Chinook vil-
lages into Chinook River to the portage. Here
the expedition would be taken over to the Nasel
River and from there would pass into Shoal-
water Bay. After a few weeks of hunting and
fishing the party, with its spoils, would return
by the same route.
Disposing of her gatherings and scattering
her party, Mrs. Birnie would doff her Indian
character and again assume her role as the grand
dame of Birnie hall.
lOO
INDIAN WIVES
Here was one of the great gathering places
of the lower river, and here at the wedding of
Mrs. Birnie's daughters were gathered impos-
ing assemblies.Thomas Fielding Scott, first mis-
sionary bishop of Oregon, an imposing figure
in full canonicals, performed the marriage cere-
monies. The Indians looked on in awe and
amazement, and for weeks afterwards the little
Indians gave dress rehearsals of the white man's
wedding. The white robes of the bishop, which
in their untutored way they took to be a glorified
nightgown or white blanket in some way pecul-
iarly appropriate for weddings, particularly took
their fancy. To see a dirty little brat of an Indian
with a piece of old cloth on, through rents in
which gleamed a brown little stomach, attempt
to repeat the marriage ceremony to a couple of
other little brats, was very funny.
lOI
XIV.
Keeping the Peace
[either Mr. Birnie nor any of the
Hudson Bay employees had any
legal authority over the Indians; law
in these very early days was chiefly conspicuous
for its absence, but each and every one of them
fearlessly assumed the duty of a chief bound
to maintain order within the bounds of his
jurisdiction. Occasionally Dr. McLoughlin
would have an Indian murderer hanged, and he
never permitted any serious off^ense to go un-
punished, but severe measures were rarely nec-
essary.
Occasionally a naval expedition was sent out,
but these on the lower river were not very des-
tructive, George B. Roberts, Dr. McLoughlin's
I02
KEEPING THE PEACE
Prime Minister at Vancouver, who in the latter
part of his life lived and finally died at Cath-
lamet, and who knew more of affairs at Van-
couver and of the Indians than almost any one
else, had many comical tales to tell of these ex-
peditions. The irate old doctor would storm
about and order the instant punishment of the
offending Chinooks. If the armed schooner
Cadboro was away another little schooner would
be hauled to the bank and a big gun would
with infinite difficulty be transferred from the
fort to her deck, where it would be carefully
balanced to prevent an upset. Then in charge of
a flotilla of canoes the schooner with the great
black gun looming up impressively on the for-
ward deck would proceed down the river to the
great awe and astonishment of all the Indians
until opposite the Chinook town, where she
103
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
would come to anchor. After allowing a suffi-
cient time for every Chinook to get well away
the big gun would be carefully trained upon a
spot where good old Roberts thought there was
no danger of hitting anybody and fired several
times. A few houses would be knocked down
and a few canoes would be captured. The In-
dians would make restitution and the principal
offenders would receive some slight punish-
ment. Then Dr. McLoughlin and Birnie and
Roberts and the others would be again indulg-
ent chiefs of their weak and erring people, and
the Hudson's Bay Company would again en-
fold them with its protedion. The schooner vic-
torious, big gun and all, would sail up the river
amidst great rejoicing and promptly resume its
peaceful business of carrying goods and furs.
The chief instrument of discipline was the
104
KEEPING THE PEACE
store, for here every Indian was well known, and
he could trade to such extent only as the factor
allowed. If for any reason he was on the black
list for offenses unatoned for it made no differ-
ence how many beaver skins he could produce.
There was no sugar or tobacco, powder, shot
or blankets for him. In serious cases the store
would be entirely closed to the whole people
and this would bring the most stubborn tribe
to its knees, for without powder and shot they
were helpless, and without sugar and tobacco
they were miserable. All hunting and fishing
would stop, and about the storehouse would
be gathered, stolid but unhappy groups of In-
dian men and women squatting on the ground
and discussing the situation.
Finally a subdued and repentant committee
of the principal men would wait upon the of-
105
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
fended factor.They would be received with se-
vere and impressive dignity, would very likely
be kept waiting for several days for an interview
with the chief. When admitted to his presence
their business would be curtly and sternly de-
manded of them. Then a great silence would
prevail; not a word would be said perhaps for
half an hour or more. Finally a principal man
would rise in his place and mournfully lay be-
fore the fador the unhappy condition of his
people, carefully refraining from mentioning
what he and the fador and everybody else knew
was the secret of the v/Hole trouble. Then the
factor upon his part would curtly tell them what
they all very well knew, that at such a time and
place a white trapper had been robbed of his
furs and outfit, and that until these had been
returned and the criminals given up for pun-
io6
KEEPING THE PEACE
ishment his heart was angry towards them, and
that there were no goods for any one until res-
titution had been made.
After expressing their astonishment at the
news and denying all knowledge of the affair
and any ability to detect or bring in the offend-
ers, the Indian committee would slowly stalk
out, and the groups about the store would be-
gin again their subdued conversations.
After a day or two some of the plundered
goods would be returned. The fador would be
obdurate.Then more would come in. Still the
factor shook his head. After awhile all would
be returned and the solemn committee would
ask for mercy, and would plaintively tell that
the robbers were of another tribe; that they
had gone to a far-off illihee, etc., etc., but all
in vain.
107
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
After a few days more Indian Jim and In-
dian Joe and their associates would be produced
as the culprits. In nearly every case the offend-
ers would surrender themselves to justice when
the pressure on their people became sufficiently
hard, but if not they were brought in by force.
Indians acted very much as children do, and
one of their peculiarities was that a criminal
seemed unable to keep silent regarding his
crime, and however disastrous the consequences
might be to himself, was compelled to confess
and give himself up.
