# McLoughlin and Old Oregon/Chapter 29

XXIX
WHITMAN'S RIDE
1842
SCARCE an hour had Dr. Whitman ridden from his door at Waiilatpu when the Cayuses fiercely gathered and barred his progress.
"Back, go back," they cried. "You cannot go."
"You promised to build houses."
"You promised fences."
"You promised a saw-mill."
"You promised sheep."
"You promised cattle."
On every side arose the clamor recounting every improvement the doctor had ever suggested. When the doctor said, "We will do so and so," the Indians construed it into a promise, and to the Indian a promise is a sacred thing.
"Yes, yes, yes, my boys," said the doctor, pleased at this sudden recollection, yet impatient to be off. "I'll do it. I am going now to see about it. Look for me back; meet me at Fort Hall when the corn is ripe."
Still they delayed and detained him,—they feared he was leaving entirely. After repeated assurances and promises they let go his bridle-rein and regretfully watched his departure.
To avoid the hostile Sioux, to strike a warmer clime, and to gain the trail of the Mexican traders, Dr. Whitman turned south by way of Fort Wintee, Salt Lake, ​Taos, and Santa Fé. A Siberian winter set in. Stormed in on the mountains, imprisoned in dark defiles for days, feeding their horses on cottonwood bark, yet on, still on. The multitudinous cry of coyotes followed on their track. Blizzards obscured the winter trail, the guide lost his way in the darkened air; their steps must be retraced, but whither? Even the morning trail was lost in the blinding drift. There in the wild mountain, with the wintry tempest howling loud and louder, all seemed lost. Dr. Whitman threw himself upon his knees and committed his wife, his mission, and his cause to God. The half-frozen mule began to prick his ears, and turning about led them back to the morning fire. After days of weary waiting the wind lulled, the sun broke through the dun clouds, and through the dazzling snow the travellers broke a path to Grand River. Here again the sides were frozen. A black current dashed down the middle.
"Danger. Cannot cross," said the Indian guide in the sign language of his race.
Dr. Whitman set his lips as Washington did that night on the Delaware, and rode to the edge of the ice. He tried to force the animal in, but he sat back on his haunches.
"Push," commanded the doctor.
Lovejoy and the guide pushed. Down, down they went, the doctor and the horse, completely out of sight, then rising like Poseidon on the foam, they battled with the current. Sweeping far below they reached the other shore, and the doctor leaped upon the ice. With his master's aid the dripping steed clambered after. Lovejoy and the guide followed with the packhorses, and all soon melted their coats of icy mail before a blazing bonfire. Another month of cold and hunger, ​of mule-meat and dog-flesh, took them over the Sierra Madres to Taos in New Mexico. Rest, supplies, then a final charge conquered the main ramparts of the Rockies. Safe on the plains beyond, the exultant missionary could no longer restrain his impatience to reach Bent's Fort on the Arkansas. Leaving Lovejoy and the guide to follow, he set on ahead. Bleak Arctic wind rolled down upon the rider in his lonely saddle. Again he was lost, bewildered, and Indians directed him down the river to the Fort. Lovejoy followed him and gave up at Bent's Fort, but Whitman pushed on, until one cold February morning he stood in the streets of St. Louis surrounded by mountaineers entreating him to tell the story of his winter trip.
"Not now; I cannot stay, I must get to Washington." Stopping not even to change his clothes, with frostbitten ears and feet and fingers, with the very flesh of him burnt with cold, the heroic Whitman paused not till he stood in the presence of Daniel Webster. In his shaggy great buffalo-coat and hood and fur leggings and moccasins, he was certainly a curiosity. Daniel Webster looked at him with those historic lion's eyes and said: "You are too late. The treaty has been signed."
"So I heard in St. Louis, but Oregon—"
"Lies untouched," said Webster, with unmoved countenance, still curiously eying the man in the shaggy great-coat.
"Then I am not too late," said Whitman, "not too late to tell you that Oregon is a treasure worth our holding, a land of broad rivers and fertile valleys."
Webster was tired. The "intricacies and complexities and perplexities" of this boundary question had worried him for years. New England was dissatisfied ​with his settlement of the Maine boundary, the west was howling about his Ashburton Treaty. Senator Linn had introduced a call for information as to why Oregon had not been included in this last treaty. Fifteen days ago Linn's bill was carried in the upper and lost in the lower House and now here comes this Oregon man to reopen the whole discussion.
Webster was not a foe to Oregon, but had he not heard, time and again, that the Americans must be crazy to think of trying to cross unbroken wastes of desert and impassable mountains to occupy a country fit only for the beaver, the bear, and the savage? Had not the "London Examiner "said the whole territory in dispute was not worth twenty thousand pounds to either power? Had not the Senator from South Carolina just said in the Senate that he would not give a pinch of snuff for the whole territory? That he thanked God for his mercy in placing the Rocky Mountains there to keep the people back? With all this in mind Webster was inclined to misinterpret that rapid utterance and that positive tone.
"You are an enthusiast, Mr. Whitman; you certainly are an enthusiast. Sir George Simpson says wagons can never get over the Rocky Mountains, and he must know. He has traversed those wilds from his youth. Besides, the country is good for nothing, the papers are full of it."
"All from English reprints," added the doctor, quickly. "The Hudson's Bay Company has flooded Great Britain with such reports to keep the land to themselves. It is to their interest to keep it a wilderness."
Secretary Webster endeavored to change the subject.
"How did you get to Oregon, Mr. Whitman?"
​"With two women and a wagon across the Rocky Mountains."
"How did you return?"
"On horseback over the snow."
An hour they talked, but the subject was ever the same, Oregon, the paradise by the sea.
"I want the President and Cabinet to hear what you have said to me," said the great statesman, visibly impressed with the heroic effort of Dr. Whitman.
They were called together, and Dr. Whitman spent an evening answering their questions on Oregon, its importance and its resources.
President Tyler listened attentively. "Dr. Whitman," he said, "your frozen limbs and leather breeches attest your sincerity. Can emigrants cross the mountains in wagons?"
"My own wagon went across."
"Is there likely to be an emigration this year?"
"They are already gathering on the frontier. I am publishing a pamphlet to help it on. I came to the States for that express purpose."
"Very well," answered the President. "Go ahead with your wagons. This question can rest till we see if you get them through."
"That is all I ask," said Whitman, rising.
Promising to forward to his old school friend, the Secretary of War, a synopsis of a bill for a line of posts to Oregon, he hastened away.
Twenty years before, Senator Benton had urged the occupation of the Columbia. "Mere adventurers may enter upon it as Æneas entered upon the Tiber, and as our forefathers came upon the Potomac, the Delaware, and the Hudson, and renew the phenomenon of individuals laying the foundation of future empire."
​Now Benton said, "Thirty thousand rifles in the valley of the Columbia is our surest ground of title."
"What are you here for, leaving your post?" gruffly inquired the Secretary of the American Board, eying his shaggy visitor as Dr. Whitman entered the office in Boston.
"I came on business to Washington," answered the doctor, unabashed.
"Opening up new territories to settlement is not a part of our business," was the Secretary's comment on his scheme to pilot emigrants over the mountains. "Here, take some money and get some decent clothes; then we'll talk."