As one by one the Hudson's Bay Company
gave up its posts the men who were foot loose
returned to English soil, but many were not so
free. Dr. McLoughlin and James Birnie, happy
in their married life, were nevertheless not in a
position to return home, and were compelled
io8
KEEPING THE PEACE
to stay in the wilderness with their wilderness
people, and this was true of hundreds of others.
Ties carelessly assumed at first, in the end held
these men captives by a chain that they could
not and would not break.
Already men and women are proud of the
Indian blood in their veins, and more and more
this feeling will grow, but at this early time the
Indian wife could only be happy in her native
land, and was unfitted for any other; and it
speaks well for the great hearts of these noble
men that they recognized this and gave them-
selves a willing sacrifice to a new country and
a dying race. They had connected themselves
with a changing time and were compelled to
change and pass away with it.
The clinging arms of the wilderness women
were about them and held them to their forest
109
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
life.There they lived and there they died, and
the God of the wilderness has pronounced their
work good.
no
XV.
Chief Umtiix
^'^ENTION has been made of the
peaceful charader of the Indians
Sf'^^-ftl along the Lower Columbia and their
broken strength. It is a fad, therefore, to be
noticed that after Fort Vancouver came into the
possession of the Americans a number of these
Indians did on one occasion form line of bat-
tle against the whites, and that by reason of
what then happened one spot in the Lower
Columbia River Valley bears to this day the
title of a battle ground.
The Coweliskies who lived on the Cowlitz
River, then known as the Coweliskie, and along
the two branches of the Lewis River in what is
now known as Cowlitz and Clark Counties of
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
the State of Washington, were not of the pure
river type of Indian, nor did they live diredly
on the banks of the Columbia. They had a trail
extending from the Cowlitz River to the gravel
plains South of 01ympia,Tacoma and Seattle.
Some of them who lived near the Gravel Plains
had ponies and were what might be called half
horse and half canoe Indians. They were a more
lively and warlike people than the Chinooks
and held a middle position between the Colum-
bia River and the Puget Sound Indians.
Indians are by nature great gamblers, and it
is hard where all so excelled to specify any one
tribe that was preeminent in this fascinating
vice, but perhaps the Indians of the Lower
Puget Sound country were entitled to this
award. Too timorous to go to actual war and
take chances with death, they were also too
112
CHIEF UMTUX
adventurous to be contented in mere eating and
drinking, and therefore gambled with an aban-
don that put to shame the very best modern
efforts of our gilded youth.The white man plays
to some limit, but these Indians had none.
Whenever any of these Indian cominunrcies
on Puget Sound acquired enough portable
property to make it worth while they sent out
invitations to their neighbors for a meeting at
some appointed place, and to this spot the In-
dians would flock from every point of the com-
pass.! hey would bring with them their wives,
children, dogs, horses, furs, lobes, weapons and
every bit of their property that they could carry
along, leaving nothing at home except their
canoes and lodges. The prominent features of
these aboriginal fairs or expositions were what
might be called "agricultural horse trots."
I
113
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
Horse racing as a gambling game was an
institution amongst them, and every little com-
munity of the horse Indians had its racing pony,
which was at once its pride and hope. Other
gambling games were played at these meetings
but the horse race was the greatest of them all.
Curiously enough the Indian in his native state
never raced canoes. This is a modern invention
of the white man.
To these race meets appointed by the Indians
of Lower Puget Sound many of the Coweliskies
with their wives and chattels would go, and
generally they came back afoot without their
chattels and sometimes without their wives.
LJpon the speed of their favorite pony the
Indians would stake everything: robes, goods
and horses, and, the fever of gambling upon
them, would not hesitate to stake and lose the
114
CHIEF UMTUX
clothing from off their backs or even their faith-
ful squaws.
This betting of a wife upon a gambling
game was a rare event, not because of any dis-
inclination on the part of the loving husband
to put up the wife of his bosom on a wager,
but rather to the disinclination of the other man
to put up anything of value against such skit-
tish property as Indian squaws. The Indian
might be a gambler, but he wasn't always a
fool, and to win an assorted lot of wives was
not exactly the way to get rich or happy.
It was only in cases like that of the amorous
Jewish King that an Indian would in a gamb-
ling game put up anything of value against an
Indian woman, and had King David and his
faithful Uriah been Columbia River Indians,
the wily old lover would have needed only to
"5
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
put his faithful soldier in the front of a
poker game to get his wife, and the putting of
Uriah in the front of the battle and the shed-
ding of blood would have been spared the
Psalmist.
This intercourse of the Coweliskies and the
Puget Sound Indians naturally made them
friendly, and when the Indian war of 1835-56
was in progress and Chief Leschi on the Sound
was taking the Puget Sound Indians into war
with the whites, great fear was felt on the Co-
lumbia River that the Coweliskies would be
drawn into the conflict, and it was deemed best
to keep them at Fort Vancouver, and there they
were brought and kept in semi-imprisonment.
At this time the regulars were in the field,
and a company of volunteers was, greatly to
its dissatisfaction and to the dissatisfaction of
116
CHIEF UMTUX
its Captain, in garrison at Fort Vancouver, and
the fort was the center of more general alarms
and troubles than any other point in the North-
west. The Yakima Indians were attacking the
Cascades settlement only thirty miles to the
eastward, and a large number of settlers had
been killed there. General, then Lieutenant
Philip Sheridan, with only forty men, the last
of the regulars, had gone to the Cascades to
withstand them, and was having a hard time.
Everywhere fear was about Vancouver and all
of the settlers from the threatened points were
encamped about it for protection.
Panics were of daily happening and it was
a common occurrence for such a panic to arise
in some strange way in the middle of the night.
A cry would be raised in the darkness that the
Indians were coming, and in a moment the
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
muddy roads and trails through the dark woods
would be thronged with the panic-stricken
people fleeing to the fort for protection. Most
of the men were absent at the front fighting
Indians, but the trampling women and child-
ren had a hard time of it, and the few men
stationed at the fort, and especially the young
Captain, had almost more than they could do
to keep order and still remain in a posture of
defense against the very real Indian enemy only
thirty miles away.
Amidst all of these alarms the camp of the
Coweliskies lay like a dark cloud under the fort,
portending danger, and many a mother and
many a fighting man, looking at it with appre-
hension, wished that it might be destroyed be-
fore it broke and scattered, carrying fire and
death with it.
ii8
CHIEF UMTUX
While things were in this condition the
Coweliskies suddenly decamped. In a single
night their camp disappeared and in the morn-
ing the settlers saw in their fancy their worst
fears confirmed: the Coweliskies had gone on
the warpath and now the Indian war was to be
brought to their own firesides.
The company was promptly put under arms
and went in pursuit, and about fifteen miles
Northwest of Vancouver overtook the fugi-
tives. Great difficulty was found in locating
them and still greater difficulty in finding out
their intentions, whether for war or peace. To
precipitate a conflict by striking the Indians un-
necessarily would in the unprotected condition
of the settlers have been a crime, while to let
the Indians escape to carry on in unbroken
force an Indian warfare would have been worse.
119
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
The young Captain placed his little force
across the path of the Indians and went to work
to develop the situation. Negotiations were en-
tered into.The two forces stood on their guard
against each other, but everything went well,
and one evening the Indians finally promised
to return the next morning, and for the first
time for many nights the young Captain had
rest. In that night some lawless idiot did his
deadly work, and the next morning it was
learned that Umtux, the chief of the Indians,
lay dead between the lines. Who killed him no
one knows or suspects to this day. None of the
sentrys fired upon him and none of his Indians
appeared to have had murder against him in
their hearts. Nevertheless there lay Chief Um-
tux half way between the lines of his people
and the lines of the volunteers, indubitably very
I20
CHIEF UMTUX
dead. Lying in the trail by the side of a log
with the hole made by a rifle bullet through
him, Chief Umtux was more dangerous dead
than living, and instantly the battle lines were
formed in earnest and for a few hours Chief
Umtux lay upon the crimsoned soil of what it
seemed would at last be a genuine battle-ground
of Northwestern Oregon. Steadily the two
forces stood against each other, but fortunately
no other shot was fired and Western Oregon
was spared an Indian war.
A brave French voyageur volunteered to go
to the Indians and resume treaty -making, and
taking his life in his hands stood in their midst.
It is told that it was a dramatic scene. The In-
dians, half crazed with fear and lust of revenge,
stood about him. He explained as he best could
that the death of Umtux was not the ad; of the
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
soldiery, but of some lawless ranger, and that
if they would submit they would be protected.
Gradually with perfect skill and fearlessness he
won back their confidence and obtained a re-
newal of their promise to go back to the fort.
One strange thing for Indians, they stipu-
lated for, and that was that the soldiers should
return and leave them free for twenty -four
hours to bury their chief unobserved. When this
condition was reported to the young Captain
he was doubtful. On the one hand it looked
like an Indian trick to escape without a battle,
while on the other hand their Chief had been
unfairly killed and they had a just right to sus-
ped the good faith of the white men.
After some hours of consideration he accept-
ed the solemn promise of the Indians and
marched his men back to the fort, leaving the
CHIEF UMTUX
Coweliskies alone with their dead. Chief Umtux
was buried that night, but how and where no
man save his Indians ever knew, and they never
told.
If you will look upon a map you will see a
place about twelve or fifteen miles Northeast of
Vancouver that bears to this day the name of
"Battleground." Near here the Indians stood at
bay, and near here Umtux was buried.
The death of Umtux was a direct blow at
the peace that then prevailed between the In-
dians and the white men in Western Oregon,
and his murder was an ad of violence that dis-
graces the pioneer annals of Oregon, but there
was more to come, and what happened after-
wards shows in still another light the less noble
side of the pioneer character, for the pioneer
men had the faults of their virtues. Their bold-
123
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
ness sometimes became temerity, their love of
liberty license, and their justice revenge, and the
wife of the pioneer was like unto him.
When the company came marching back in-
to the fort without any Indians either dead or
alive and without a battle to report, excitement
ran high and when it became known upon what
terms they had allowed the Indians to remain,
the excitement increased. There could be no talk
of lynching, because the company contained
practically all the fighting men of the settle-
ment, so the women with busy tongues took
the matter into their own hands, and when the
company was assembled, appeared before it,
and, in the presence of an excited crowd, pre-
sented to the Captain a woman's red petticoat
as a banner for his soldiers. It was a deadly in-
sult and the company quailed under it.
124
CHIEF UMTUX
For a moment matters looked serious, and
there was every prospect of a general riot and
a free fight, but the Captain was a man of parts
and equal to the situation. With a white face he
stepped forward and on behalf of his company
accepted the gift. In a few manly words he told
the women and the gaping crowd that they did
not know what they did or appreciate the reason
for the action of the soldiers, and assured them
that if it should be the good fortune of the
company to be ordered to the front that their
flag would be carried into action, and if so car-
ried would be dyed a deeper red before it re-
turned, and then turning to his company gave
a short military command.There was some hesi-
tation in obeying it, and a tall, lanky fellow
made some insolent remark and drew a bowie
knife. That was enough, and with joy in his
125
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
heart that his wrath could be unloosed and that
he had somebody besides women to expend his
anger upon, in one bound the Captain was up-
on him. The man made one ineffectual stroke
with his knife, and ever after one side of the
Captain's mouth, where the knife cut in, drooped
under his moustache a little more than the
other, and then the man went down helpless
as a child in a grasp that threatened to choke
out life.