"Marcus came to father's house in sorry plight," says his sister Harriet in a letter to this author. "He had been so chilled in coming over the mountains that he was suffering all the time. He was the grandest man in overcoming difficulties and executing the most improbable things. Yet his heart was tender as a woman's."
By order of Congress Senator Benton's son-in-law, John Charles Fremont, was despatched to accompany the proposed immigration. When the first grass sprung the emigrants crossed the border with their rifles on their shoulders. Already the long train of wagons was far out on the Platte when Dr. Whitman joined them in May, so far out that Fremont barely caught up and followed in their wake to Oregon.
XXX
A PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT
1843
CAPTAIN COUCH, sent out by the Cushings of Newburyport, opened trade with the Sandwich Islands and sailed his brig up the Willamette. American sentiment began to crystallize. The handful of settlers had long looked with jealous eye on the commercial aristocracy of the Columbia. Now, hither into their midst came the democratic corner grocery, with its tea and flour and Yankee notions, with its free discussions, long-spun yarns, and political caucus.
The immigrants of 1842, winding over the pack-trails of Mt. Hood, were soon ensconced on the dry-goods box and nail-keg. "Is not the country ours?" they said. "Did not an American discover the river? Did not Lewis and Clark explore it? Did not John Jacob Astor found Astoria at the mouth of the river? Did not England admit all this when she restored Astoria after the war?" So they argued.
As early as 1829 Dr. McLoughlin had taken a claim at the Falls of the Willamette, the town-site of the future Oregon City. "I may want it for a home in my old age," he said, thinking of that future far-away time when he might be too old to serve the Hudson's Bay Company. Already some adventurous American had jumped his claim to a mill-site on an island at the Falls. Now the immigrants had come, the doctor sur​veyed his claim and offered lots for sale. The pot began to boil.
"What right has Dr. McLoughlin to this town-site?" asked the jealous immigrants. "He is head of a foreign monopoly and he doesn't live here. There is no question that he is holding this town-site and waterpower for the Hudson's Bay Company."
"Fur that matter," chimed in a mountaineer, "ther ain't a town-site er water-power in all the valley wher the company ain't built a shed an' sent a man to hold it daown."
"Yes, and if they dared they would set up a great 'No thoroughfare' board to keep us immigrants out," added another. "Were it not for that Joint Occupancy Treaty, a settler would have no more right to enter Oregon than to trespass on the lawn of a private gentleman in Middlesex, England. The company designs to hold Oregon, as it holds all British North America, like a vast estate, exclusively in the interests of the fur trade."
"Don't be too hard on the company," suggested one of the more conservative. "We live here under its protection and in comfort."
"We live here! "exclaimed a tall, gaunt man astride the counter. "Yes, as the lamb lives with the lion, to be swallered up. Under their protection? Yes, because our own country refuses to give it. Like a great octopus the Hudson's Bay Company has us in its claws. No private trader has ever ben able to compete with this 'ere monopoly. They claim every fish in the stream, every beaver in the dam. Look at Wyeth, Bonneville, and the trappers that venture to cross the Rockies defeated every time."
"I move that we draw up a petition to Congress to ​protect American interests in Oregon," said Robert Shortess, a native of Ohio. "This salmon-skin aristocracy has ruled the country long enough."
"'T will do no good," said a missionary. "Uncle Sam is dozing while England takes the country. We have sent petitions by the yard, Jason Lee took one, Wyeth wrote a memorial, we sent one by Farnham, we have begged and plead, and prayed, but Congress pays no attention. She is too much engrossed in the nigger business to notice an obscure little settlement on the northwest coast."
Nevertheless Shortess and Abernethy, the mission steward, did draw up a document bristling with charges against the Hudson's Bay Company and despatched it to the States. Dr. McLoughlin heard of it it cut him to the heart.
The people in the valley feared the restless chiefs beyond the mountains. Their own Indians began to mutter, "These Bostons are driving off our game and destroying our camas-fields."
The woods were full of painted faces. Tomahawks and scalping-knives glittered in the grass. The whites had scorned these valley Indians; now a secret dread took hold of every heart. Outlying ranchers came in with frightened whispers
"The Clackamas Indians are on the move."
"The Molallas are defiant."
"The Klickitats are collecting back of Tualati Plains."
A Calapooia chief crossed the Willamette, shaking his finger toward the settlement by the Falls. "Never will I return till I bring back a force to drive out these Bostons."
"Should these Injuns combine, we are lost," said the settlers.
"Dr. McLoughlin will not help us on account of that memorial to Congress. There 's no ammunition except in the stockade at Fort Vancouver."
"We are without defence," said the settlers. "We cannot wait for Congress, we must organize."
"But how? "queried the timid. "The French Canadians of Champoeg will oppose. They are not afraid of Injuns. They will stand by the company, and they are more than we in number."
"We must find a basis of common interest, how about wolves? "
Wolves? How they laughed and cried around the mission! With what long howls they struck the midnight hour beside the Falls! What multitudinous reveilles rang along the valley at the first red streak of dawn! How the fine bark of puppies staccatoed the hoarse bass of big gray grenadiers! How they ran down herds of elk and horses and cattle! How they dined on pigs and poultry and calves!
"Yes," was the unanimous response; "let us call a wolf meeting! "
So, on the first Monday of March, 1843, every American that could muster a boat landed at old Champoeg at ten o'clock in the morning. They proceeded at once to the house of Joseph Gervais. Telix, faithful housewife, had scrubbed her floor and swept her hearth and hied her away to plant her onion bed.
The long-haired Canadians, indulging in their favorite vice of smoking, discussed the bears and wolves and panthers with these astute Americans. For fifteen years these Frenchmen had depended each on his own old rusty trade-gun, and the wolves were bad as ever. Every night the good wife heard the squawking in her ​
A PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT 241
chicken-coop, and the farmer ran out bare-legged at the squealing of his pigs. But these Americans one loss was enough to set loose relentless war against the " varmints."
"How is it, fellow-citizens," cried the ringing voice of an immigrant when bounties had been fixed upon the scalps of wolves, "how is it with you and me and our children? Have we any organization upon which we can rely for mutual protection? Is there any power or influence in the country sufficient to protect us, and all we hold dear, from the worse than wild beasts that threaten and occasionally destroy our cattle? Who in our midst is authorized to call us together to protect our own and the lives of our families? True, the alarm may be given, as in a recent case, and we may run who feel alarmed and shoot off our guns, while our enemy may be robbing our property, ravishing our wives, and burning the houses over our defenceless families. Common sense, prudence, and justice to ourselves, demand that we act consistently with the principles with which we commenced. We have mutually and unitedly agreed to defend and protect our cattle and domestic animals; now, fellow-citizens, I move that a committee be appointed to consider the civil and military protection of this colony, and that said committee consist of twelve persons."
Canadian and American, the ayes were unanimous. The founders of Rome were suckled by a wolf. Out of a wolf meeting grew the government of Oregon.
May came. Knee-deep in flowers, the delegates gathered again at old Champoeg. The larks flew up and sang. The Canadians made big eyes at one another. "The old regime is good enough," they said.
"Wait until the sovereignty is decided."
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The Americans groaned in spirit. Some opponent unknown had passed from house to house in old Champoeg and said to the Canadians, "Vote no, vote no, vote no to everything," The Canadians were out in force hope flickered against hope that some of them might favor American institutions.
They stood in the open air. The river ran by and laughed, as when the red man held his councils on the bluff. The report of the committee was read.
"Shall we accept the report? "said the chairman.
"No! "thundered the Canadians as one man.
The hearts of the Americans thumped against their ribs. Confusion prevailed. The eye of the Secretary measured the crowd "We can risk it; let us divide and count! "
Scarce had the second passed when Jo Meek the trapper stepped forward with stentorian call: "Who 's for a divide? All in favor of the report and organization, follow me! "
The lines marched apart, swayed a moment, hesitated at deadlock then after a moment of heart-throbs two Canadians crossed to the American side. Fiftytwo against fifty!
"Three cheers for freedom! "again rang out the trappers' call. A shout went up that summoned the dusky dames to their doors a mile back on French Prairie. The river ran by and laughed, but Oregon was not the same.
"These Americans fatten on politics," said the clerks at Fort Vancouver. "Why, it was as good as ' Punch and Judy' to see the fun go on. And they were so solemn and earnest about it, too."
The Canadians looked on and wondered. Dr. McLoughlin could hardly realize that out of these appar ​
A PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT 243
ently trivial proceedings had arisen the fabric of a State, that the infant settlement had donned the toga virilis.
Dr. McLoughlin was walking in the garden at Fort Vancouver, musing upon the troubled state of affairs. The stronger grew the American colony the weaker seemed his influence over the Indians. The last returns of each brigade grew less and less. The beaver were disappearing. Added to this, a contest between England and the United States seemed imminent, in which a single misstep on his part might precipitate a bloody war. The usually erect form was bent. A light breeze dallied with his hair. A footstep at his side attracted his attention. He turned and faced the stalwart form of Yellow Serpent. The Walla Walla's long black hair rippled over his beaded buckskin. The eagle-plumes in his head-band gave a regal touch to the haughty face.
"Ah, my son! "said Dr. McLoughlin, "I am glad to see you here. What news from the Walla Walla? "
"Bad news, my father. My people are full of fears. I have come a long journey to show you my heart. Dorion says Dr. Whitman will bring white men to take our lands and kill us all."
"Tut, tut, tut! Why does the naughty Dorion frighten my people? The white men will do no harm. They are your friends. They come to help you, to teach you."
Yellow Serpent was even taller than Dr. McLoughlin. Approaching him closely he bent forward and looked him eagerly in the eye.
"Will Boston man fight King George man?"
"Certainly not," answered the doctor; "we are at peace."
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"What for then you strengthen your stockade?" said the Indian, majestically waving his hand toward the wall. "What for another big gun? What for big ship guarding you all winter?"
"Our stockades were old. We renew them often," answered the doctor. "The ship was a visitor, not a defender."
The Indian went on:
"We hear Boston man making laws. Getting ready to become great people. Dr. Whitman will bring many, many people. He say this America land. He take all our land. Poor Indian will have no horses, no land, no home by and by."
"You must do as Dr. Whitman tells you," said McLoughlin. "Build homes on your land. Cultivate your ground, and you can keep it like white people."
"My people fear King George man and Boston man join together and kill all Indian." Again that bent face, that eager, searching, flashing look.
Dr. McLoughlin saw the real trouble in Yellow Serpent's soul. Truly he had shown his heart. Stepping toward him and taking the Indian's two hands in his own the benevolent doctor said: "My son, is this what troubles you? Go home and fear no more. No white man will harm you. Dr. Whitman is your true friend. He will not see you injured. If any American should make war on you the Hudson's Bay Company would never join them. Have we not been your friends for thirty years? Do you think we could bring our hearts to harm our brothers? Go home and work in your little gardens as Dr. Whitman taught you. Drive the wicked Dorion away. He will bring my children into trouble." ​
A PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT 245
"I will tell your words," said Yellow Serpent, turning away.
But though Dr. McLoughlin had quieted the chief, he himself was not quieted. In considerable mental distress he dismissed the friendly chief and retired to his office. An hour later Douglas entered.
"What have you written? "inquired Douglas, as the doctor looked up.
"I have written to the Hudson's Bay Company that if they would not lose the country they must protect their rights here; that immigrants hostile to British interests are coming in, made more hostile by the publication of Irving's ' Astoria ' and ' Bonneville,these immigrants really fear we will set Indians upon them; that by kindness we are striving to overcome this prejudice; that, however, we have enemies here trying to make trouble, threats have been made against Fort Vancouver, and really, the people have been encouraged to make an attack, by public prints in the United States, stating that British subjects ought not to be allowed to remain in Oregon; that there is no dependence in the servants about the fort to do sentry duty beyond a few nights, nor are there officers enough to be put upon guard without deranging the whole business; that our forces are not sufficient in case of attack, and that in the dry season the fort could easily be burned. So I have asked for a government vessel to protect Fort Vancouver. The great question with me is, how to keep the peace till the sovereignty is decided. I think that covers the case."
"I think so," said Douglas. The chief and his second always consulted each other and always agreed. The letter went by express to Canada and on to ​
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London. Dr. McLoughlin mounted more guns and waited for a reply.
A Catholic priest from the upper country brought word to Fort Vancouver: "The Indians say they are not mad at the King George men, only at the Bostons, because they take their lands."
"Very well, then," said the irritated doctor. "Let the Americans take care of themselves."
"The Indians of the interior are endeavoring to form a coalition for the purpose of destroying all the Boston people," wrote the missionaries from the Dalles to the Indian subagent "They construe the language you used last autumn into threats. The wicked Dorion has told them that ships are coming into the river with troops."
"I must go up there again at all hazards, and meet those Walla Walla-Cayuses," said the subagent. He engaged twelve Frenchmen to accompany the expedition, but when the day came every one sent word, "We have decided not to go."
Not to be daunted, the subagent set out with four companions from the Methodist mission. At Champoeg Dr. McLoughlin's long boat met him with a despatch, "I entreat you not to undertake such a dangerous expedition. In all probability you and your party will be cut off." But the subagent went on.
At the Falls a second runner met him with a second letter from Dr. McLoughlin. "I advised my Frenchmen to have nothing to do with this quarrel. Keep quiet, keep quiet. The excitement will soon subside."
Madame and Mrs. Douglas were at their embroidery when they heard loud voices in the fort: "Is it true that you refuse to grant supplies to the Americans who signed that memorial?" ​
A PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT 247
"I have not refused supplies to the signers, but the authors need expect no more favors from me," answered Dr. McLoughlin, in a tone that made the household tremble.
"Then, as we had nothing to do with it, you can let us have Indian goods on the credit of the United States for our journey up the Columbia, can you not? " persisted the subagent.
"I am astonished that you think of going up there among those excited Indians," roared the doctor, looking hard at the venturesome four. Dr. McLoughlin's usual tone was low and slow. This thunderous key he sometimes used to his servants in reproof or command, never before to Americans.