The Captain always afterwards cheerfully in-
sisted that he was only maintaining military dis-
cipline, and would not have killed the man, but
the men of his company, in telling of the affair,
claimed that they saved the fellow's life only by
pulling the Captain off.The Captain stood six
feet two inches in his stockings and had had
provocation that would have angered an angel,
126
CHIEF UMTUX
so perhaps the truth was with the rank and
file.
The next day, true to their appointment, the
Coweliskies came marching in and put them-
selves under the protection of the white Cap-
tain, and the women with one of those swift
revulsions of feeling that follow so fast after
heedless adion, were profuse in their apologies
and wanted to take back their flag; besides the
woman who had lent the petticoat wanted it
back for personal reasons, for petticoats were
short in more ways than one in those days, but
no, the members of the company were obdurate.
The petticoat had been given to them and their
flag it would remain.
The Coweliskies made no more trouble. The
Indian war rolled Eastward back from the
gates of the Cascades. The settlers went home
127
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
and confidence was restored.Then the company
was disbanded, taking back with it only the
satisfaction of knowing that it had done its duty
and that it had been the only military command
of the war that had been presented with a ban-
ner.
The Coweliskies in their squalor were but a
poor and far away imitation of the angels that
buried the great law giver, yet their work abides,
for of Umtux it is true "that no man knoweth
of his sepulchre unto this day."
128
It"
XVI
Happy Days
I' HERE were few more joyful or ani-
j mated sights than a lodge or hunting
j&M^M^\ party of Indians in good luck. The
Indian bucks sitting around smoking or gamb-
ling, the Indian women busy in preserving fish
and meat and preparing skins, and the funny
little children and the dogs: a mingled, whoop-
ing, joyful mass, eating, sleeping and playing
all day long. Even the little baby with his tightly
bound head and body strapped to a board hung
up against a tree, looked around with his little
beady eyes in contented amusement, and unless
frightened never cried.
Amongst themselves or with their intimate
friends they were not at all reserved, but joked
129
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
and told stories with the utmost freedom. Many
of these stories, told in the open lodge before
the women and children, would not bear re-
peating, could not well pass inspection for the
Government mail.
As the lingering remnant of this people ap-
proached the end, on one conspicuous occasion
Providence threw a broad gleam of sunshine
over their path and made all of them rich be-
yond the utmost dreams of Indian avarice.
In 1 86 1 came a day when the snows gathered
and the rains fell. The Clackamas, Molalla, San-
tiam, and McKenzie, the Long Tom, Rickreall,
Yamhill and Tualatin poured their crowded
waters into the Willamette River and swept it
with a great flood from end to end. Linn City,
opposite Oregon City, was swept away to the
bedrock, and flouring mills, saw mills, ware-
130
HAPPY DAYS
houses, wharves, stores and houses from all
along the river went floating to the sea in a mass.
The Columbia River at Cathlamet was covered
for days with lumber, flour, furniture and prop-
erty of every description, and the tides there
made salvage easy.
Every Indian and every canoe along the river
was busy. Flour was the principal thing saved.
This wets in only about half an inch, and re-
mains just as good as ever inside.
In front of the Quillis lodge was ranged a
great pile of sacked flour, food enough for years.
Lumber was brought ashore in any quantity
that was wanted. The Indians even tied up a
whole wharf and warehouse in one of the
sloughs below the town.
They saved furniture and clothing and
crockery, everything that an Indian could ask
131
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
for. Incalculable wealth rolled along for days on
the river and the Indians were free to pick and
choose. The little Indians whooped along the
bank with their loose, single shirt half the time
over their heads and never covering their naked-
ness.
"Nanich! nanich!" (see! see!) they shouted,
and "Hiyu supalil! hiyu supalil!" (plenty flour!
plenty flour!) dancing up and down in their ex-
citement and occasionally making a wild plunge
toward the river to save some article that floated
near shore, occasionally, too, falling in and be-
ing pulled out and slapped by the watchful, ex-
cited mothers.
It was almost incredible what came down
the river. There was no rattlesnake country
within 150 miles, and yet an old log house came
floating by alive with rattlesnakes. Bales of hay
132
HAPPY DAYS
floated by with crowing chickens. One young
Indian attracted by the neat look of some white
painted beehives that came floating by on the
platform of on old outhouse, took one aboard
his canoe. A moment after he went howling
overboard, and when he was pulled ashore and
emptied of the water that had poured into him,
expressed his opinion in unvarnished terms of
the white people who put up hornets in white
boxes. ''Hiyu Mesatchie, '^and then, as the Indian
vocabulary failed, "D—nMe^.^/cA/V." As for the
beehive and the canoe, they went sailing out
over the bar, and so far as any one knows,
these bees are the same ones that are now
making the beeswax that washes up every now
and then from the Pacific Ocean.
It was a gorgeous time, and when the flood
of wealth was over the Indians of the lower
133
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
river were richer than they had ever been even
in their dreams.
To Quillis and his people, however, the in-
quiry that suggested itself to the sportsmen who
found four pounds of bread and ten gallons of
whisky in their camp luggage, soon suggested
itself," What did they want so much bread for?"