"Not all the people of the valley signed that paper, Dr. McLoughlin. Not all of them approved of it. It was puerile and childish. I shall tell the commissioner of Indian affairs in my next report that if any one not connected with the fur company had been at half the pains and expense that you have been to to establish a claim at the Willamette Falls, there would have been few to object. Under the Joint Occupancy Treaty you have as good a right as they."
This statement quite mollified the doctor's wrath. " I thought my character as an honest man was beyond suspicion, but when I heard of those charges, well, really, really, the citizens themselves are the best judges if I have injured them or not."
The governor seized a pen and hastily scribbled some orders.
"Here, Roberts! McTavish! Let the gentlemen have whatever they want. God bless you, gentlemen, God bless you. May your errand succeed."
Mrs. Whitman joined them at the Dalles. Rogers, ​
248 McLOUGHLIN, AND OLD OREGON
beloved of the Indians, Rogers without whom Mrs. Whitman felt the meeting could not be held, was dead.
The Indians were watching for the subagent and the subagent was watching for the Indians. Each expected to see an enemy. When three or four whites entered their midst unarmed, their fears gave way to wonder.
"Yes; Yellow Serpent was right," they said. "We were mistaken." Ever since the chief's return they had been working on their little plantations. Corn, peas, and wheat were peeping through the mould.
"I actually found the Indians suffering more from fear of the whites than the whites from fear of the Indians," was the su'bagent's report on his return.
The Walla Walla meadows were purple with camas, the plains a moquette of multicolored phlox. The Cayuses were camped along the base of the Blue Mountains. Three thousand Walla Wallas were camped on the Umatilla. A thousand Nez Perces came down from the North on their best horses. The mounted Cayuses and Walla Wallas rode forth to meet their guests in sham battle. In front of Dr. Whitman's the entire plain was a glittering cavalcade of prancing horses and plumed warriors, gay as when the monarchs of old met on the Field of the Cloth of Gold. Elijah, Tauitau, Five Crows in splendid array led their several bands.
Yellow Serpent sounded the war whistle. Chief Joseph answered with the Indian bugle. The spirited chargers dashed as in deadly combat, imitating a recent battle with the Blackfeet. There was a rush and a roar, a whirl and confusion, and shouts and flying foam, as the savage cavalry swept the plain. Even the chiefs ​
A PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT 249
began to fear an actual battle, when Spalding, from Lapwai, said, "Let us retire to the doctor's house for worship."
Chief Ellice rose on the back of his splendid charger, waved his hand over the dark mass, and all was still. The horses, gay with scarlet belts and head-dresses and tassels, were led away. The trampling of many feet resounded in the mission house. Like a vision Narcissa Whitman glided into the dark assembly. The fair brow, the golden hair, the clinging dress, riveted every eye. When they sang her clear soprano soared like a bird above the Nez Perce" chorus. Ever since her return there had been a constant stream of Indian women, calling with little gifts to show their love.
The next day the chiefs in paint and plume assembled at the Council.
"You have heard a talk of war," said the subagent. " We are come among you to assure you there is no war. We come to regulate your intercourse with white people. If you lay aside your quarrels, cultivate your lands, and receive good laws, you may become a great and happy people.
"Hear! hear! hear!" cried the Walla WallaCayuses.
All that day and the next the chiefs discussed the laws. "And do you accept them? "said the agent.
"Ay," said all the Indians.
At this point excitement rose to fever heat.
"Who shall be our High Chief?"
Some said Tauitau. In former time Tauitau had been head sachem of the Cayuse nation, but after his attack on Chief Factor Pambrun that officer had broken up his power, encouraged his young men to insubordination, and had advanced the influence of the younger brother, ​
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Five Crows. Tauitau wore a rosary and a crucifix and there was a blue cross embroidered on 'his moccasions.
"He is a Catholic. We do not follow his worship," roared Tiloukaikt.
"I cannot accept the chieftainship," said Tauitau. " I have tried to control our young men in former time, but I am left alone to weep."
Some mentioned Five Crows. "He is a strong heart," said one. "He will not change," said another.
"Our hearts go toward him with a rush," cried all the people.
Five Crows, the most ambitious chief of all the Indian country, did not respond at once. He only bowed his head and wept. By inheritance the chieftainship belonged to Tauitau, now by election it was his.
The wind blew the tempting fragrance of a barbecued ox toward the scene of deliberation. A fat hog hung hissing over a pit of fire, and the hungry throng soon gathered around a feast on the flowery field. The sharp teeth of the Walla Walla-Cayuses and their Nez Perce" brethren made quick work of the savory menu. Chief Ellice brought out the Nez Perce" peace pipe, three feet long with a bowl like a porringer, and laid upon it a coal. The chiefs puffed first, and then the whites. As each one drew a whiff he spoke, Five Crows, Ellice, Tauitau, Yellow Serpent, one by one, as the fragrant aroma curled up by the still Walla Walla. One by one they took each other's hands and went out from the council and faced their antelopefooted horses homeward. Late at night the fires still smouldered, but where the nations camped that day only one solitary old Indian remained to boil up the feet of the barbecued ox for his next day's dinner. ​
XXXI
WHITMAN RETURNS WITH A THOUSAND PEOPLE
1843
"HHRAVEL, travel, travel, nothing else will take — you to the end of your journey. Nothing is wise that does not help you along. Nothing is good for you that causes a moment's delay." The commanding voice and clear-cut face of Dr. Whitman passed from wagon to wagon of that great procession on the plains.
Back, far back as the eye could reach the line extended, a thousand souls, one hundred and twenty wagons drawn by oxen, and following in the rear fifteen hundred loose horses and cattle trampled up the dust. Like the Greek anabasis, like the exodus of Israel, like the migrations of northern Europe, this little army of emigrants broke all previous record, as they toiled on westward two thousand miles in one unresting march. At every dawn the bugle woke the night encampment. At every dusk the tents were set and supper fires were kindled. Old rocking-chairs were brought out. Grandams knit by the cheerful blaze and babies toddled in the grass. Under the mellow moon the old men met in council, and young men and maids tripped the toe to "Pretty Betty Martin "on the velvety plains of the Platte. Many a lover's ​
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vow was plighted in that westward march from Missouri to the sea. Hunters swept in from the buffaloraid and scouts reported the trail of Indians. Future senators, governors, generals, divines, and judges were in that train; founders of cities and carvers of empire. Burnett, a brisk lawyer, good-looking and affable, became the first governor of California; William Gilpin, the first governor of Colorado. Nesmith sat in the national Senate; McCarver, the founder of Burlington, Iowa, became the founder of Sacramento, California, of Tacoma, Washington, and missed by only ten miles the metropolis of Oregon. Journeying leisurely in the rear, by a somewhat different route, came Lieutenant Fremont with fourteen government wagons, following the emigrants out to Oregon.
Here, there, everywhere, Dr. Whitman attended the sick, encouraged the weary, and counselled with the pilot over the safety of the route. He was patient with complaints. "The best of men and women, when fatigued and anxious by the way, will be jealous of their rights," he said. For them he sought the smoothest route, the shallowest ford, the most cooling pastures for their fainting cattle.
Men were in that train who had inherited a hearty hatred of the British, men whose fathers had fought in the Revolution, and to whom 1812 was fresh in memory. Burnett, the lawyer, struck a responsive chord when he cried: "Let us drive out those British usurpers, let us defend Oregon from the British lion. Posterity will honor us for placing the fairest portion of our land under the stars and stripes."
Along the Big Blue in the sweet June weather, ferrying the Platte in their wagon-box boats in the July sun, sighting the Rockies in August, they camped a ​nd
marched and marched and camped toward the sunset. In the buffalo country the Indians peeped like blackbirds over the hills and disappeared. In September, dashing across a cut-off, Dr. Whitman reached Fort Hall three days before the train. Thither to his great joy he found his faithful Cayuses had packed a quantity of provisions on their plump little ponies. There they were, riding and swaying and swinging, clinging with their legs under the ponies' bellies and waving their arms in greeting the poetry of Delsarte before Delsarte was heard of.
We can well imagine Dr. Whitman's first words, "My wife?" and the answer, "Watching for you," in Indian pantomime. Something of the May-feast he may have learned and of the burned mill as he shook hands with his red retainers.
Against the crackling sage-brush the dust-covered train came rolling in.
"What are you going to Oregon for? You cannot get the wagons through," said Captain Grant, the Hudson's Bay factor at Fort Hall. "'T is a physical impossibility. A small immigration passed through here last year. I told them as I tell you, wagons never have passed, never can pass through the Snake country and the Blue Mountains. They believed me, left their wagons, bought pack animals, and got through safely. My advice to you is the same, get pack animals and go through, but I advise you to go to California. The route is shorter and safer, and there is the better country."
"Can't get the wagons through," was the word that passed from lip to lip.
"No," said Captain Grant; "there you see the ones abandoned last year." ​
2
Sure enough, there in a corner of the stockade stood five battered old wagons left by the venturesome party last year. Along with them were ploughs and other implements that could not be packed on horses. At this apparent proof the men looked solemn. The women began to cry.
"Both the Snake and the Columbia are deep, swift rivers," continued Captain Grant; "no company has ever attempted their passage but with a loss of life. Besides, several Indian tribes in the middle regions have combined to prevent your passage. Why, the Willamette is a thousand miles from here. The distance is so great that winter will overtake you before you reach the Cascades. I am astonished that you ever scaled the Rockies, but the Blue Mountains are much more formidable. From here to the Blue Mountains the plain is a cut-rock desert without water. The Snake River runs at the bottom of a deep canyon if you have read Irving's ' Astoria ' you remember how Hunt's party wandered along the brink, and yet almost died of thirst because they could not reach the water. There is absolutely no food to be had unless you eat gophers and ground-hogs you will die of famine. I would n't undertake it; the short cut to California is much safer."
Groups stood here and there, talking in great excitement, when Dr. Whitman returned from his conversation with the Cayuses.
"What! Can't get the wagons through! "exclaimed Dr. Whitman. "That's all bosh. My wagon went through three years ago, and where one went a hundred can. Bring the wagons by all means. You'll need them. There 's a great demand. What can farmers do without wagons? and most of you are farmers. Her ​e,
my friend, sell me that light dearborn and I'll prove what I say. My Cayuses are here, they know the trails; they are the safest guides in the world."
Six months had passed since that gallant company crossed the border with their rifles on their shoulders, headed for the end of the West.
"The Sioux will oppose you." "Look out for the Crows." "Beware of the Blackfeet," had been the warning from point to point. No foe had troubled them. They had forded many a rushing stream, had followed the wagon route of two women round and round and over the Rockies. As to Dr. Whitman, some of them had heard his bugle-call along the border, some had read his pamphlet as far away as Texas. More had heard of the previous immigration, for Oregon was in the air, and the settlers of the then isolated Missouri believed that their crops might find a better market by the seaboard. Of Whitman they knew nothing. All they saw was an immigrant, like themselves, who had almost recklessly exposed himself in hunting fords for their wagons and cattle. His past they knew not, his future not, nor his plans; he spoke seldom, and to the point, and always hopefully. He was worried, perhaps, with the expense of that winter ride, that the Board would not meet and he must. He was anxious, perhaps, for future food for that army. Flour at Fort Hall was selling at mountain prices, a dollar a pint, forty dollars a barrel, or four cows a hundred weight. The immigrants had spent thousands of dollars for provisions at Laramie and Fort Hall he knew they were short of money. If worst came to worst they had their cattle, perhaps the mission plantations had raised enough to last them down to Fort Vancouver. These cogitations the immigrants saw not, but they did see an American. ​
2
His positive manner, his honest face gave them confidence.
"He has led us right so far," they said. "He has been over the road. He lives here. These Injuns know him. They have come to meet him. We will follow Dr. Whitman."
As the groups closed round their leader again, Captain Grant expostulated.
"You Americans are running an awful risk. There 's not a particle of pasturage on the Snake; your cattle will all die. All I have seen convinces me 'tis a beggarly country. The buffalo starves there, even the wolves are so thin you can count their ribs. As for wagons, the pack-trails are of sharp, cut rock, and narrow and steep. You will be stranded in some lonely gorge, if you persist in this attempt to take them through the tangled woods and rocky cliffs and canyons of the Blue Mountains. But I wash my hands of your destruction."
It was not the last effort of the Hudson's Bay Company to divert immigration away from Oregon.
Dr. Whitman gave the whole of the provisions brought by the Cayuses to the immigrants, reserving only scraps and bones for himself, and with a body-guard of axemen and his trusty Indians, set on ahead. He tacked up notices at every difficult place, and set up guidepoles in the dusty desert. Night by night tents were set at oases of buffalo-grass, and the Indian guides by day became night guards and herders. The Snake was forded at Salmon Falls, then over the future battleground of the Chief-Joseph-Nez-Perce-War, through the deep sand and tough sage, thirteen miles a day, they came to the Burnt River canyon. On every side lay tangled heaps of burnt and fallen trees, but with t ​he
genius of a Caesar Whitman led his battalions in the centre of the river-bed for twenty-five miles. Over the rough hills, on the first of October, the main body of the immigration entered the Grande Ronde valley. Hundreds of Indian women were digging and drying the camas. A second party of Cayuses, on their plump little horses adorned with streamers, came out to meet them with a feast of bread and berries and elk meat. In their long-laced leggings, and deerskin jackets, and flying hair, the Cayuses welcomed Dr. Whitman with a thousand extravagant antics, circling about and about, and flinging themselves over and under their ponies like circus boys.
The Indians offered their native roots. The white people gingerly touched the bulbous camas. It flaked off like an onion. "Better than licorice," said the white children. The snowy kouse, the biscuit-root, was tasted. "Sweet potatoes," shouted the little Yankees, and later most of them learned to like the starchy wapato.
While yet feasting, a courier rode into the Grande Ronde and stopped at the doctor's tent.
"Mr. and Mrs. Spalding are very ill. They send for you."
Dr. Whitman turned to the faithful Cayuse that had met him at Fort Hall, "Sticcas, my boy, can you guide these people in?"
"I can," answered the sub-chief, who was never known to refuse a request of Dr. Whitman.