A lot of flour was promptly exchanged for a
sixty -gallon barrel of whisky, and Ingersoll
never sang the song of the oaken barrel half as
joyously as the Indians did.
It was the last great feast of the Columbia
River Indians, Only one thing marred its joy-
ousness and this was temporary. Old Quillis
was a wise old chap, and as the whisky bright-
ened up his intelled it occurred to him that the
barrel of whisky would last one Indian longer
than it would the tribe, so he quietly stole the
134
HAPPY DAYS
half empty cask and hid it in the woods, but
Quillis sober could not find what Quillis drunk
had hidden, so after a week of antics that
alarmed the rest of his tribe as to his sanity,
Quillis called his people together and con-
fessed his sin and begged their help in finding
the precious barrel. After a long search en-
thusiastically joined in by all the Indians, the
barrel was found and the interrupted feast
went on.
Gradually the race died out, happy in the
Indian fashion, and care -free to the last, and
the survivors in the Willamette Valley and the
Valley of the Columbia can now almost be
counted on the fingers. They did not pass away
unnoticed or alone. Other powers and noted
men tied to them in the web of fate, passed
away with them. Great captains of the imperial
^35
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
race sat in their lodges, and a President, to be,
of the United States, traveled in somewhat
sorry state in their canoes, in those last few
years.
.36
XFIL
The Pioneers
fiO PICTURE of the Western In-
dian can be complete without refer-
ence to the race that supplanted him
and the circumstances of the contact of the two
races so long as it existed.
Shuffle Shoon and Amber Locks
Sit together building blocks,
Shuffle Shoon is old and gray,
Amber Locks a little child.
One speaks of the long ago.
Where his dead hopes buried lie,
One with chubby cheeks aglow,
Prattleth of the By and By.
In 1850 there were probably not to exceed
one thousand white men in all the vast district
'37
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
lying North of the Columbia River. The Wil-
lamette Valley South of the Columbia, was
comparatively well settled with white people,
but from Cathlamet Northward for thousands
of miles the wilderness lay unmarked by white
men's hands.
A few hamlets on Puget Sound, a house at
Cathlamet, another at Oak Point and a few
others here and there, with Fort Vancouver,
was all.
Cathlamet was one of the loneliest places on
the earth. Into its loneliness in 1850 came a
white pioneer and his wife, with two little
babies. A trail through the woods was made to
the point on the river about a quarter of a mile
below Mr. Birnie's, and here a small log house
was built and occupied.
It is hard to conceive of the impulse or in-
.38
THE PIONEERS
stinct that brought two such people into such
a situation. The man was a trained lawyer, as
after events made clear, one of the highest types
of his profession. Even before he left the East
his abilities were recognized, and he stood on
equal terms with men who in the stirring events
of the next ten years were to earn world-wide
fame. He was a man of culture and refinement.
At a time when college graduates were rarer
than they are now, he was a graduate of Yale
College, and always bore about him the evi-
dence of his training. Greek was familiar to him,
and Latin he could read to the end of his days
almost as readily as he could English. Not only
college bred, but a man of wide and choice
reading, he made a strange seledion of a place
for the exercise of his undoubted talents and
capabilities, but, strange as was his choice of a
139
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
home, it was a still more strange home for his
wife, who for some years was the only white
woman of Cathlamet.
A refined and cultivated young woman,
thoroughly educated and accustomed to the
best social circles of the Eastern States, with
two little babies, was somewhat out of place in
the Cathlamet of 1850. The pioneer instinct is
one of the strangest instincts of a virile race,
and no stranger manifestation of it ever ap-
peared than this. In the long Winter nights the
wolves howled within hearing of the little log
house, and the young women of today, fearful
of a mouse, would not have thought it a cheer-
ful sound. With wolves on one side and an In-
dian village on the other, the bravest of women
might have felt a little timid.
The first few years at Cathlamet were years
140
THE PIONEERS
of hardship for this white family.The duties of
the man compelled him to be away from home
and to be at Oregon City, Salem and other
points a great portion of the time, and his wife
was left alone with her children.
His income was ridiculously small, and was
almost consumed in traveling and similar ex-
penses, so that the improvement of the place
grew very slowly, and household comforts were
not to be had, and the surroundings made the
young wife's position a very hard one.
One of the peculiarities of Indian life is the
little apparent effed that an Indian village has
upon wild animals in its proximity. The large
gray wolf, the most knowing and elusive of
animals, will loiter around the outskirts of an
Indian village, and upon occasions will come
into it almost as fearlessly as the native dogs. It
[41
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
may be that the wolfish nature of the Indian
dogs invites such familiarity, but there is no love
lost between the wolf and the dog, and it is not
uncommon for the wolves to kill and eat their
dog brethren.
InMetlakahtla, a large Indian village of eight
hundred people, on Annette Island, in Alaska,
two years ago, large gray wolves came, even in
Summer nights, into the heart of the town, and
the shadowy gray creatures were frequently met
with on the streets. Wolves would not have
come within five miles of a town of equal size
of white people.
Wild animals fairly swarmed about Cath-
lamet.
Every now and then a choice duck of the
tame flock would be heard squawking loudly
and be seen progressing across the sloughs in
142
THE PIONEERS
a direction in which he evidently did not want
to go, A cunning little mink had seized him
from below and was towing him ofF. Not a
sign of the mink could be seen, and when any-
body shot at the sorrowful procession they gen-
erally killed the duck, and the mink went free.