The doctor struck across the country to Lapwai. Sticcas went ahead, with forty men, cutting a road through the heavy timber. The Applegates, the Daniel Boones of Oregon, Burnett, the future governor, and Nesmith, the senator-to-be, walked all the way through
17 ​
2
the Blue Mountains, with axes in their blistered hands, hewing a wagon-way through the crossed and crisscrossed fallen trees.
Nesmith says, "Sticcas was a faithful old fellow, and although not speaking a word of English, and no one in our party a word of Cayuse, he succeeded, by pantomime, in taking us over the roughest wagon-route I ever saw."
A heavy snow fell in the mountains, the warning of approaching winter. Descending the western slope, there lay before them the great valley of the Columbia. At their feet the Cayuse lodge-fires curled on the green Umatilla. Miles away the sinewy Hood, and his sister St. Helen's, swam in light, Mt. Adams lay like a couchant lion, and winding 'mid her battlements, the Columbia, a long line of liquid gold, blazed in the setting sun. Fatigue was forgotten in this glorified glimpse of the promised land. Exultant, the train of wagons rolled into the plain.
High on a spur of the Blue Mountains one stood and watched the moving caravan. A dark scowl of hate disfigured his face, his clenched hand, lifted, sunk again. Too well the Delaware knew the story of American immigration.
For miles the Indians came to view that caravan, that, farther than Caesar bore the Roman eagles, had come to claim a land. But the feature that most engaged the Indians was the wagons, the mysterious " horse canoes," that rolled along over the obstinate bunch-grass, bearing women and little children into Oregon. On, on they came, it seemed to the Indians a never-ending train, as if that great mysterious land to the east was pouring itself into the vales of the Columbia. All their doubts, all their fears, all their terro ​rs
leaped anew. "Yes, it is as Dorion said; they have come to take the country." But no hand was lifted against the new-comers surprise absorbed all other emotions.
Dr. Whitman, the Nestor of them all, had already despatched from Lapwai a train of Nez Perces, with grain and potatoes, that the immigrants might purchase needed supplies before advancing down the Columbia.
"I said I would bring an immigration over the mountains, and I have done it," said Dr. Whitman, bringing his hand down on the pommel of his saddle.
"Yes, but mind, now, Doctor," said Spalding, as the pack-ponies set out, "I furnish those provisions only on condition that you accept pay for them. Of course let nobody suffer, but remember, we are not in a condition to give out of hand to every immigrant as you did last year. I know your generous nature; you would give your last ounce of flour and live yourself on the bran. The missions are compelled to be self-supporting. The very toil we expend in raising these supplies is that much taken out of our time for preaching and teaching."
"Not so, brother Spalding," cheerfully answered the doctor. "With the plough, the spade, the hoe, we teach. When the Indians see us work, they are more willing."
"I know, I know," said Spalding, "my Nez Perces often laugh and tell me, ' Before you came we never worked. Now we are become a nation of squaws.' "
The worn-out oxen dragged the worn-out wagons down to the Dalles. The herders drove the cattle by the trail around Mt. Hood. Some cut timber and fashioned log rafts to navigate the perilous river. Driving on their wagons and piling on their goods and families, down they glided, Indians assisting, and ​
2 6o McLOUGHLIN AND OLD OREGON
stealing now and then, till the seething cascades rendered the crafts useless. On one of those rafts a child was born.
Pitching their tents, the men struck into the forest to cut a wagon-road around the Cascades. It was toilsome work. The stormy season had come. Cold rains set in. High winds from the sea sucked up the Columbia, blowing down the tents at night, drenching the sleepers in their beds. Provisions gave out. On the very threshold of their Canaan the Oregon immigrants of 1843 seemed likely to perish of cold and hunger. The hardships of the entire journey seemed concentrated at the Cascades of the Columbia.
Below, at Fort Vancouver, the Canadians were busy, as usual, beating furs in the court. The dull thud of their batons kept time with snatches of song, and tilts of wit and repartee. The furs were out for their last airing, to be sorted and packed for London. Bales of beaver, bales of bear, bales of otter were dusted and folded in a certain way for their long journey to the dim old warerooms on Fenchurch Street. The barque lay in the river taking on her precious freight.
"Dose Engine say Bostons camp by Mt. Hood, der odder side," exclaimed a Canadian in from the court. " Dose Engine say women and wagons "
"Oh, nonsense, nonsense, Gabriel. You 're like Father De Smet, who roused the whole camp crying ' Indians! Indians! ' in his dreams," said Dr. McLoughlin, sticking his quill behind his ear, and holding the paper he was writing at arm's length.
"Dose Engine say "but the doctor waved him off impatiently.
"Bah! Indian bugaboo! Indian bugaboo! Don't tell me." ​
Nevertheless, when Gabriel reluctantly withdrew the doctor called him back.
"Say, say, Gabriel, send those Indians here."
A few men in a canoe shot the Cascades and hurried down to Fort Vancouver.
"A thousand people? Lord! Lord!" exclaimed Dr. McLoughlin, crossing his breast. "What manner of men are these that scale the mountains and slide down the rivers as the Goths of old down the Alps? "
He heard the tale of distress. Dr. McLoughlin thought not of the company, not of rivals; he only knew that women and little children were perishing at the Cascades.
"Man the boats," he cried. In fifteen minutes every boat was on the water.
"Take provisions, twenty-five pounds of flour to every small family, fifty to every large one, one quart of syrup to every small family, half a gallon to a large one; take sugar in three and five pound packages and a pound of tea to every family. If any can pay, let them, but don't stand on ceremony. Make haste, reach there to-night."
The boats shot out on the errand of mercy. The doctor was greatly excited. He ordered the servants to bring great piles of brush and fuel for bonfires on the morrow.
The boats arrived at the Cascades none too soon. With tears streaming down their cheeks aged women yet living say fervently: "God bless Dr. McLoughlin! "
Little children danced for joy. Many had not had a square meal for weeks. So starved were they, some cooked and ate all night. The next day they set out for Fort Vancouver. The overloaded boats rocked on the tempestuous river, cold brown clouds wrapped ​
2
the hills, wheeling eagles shrieked and screamed, the winter rain beat in their defenceless faces. Mothers wrapped their babies in their shawls, and fathers with lips set, as the Pilgrims of 1620, looked toward the blast.
Dr. McLoughlin had been up since daylight and was watching on the bank. There were Indians all around. The doctor noted the angry, excited glance that fell upon the approaching boats. As the first boat swung toward the shore a big Indian flourished his club and shouted to his comrades,
"It is good for us to kill these Bostons."
Dr. McLoughlin's quick ear caught their meaning. One word from the Hudson's Bay Company and those Indians would rise as one man to cut off the incoming Americans. The possible tragedy seemed about to open with all the horrors of tomahawk and scalpingknife. Rushing upon the savage, with uplifted cane, the doctor grabbed him by the throat,
"Who is the dog that says it is a good thing to kill those Bostons?"
That awful tone, that made the red men tremble, seemed doubly awful now. Fire blazed from his eye. The white locks flew like a bush around his head, giving him a fierce and terrible aspect. The craven slunk back in abject fear.
"I spoke without meaning harm, but the Dalles Indians say so."
The doctor gave him a shake as a terrier would a rat. "Well, sir, the Dalles Indians are dogs for saying so, and you also. If I hear another such word, I'll put an end to you." With that he flung him to the ground.
Crestfallen the Indian crept away.
Returning to the landing, Dr. McLoughlin anxious ​ly
took the hands of the immigrants. Bonfires were blazing all along the shore, where the wet people hastened to dry their drenched garments. In five minutes the friendly doctor in his cap and cloak seemed like an old acquaintance, meeting them there as a matter of course. " Go right up to the fort to dinner," said Dr. McLoughlin. Some went up, glad again of the shelter of a house and a civilized meal.
The indoor servants were busy, sweeping, replenishing fires, dusting clothes; but at a word from the Governor all turned in to wait on the multitude of guests.
"And what did you have for dinner?" was asked of one now white with eighty years.
"Salt salmon and potatoes, hot biscuit and tea. It was a splendid meal, the best I ever ate, and we were thankful to get it."
"And did Dr. McLoughlin eat with you?"
"Oh, no, he stayed all the time at the river-bank watching the boats come in. It was raining hard, and the wind blew his long white hair around his shoulders, but he would not leave the boats. After dinner we went on up the Willamette, but the last we saw was Dr. McLoughlin, there in the rain, watching the boats."
"How the wind howls! "said Dr. McLoughlin that night.
"T is time noo to lock the gates," answered the old gatekeeper, pulling down his hood and buttoning up his great capote.
"Leave them a little, Bruce. Some one else may come. 'T is a stormy time for immigrants. I am sorry for those poor families that went up the river."
All day, and into the night, and for days thereafter, Dr. McLoughlin stood by the river, never for a moment relaxing his vigilance, personally superintending the ​
2
reception of the immigrants, as if they had been his own invited guests. Many a hostile intent was disarmed, and to the end of their lives the heroes of 1843 cherished a brother's regard for Dr. John McLoughlin.
In a day or two the mission blacksmith came down to the fort. The doctor caught sight of him on the steps, and that prophecy, "Before we die we shall see the Yankees coming across the Rocky Mountains with their teams and their families," flashed through his mind. Rapidly crossing himself, Dr. McLoughlin exclaimed, " God forgive me, Mr. Parrish, God forgive me, but the Yankees are here, and the first thing you know, they will yoke up their oxen, drive down to the mouth of the Columbia, and come out at Japan."
The servants were turned out of their beds, every available niche and cranny of the old fort was filled with immigrants. The Montreal express came in, bringing Billy McKay home from the States, a young M.D. " I found the fort full of immigrants," says Dr. McKay, " and my father's house at Scappoose, and all the Canadians' at Champoeg. There were only six houses at the Falls; they were crowded, and all the posts of the Methodist mission." Through the long autumn the immigrants continued passing at Fort Vancouver.
"How they ever get here is what confounds me," said Dr. McLoughlin. "These Yankees seem to be able to drive a wagon where our men can only lead a packhorse."
"Can't we devise some method to head them off to California?" suggested James Douglas, annoyed by the constant arrivals.
"Who cries ' head them off'?" said the doctor, flushed and tired. "The very effort would precipitate trouble. Too many Boston ships have visited th ​is
coast for us to hide her riches now. America is not asleep. If we hold north of the Columbia 't is all that we can hope."
Black Douglas was angry. He thought the doctor's philanthropy excessive. Ogden felt again the baleful star of his birth that gave him no rest between the rival powers. Ermatinger put on the cap with, "Why, Doctor, I believe you've a bit of Yankee blood yourself."
"Thirty miles north of the Maine border lacks little of it," growled the doctor, nodding his shaggy mane. Somehow McLoughlin, bom on the St. Lawrence, never could see through the partial eyes of a Thamesborn Briton.
He walked back and forth with excited stride, kicking now and then a chair with his cane. Absolute in his rule, he was not accustomed to being crossed, least of all by strangers. Many things had gone wrong. Despite his well-meant kindness, some rough fellows of the baser sort had spoken rudely. He caught the contemptuous epithets, "Money bags," "British," "Monopoly." His companions reminded him of these things. Turning with that eye of his, that cut to the marrow, " Because an ill-bred puppy barks shall I blame a whole people?"
Stung, harassed, annoyed on every hand by the perplexities of the situation, the doctor had one mentor that always led him right his faithful wife, the Madame. Composed, apparently imperturbable, she sat with her knitting, soothing him with her soft French, "There, there, Dogtor, he low-bred fellow. Gentlemen not heed such thing."
So always it had been. Frequently the doctor's quick temper had ignited over some recreant servant, ​
2
and he had stormed in a rage, "I'll thrash that rascal. I'll "until the Madame's crooning, "There, there," fell upon his ear. "He, poor ignorant boy, he not know any better, he not understand, he tired, he too much work," until the wrath cooled out of the doctor's heart.
Lieutenant Fremont hastened down to Fort Vancouver to purchase supplies for his overland trip to California. He records in his journal: "I immediately waited upon Dr. McLoughlin, the executive officer of the Hudson's Bay Company, who received me with the courtesy and hospitality for which he has been eminently distinguished, and which makes a forcible and delightful impression on a traveller from the long wilderness from which we had issued. . . . Every hospitable attention was extended to me, and I accepted an invitation to take a room in the fort and to make myself at home while I stayed.
"I found many American immigrants at the fort; others had already crossed the river into their land of promise the Willamette valley. Others were daily arriving, and all of them had been furnished with shelter, so far as it could be afforded by the buildings connected with the establishment. Necessary clothing and provisions (the latter to be afterward returned in kind from the produce of their labor) were also furnished. This friendly assistance was of very great value to the immigrants, whose families were otherwise exposed to much suffering in the winter rains, which had now commenced, at the same time that they were in want of all the common necessaries of life."
A month after the immigration was in, Dr. Whitman came down to Fort Vancouver he felt it his duty to come in person and thank Dr. McLoughlin. The ​se
men, of opposite religious faiths yet of equally noble hearts, had always entertained for each other the warmest friendship.
Whitman was always direct in speech. "Doctor McLoughlin," he said, "I come to Vancouver to thank you in the name of humanity for your kindness to my countrymen. That very act disarmed that company of a thousand prejudices that had worried me all the way. By a single act you turned presumptive foes into the warmest friends."
Dr. McLoughlin reddened. It was hard to stand thus and be thanked by one who had just returned from the errand of a rival, and that, too, for succoring the very ones who, confessedly, came to take the country from the government to which he owed allegiance. And he, himself, had he been loyal to Britain? Banish the doubt. There is a law above all personal consideration, the law of common humanity. In feeding the hungry and clothing the naked, in saving fellow-men from the tomahawk of the savage, no mere worldly policy but a divine principle had governed his action.