The family pig, upon which was centered
many hopes, would be feeding in a little pas-
ture near the house, when a great hulking bear
would come rolling over the fence and little
piggy, with a frantic squeal issuing from one
end of him, and his curly tail twisting frantic-
ally from the other, would disappear in the
dark woods, never to be heard of more.
The cougars took toll from the dozens or so
of sheep that were kept, and would come into
the very corrals for that purpose.
As if this were not enough, the Indian dogs
43
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
took a hand in the sport and worried the sheep
whenever they could, and nothing would per-
suade the Indians to reduce the number of
their canine pests. The white men formed an im-
promptu protective association, and shot the
dogs whenever they could catch them, until the
dogs learned the trick of running into the lodges
whenever they saw a white man around with
a gun.
This protected them for some time, until
the sheep were nearly gone, when something
had to be done, and then one of the white men
with a rifle in one hand for emergencies, and a
Colt's revolver in the other for dogs, boldly
went into the lodges and shot the dogs there.
It was risky work.
The inside of the lodge was all smoky and
confusion, and the children and the Indians
144
THE PIONEERS
hid the dogs in the beds, but canine curiosity
was too strong, and every now and then a dog
would stick his head out and bark. Crack would
go the revolver, half a dozen more dogs would
break out simultaneously, and it would be bow-
wow, crack, crack, until the revolver was empty.
In this way the dog pest was kept down and
the sheep were given some chance for their
lives.
There was naturally a very limited market,
and not much variety in food, and salt salmon
and potatoes grew tiresome.
The only thing that made living possible was
that wild game was abundant and cheap. A few
charges of gunpowder and shot would buy a
fine wild duck or goose, a single charge of gun-
powder would buy a forty-pound salmon, and
an Indian would sometimes come in with his
145
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
one-man canoe loaded with wild fowl, which
he would sell for anything the white people
would give for them.
The family grew larger, and as children were
born to Mrs. Birnie and the young white wife,
the white woman and the red would minister
at each other's bedsides like sisters, and the
friendships so formed never failed or changed
so long as the two women lived.
Occasionally some relief came to the mon-
otony. In 1853 a visit was made to Fort Van-
couver, nearly a hundred miles away. To save
expense the traveling was done in a canoe, with
an Indian crew, and as a baby six months old
was a necessary passenger on the journey, it
will be seen how anxious this white woman was
to see and talk with her own people again.
During all of this time at Cathlamet the In-
146
THE PIONEERS
dians looked to the white woman for help in
every time of trouble. Was a native baby sick
the white mother must know some remedy; was
any Indian hurt the white woman in the absence
of the white man must do the necessary surgi-
cal work.
It was one continual demand, and the back
porch of the house was lined with Indians al-
most every morning with olallies (berries) to sell,
with ducks or geese to dispose of, or with some
tale of woe or sickness to tell. Generally one or
two Indian women were about the house help-
ing in some capacity, and their relatives would
visit them as often as they were allowed.
Indian women visiting were not enlivening
creatures. Coming in quietly with a hardly ar-
ticulate "klowhiam" or good morning, they
would stand around, saying nothing. When
H7
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
pressed to stay, they would look about, chatter
a little among themselves, and then, carefully
avoiding the chairs, would curl their legs un-
der them and squat down on the floor. Once
there they were fixed to stay until told to go
home.
The original Indian woman always squatted
on the floor in preference to sitting on any-
thing higher, and always stayed until she was
told it was time to depart. She used her eyes a
good deal, but her tongue very little.
As household help the Indian girls were
quick to learn and ready to work, but so soon
as they were educated to a point where they
were useful and dressed nicely and kept clean,
they became so attradive that they were mar-
ried out of hand.
The household help by reason of this was
148
THE PIONEERS
a continual succession of Indian Lucys, Mar-
garets, etc., without number.
149
XVIIL
The Pioneer Mother
ITH visiting the sick, teaching the
young and caring for her own family,
the pioneer mother had her hands
full, and of the fruits of her lahor she saw but
little. The life was terribly narrow, but so full
of labor and danger that there was no time to
repine. The coming of a white man with a
white woman who settled in ElokomonValley,
about two miles back of Cathlamet, was a great
event.
The low divide between the Columbia and
Elokomon Rivers was covered at this time by
a dense forest of the spruce and Douglas fir,
and so thick was the growth that the fir trees
would go up for loo feet without a limb, and
150
THE PIONEER MOTHER
not a ray of the sun could reach the ground.
The trees grew very tall, and one a short way
outside the forest on the edge of a little prairie
being measured with instruments, was found
to be about 308 feet in height.
An almost obliterated Indian trail went over
the divide between the rivers, and so anxious
were the white women to see each other that it
was a very common thing for them to go over
it. One hundred yards up the trail there was
nothing to see but trees, and one mile in the
woods was as far away from human help as
the wilds of Siberia.
One day when one of them with two of her
little boys was on the trail in the midst of the
woods, a large cougar suddenly appeared in it
not forty yards away and stood looking at her.
Now, the cougar is an uncanny beast, and in
151
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
these Northern woods, a most formidable one.
A man can live in the woods for years and
never see one, and yet some day the supple yel-
low panther will stand in front of him on some
woodland path as though he had come there
by magic. Not a footfall or sound of breaking
twig will give any warning of his coming. He
will simply be there; it is a trick of his, and he
always takes the same position, calmly looking
at you without curiosity and without fear, very
rarely if ever crouching, and growling, if at all,
in a gentle, sing-song drawl, more like purring
than anything else.
With a low flattened head, the little ears
drawn back, softly poised on sinewy, tawny
legs and velvet pads, and with the long sweep-
ing tail gently going from right to left and left
to right with a quiet, steady motion, the cou-
152
THE PIONEER MOTHER
gar when he steps out of obscurity into the open
to observe man, is an impressive creature.
An armed man stops to consider a moment
before he fires, and an unarmed man has a very
lively desire to be somewhere else. Only in the
woods can you see a cougar so, and it is not a
pleasant sight for a woman with empty hands.
There was one best thing to do, and, prompt-
ed by the mother's instinct, this mother did it.
Taking one child by each hand and drawing
them close up to her, so as to present a united
front, she calmly looked the beast in the eyes
and slowly and steadily moved towards him.
She said it was the only thing that she could
very well do.
The grim lips curled back a little, and the
white teeth showed; but few animals unwound-
ed can face man, and, retiring step by step, the
153
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
cougar moved back before her, and gliding into
the brush, disappeared.
An Indian woman would have stood in her
place, and, gathering her children under her
blanket, would have waited the issue in pa-
tience, and if forced into a fight, would have
made a better one than the white woman; but
steadily moving up into the face of the enemy
was the English blood, and for cold-blooded
courage when courage was necessary, the white
woman was the superior of her red sister.
This was only one of many anxieties and
perils.With so many burdens the children had
largely to take care of themselves, and one day
a two -year -old boy being missing, a search was
instituted and the youngster was found floating
in an eddy of the Columbia River, quietly cling-
ing to a little piece of driftwood. He had fallen
154
THE PIONEER MOTHER
over a rocky clifF about eight feet high into the
river, and had found a natural life-preserver in
the tiny piece of wood just at hand. Indian
Margaret was the nurse then, and she quietly
stripped herself, swam out like a duck and towed
the baby in. Except for that friendly piece of
driftwood and Indian Margaret, this little nar-
rative would never have been written.
Another time of extreme anxiety was when
the Indians had procured large supplies of
liquor. A frightful hubbub would prevail in the
Indian village, and as this was diredly between
the Strong and Birnie houses, it made a fear-
some situation.
The Indians, harmless enough at ordinary
times, were liable to be dangerous when drunk,
and more than once the children were chased
home by drunken Indians with drawn knives.
155
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
It was perhaps a drunken joke, but if so, the
joking was on a very serious subject, and a
white- faced little woman barring her doors and
windows with only her small children within,
had no enjoyment of the situation.
156
X7X.
The Red Box
HE Indian War of 1855-56 brought
great anxiety to Cathlamet. There
were a few more white men there
then, but the preponderance of the Indian was
still overwhelming, and when it became whisp-
ered about that the Klickitat Chief Kamiakin,
the head and front of the war, had messengers
at Cathlamet, there was fear everywhere, but
the native Indians stood up manfully for their
white friends, who had helped them, and Mrs.
Birnie and her husband held them with a steady
hand.
Here was one of the great advantages to the
Hudson's Bay men of having Indian wives.
No plotting could go on without their knowl-
157
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
edge, and in a time of stress the Indian wife
could always be relied on. No white person saw
the messengers or knew who they were, but that
they came was certain.
Across the Httle creek in a small pasture
stood two tall spruce trees, and at the top of
one of these, placed on a limb trimmed off for
the purpose, suddenly appeared a large box, red
as blood. There it remained for months, and
even years, and was said to be Kamiakin's sig-
nal to war, but no white man knew how it got
there or what its message was.
One explanation of its presence only deepens
the mystery. If an Indian killed another he
would, so it is claimed, procure a small box,
paint it a brilliant red and attach it to a limb
high upon some conspicuous tree, cuttmg close
to the trunk all the limbs below it, and it is said
.58
THE RED BOX
that this in some strange way showed repent-
ance for the crime and amounted to a punish-
ment because the life of the murderer would
only last so long as the box remained secure in
its high place. As the box was generally very
securely attached, the murderer's Me was quite
safe for many years, and no other Indian would
meddle with it.
This particular red box that appeared so
mysteriously at Cathlamet in the time of Kam-
iakin's war was, it is claimed, placed there by
a son of the Chief of the Skookum Tillicums
(Strong People), who had murdered a fellow -
Indian and was intended by him as a public
confession of guilt and an expiatory sacrifice.
Be this as it may, the mere suggestion opens
up many strange phases of the Indian character.
No Indian ever openly humilated himself, and
159
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
if such a custom prevailed the elevation of the
red box was made more in pride than in hu-
mility. "I have slain" it said, and no ordinary
Indian had much compunction in this or
thought it lowered him in the estimation of his
fellows.
If the young SkookumTillicum hoisted such
a signal in the feverish times of a general war,
and the settlers had known that he was boast-
ing of an accomplished murder, it is more than
likely that they would have taken it for granted
t|hat his message was, "I have slain, I have slain.
Go thou and do likewise," and would probably
have promptly disposed of young Skookum
Tillicum.
This strange red box might well therefore
have been a confession, a boast and a call to
war all in one, and people as quick as are the
i6o
THE RED BOX
Indians in interpreting signs would very easily
have known its deeper import, although they
might not tell it to their white neighbors.
The red box raised high upon the tree did
not add any to the comfort or feeHng of se-
curity of the few white people that lived at
Cathlamet.
From 1850 to 1862 the pioneer life of Cath-
lamet went on, the white population steadily in-
creasing and the red as steadily diminishing.
The order of burial of the Book of Common
Prayer was continually in use and was read over
many lonely little graves, every trace of which
has since been swept away.
One of the saddest of these burials was that
of Indian George, a young Indian of sixteen.
He had been a slave of theTsimpseans, North-
ern Indians, from Fort Simpson, and on one
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
of their insolent war excursions into Puget
Sound, Judge Strong saw him, and, moved with
pity at his deplorable condition, bought him
for two dollars and fifty cents worth of goods
and brought him to Cathlamet. Here he grew
up in the household into a strong, happy boy,
but every now and then the wild instinct would
come upon him and he would run away. Noth-
ing would be done to reclaim him, and in a itv^
weeks he would return, ragged and thin, but
very happy to get back. Nothing pleased him
so much as to salute the little steamboats that
used to come monthly from San Francisco by
dipping to them a little home-made American
flag, and when he lay dying of consumption
his every wish was gratified by the promise that
he should be buried shrouded in it.
[62
XX.
The End
^^! HE earlier Cathlamet life was some-
times enlivened by the visits of strang-
ers, and one of these is worthy of
remembrance.
Half way between the Hudson's Bay store
and the Strong house was a little cove in the
low, rocky bank before which, in high tide,
floated the Indian canoes and behind which was
the Indian lodges. An old logging railway and
cannery wharves now hide it almost from sight,
but it was in this early day the principal land-
ing place for the Indian village and here in
times past McLoughlin, McDougall, McTav-
ish and many other notables had landed.
In the Fall of 1852 a canoe turned in to the
163
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
landing from the Columbia River, and in it
were an Indian crew and a rather short young
man of pinic and white complexion, evidently
one of the new United States officers at Fort
Vancouver. He was a stranger in the country
and was on a trip to Shoalwater Bay and very
anxious to get some white man to go on with
him. He stayed at the Strong house for several
days and so prevailed upon his host that at the
end of his visit they went off together to the
bay.
No record of this trip exists, and no official
report of it was ever made. The Indians were
reticent in regard to it, and all the two men
vouchsafed to say was that they had had a jolly
good time and would have stayed longer had
the provisions held out.
Twice again the young officer came to Cath-
164
THE END
lamet a welcome guest, and then his short stay
of a year in this country being finished, went
away to the career that time had in store for
him, and a marvelous career it was, for it was
written in the book of fate that this obscure
young Captain Grant should command the
armies of the great Republic in the mightiest
war of modern times, that he should sit as a
ruler of the Nation and should finally sleep in
that great tomb that looks down upon the
Hudson,
It was fated that both host and guest should
sleep at last at two Riversides far apart, one in
his stately tomb by the Hudson, and the other
under the trees and grass by the dark forest he
loved so well, looking down upon the Wil-
lamette.
One rendered a great service to his country
165
CAIHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
in its time of need and met with quick and
great reward; the other at the fountain head of
the history of a great commonwealth, after the
fashion of the pioneers, expended his life and
strength for a coming people and gave of the
best that was in him for future generations.
Another visitor was a dashing young fellow
from New York who entered into wilderness
life with a zest. For the few years he was here
his adventures were numberless. When as clerk
of the court in some fiercely contested murder
or other case he carelessly unslung his revolver
and sat at his desk with it lying on the table
before him, there was order in the court, for
everybody knew what he could do with fire-
arms.
Only once did the wilderness get the ad-
vantage of him, and then he owed his life to
i66
THE END
the friendly service of an Indian. While survey-
ing a road from Cathlamet Northward to the
Boisfort Prairie, with the idea of extending it
to Puget Sound, he was, when a httle away
from the party, suddenly charged upon by an
enraged elk.
Being without weapons, he dived for the
first place of shelter at hand, which happened
to be a small fallen tree lying about two feet
above the ground. The elk would furiously
strike at him with hoofs and horns on one side,
and would then jump over and strike at him
from the other, and the only way to avoid the
savage animal was to keep up a very alert dodg-
ing under the tree from side to side.
This game of hide and seek went on for sev-
eral hours until the man was nearly worn out,
the elk growing more and more adive and his
167
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
eyes growing greener and more furious, as their
manner is when balked, until an Indian com-
ing up shot him and allowed a very tired, dirty
and humbled young man to limp back to camp.
It was written for this young man that he,
too, should serve his country in the Civil War,
but that less fortunate than some of his com-
rades, he should fall in battle at the head of his
brigade, crippled for life by a shot through the
hips.
As a white - haired old General he now walks
haltingly in his vineyard in California, and
thinks often of early Oregon and of the days
when '^all the world was young."
About the time of the great flood of 1861
came one of the coldest Winters ever known in
Oregon, theWinter of 1861-62. Ice rarely forms
at Cathlamet, but that Winter the water along
168
THE END
the shores of the Columbia was frozen so solidly
that horses and sleds were used on it, and snow
fell and remained on the ground to the depth
of three feet. The little steamer Multnomah,
with genial Captain Hoyt as master, was frozen
in at Cathlamet, and so were quite a number of
other people.
There is at least one staid, elderly woman of
Portland who will remember the gay carnival
of that Winter in the white and Indian town of
Cathlamet.The Indians had plenty of food and
clothing and were happy .The whites were jolly,
as pioneers always were if they had half a
chance.
The six weeks of freezing weather was filled
in with sleigh -riding, games and dancing, and
from the hills of Cathlamet to the Columbia
River the men, boys and women, white and
.69
CATHLAMET ON THE COLUMBIA
Indian, coasted continually. Food with the white
people grew scanty, but this made no differ-
ence, and a fine young horse was shot for meat
and served on the tables as roast beef.
In the log houses and the lodges great fires
blazed and there was nothing of sorrow or fear,
and so we end the story, for here Cathlamet
ceases to be Indian Cathlamet, and became from
this time on a town of the"Bostons."
[70
TVNews
OpenLibrary