Justified of God, he smiled and grasped the hand of Dr. Whitman "Do not thank me, Doctor, I could not help it. I could not see those people in want while I had stores of plenty. But there was another reason, a more potent one yet. I stood on the shore that day and saw your first stragglers coming up in their canoes, and I read in the looks of the excited Indians that there was danger. I said to myself, ' If these savages see that the Hudson's Bay Company receives these people as friends they are safe,' so I did what I could. I was racked with fear that if your excitable countrymen learned the situation there would be fighting, and so, ​
2
without concerted plan, they would all be cut off. Fortunately my ruse succeeded. I thought some of our rascally Iroquois might have sprung this scheme, and investigated the matter afterward, but found no light on the subject."
"Oh," said Whitman, "I know all about it."
"You do, Doctor?" ejaculated the governor.
"Yes, and I have known it for two years."
"You have known it for two years and have told me nothing! Pray, who is at the bottom of this mischief? Who is making you trouble? If it is a graceless Iroquois I will tie him to the twelve-pounder and give him a dozen."
Dr. Whitman saw in fancy the irate governor already in quest of a guilty Iroquois and said: "No, it is not an Iroquois. His name is Thomas Hill."
Dr. McLoughlin knit his brows in thought, gazing at Whitman. "We have no one by that name in our service," said Dr. McLoughlin.
"No, it is Tom Hill, the Delaware Indian, educated at Dartmouth College in the States. He has urged the Indians to allow no Americans to settle on their lands my Cayuses are greatly agitated over the matter. I have told them white men will pay them for their lands, but they no longer believe me. I think, however, the trouble will blow over and they will set to work again. Some of my faithful Cayuses met us at Fort Hall, others at the Grande Ronde. The immigrants owe a great debt to the sub-chief Sticcas."
"Doctor, take the advice of a friend come down to Fort Vancouver. Some one has been exciting those Indians, and the consequences may be immediate and awful. You know while you were gone we had a gre ​at
deal of trouble. Yellow Serpent came to me for advice and told me the same tales. My brother, I tremble for your safety."
Dr. Whitman sat in a large, leather-covered chair in the doctor's sitting-room. Dr. McLoughlin had risen and laid his hands upon his shoulders. Entreaty shone in his eyes and in every line of his noble countenance. " Listen to me," continued the governor. "Indians are not to be trifled with. Leave them. Come here and stay. By and by they will invite you back. Then you can go in safety."
The Indians seemed friendly; they had welcomed him back with joy. He could see no danger, and yet Dr. Whitman was not unmoved by his friend's solicitude. He recognized the motive of the generous heart that would shield him from possible harm, but he said: "I cannot leave, Doctor. My duty lies with the Indians. I cannot desert my post. I must stay and do what I can."
Dr. Whitman had risen. Two heroes stood face to face. The early sunset cast its slant shadows across the wall, lighting up the silver locks of the Father of Oregon, and resting in a halo on the brow of the future martyr. Catholic and Protestant, British and American, yet brothers in a common fidelity to God and humanity.
Yes, from her mission door Narcissa Whitman, watching on the Walla Walla, had heard the returning hoofbeats of that rider on the plains. From that door she saw the wagons rolling in, that were to turn the rocking balance forever in favor of her country. There were immigrants with a new-born babe in her bedroom, immigrants with four little children in the room east ​
2
of the kitchen, an immigrant family with six little children in the Indian room, immigrants slept on the dining-room floor. Little Mary Ann and Helen Mar, tucked in their trundle-bed in the doctor's room, asked, " Mamma, mamma, where so many people come from?"
A village of Indians camped outside, eager to explain to the doctor: "We no burn the mill. We no do such thing."
"I know it, my boys, we'll build another; "and the doctor brought out his blackboard, and printed the lessons as if nothing had happened. At the ringing of the hand-bell the feet of little Indians came tracking up the yellow pine floor, and musical voices joined the Nez Perce,
"Nesikapapa kldxta mitlite kopa sdh-a-le." Our Father who art in the above
(or Heaven).
It was nearly Christmas before Dr. and Mrs. Whitman were fully settled to the old routine at Waiilatpu. But the larder was bare, as if swept by a swarm of locusts. Everything went to the immigrants. The mill with its grain was gone. Nothing was left but potatoes and salt, and even salt was two dollars a pound at Fort Walla Walla. "Never mind, Narcissa," said the doctor, "next year we will plant enough for all that come. For the present I think the Indians will sell us some ponies for steak."
Just after the arrival of the immigrants a heavy cloud rose over Mt. St. Helen's, and continued to enlarge. A copper haze, heavier than Indian summer, hung over the Columbia. Mt. Hood was hid in shadow. The sun glared red as blood. ​
"Why, this is equal to a Christmas fog in London," said Dr. McLoughlin, noting the increasing darkness.
"Has the mountain fire-bug been out again? "inquired Douglas.
"Cannot be," said Dr. McLoughlin. "September rains extinguished the mountain fires long ago."
Old Waskema, returning with berries from Mt. Hood, had seen the immigrants in bateaux going down to Fort Vancouver. Hastening to a camp of Molallas who were fishing for the late run of salmon, she startled them with the Cassandra-cry, "Woe, woe, woe the poor Indian! "
"Lou wala clough smoke," said the old crone, shading her eyes with both skinny hands and looking toward St. Helen's.
The superstitious Molallas trembled and put aside their fishing. Still with the hollow "Woe, woe, woe " upon her lips Waskema set out for Fort Vancouver.
It was a phenomenally dark and heavy day. Not even when the great forest fire came down and threatened the fort had it been so oppressive. Dr. McLoughlin went out to observe the lurid sky. Candles were lit in the hall, and the cattle came lowing up from the marshes at midday. The air was full of fine, light ashes that fell over a radius of fifty miles. For the first time in the memory of man the white robes of St. Helen's were blackened with dust.
Down by the boat-house Dr. McLoughlin saw old Waskema, landing from her canoe. With the kindness of heart that would not slight even a withered old squaw, he advanced and took her hand, "Well, what 's the good word, grandmother?"
The decrepit figure tried to straighten itself. In spite of her taciturnity the White-Headed Eagle had ​
2
won the heart of old Waskema. A smile, that was a pathetic contraction of leathern muscles long unused to laughter, danced over her face and was gone. In a sepulchral tone, shaking her bony finger, she pointed to the erupting mountain.
"Lou wala clough smoke! White-Headed Eagle beware. Um too much Boston! Um too much Boston I Um drive King George man out. Um drive poor Injun out."
The attitude, the tone, the darkness, all corresponded with the gloom of the doctor's spirit. Only too well he knew that with this influx of Americans the Hudson's Bay regime was over. A wind loaded with frost blew down from Mt. Hood.
"Ugh-ugh! Walla Walla wind freeze," chattered Waskema, drawing her blanket closer and crouching beside old Kesano's camp-fire by the gate. Dr. McLoughlin watched the pair, withered and thin, bent and gray, the last of two distinct tribes in the once populous Willamette. "So will it be with them all," he thought sadly. "The beaver and the Indian will perish together."
St. Helen's poured her molten lava over the beautiful white snow. Moneycoon, the hunter, was up in the mountain and found his return cut off. Taking a run, he tried to leap and fell, one foot in the glowing torrent. The moccasin was singed from his foot, and the flesh so burned that he came near being a cripple for life. Crawling miraculously back to Fort Vancouver, he was put in the hospital, where Dr. Barclay nursed him back to health.
"Oh, lovely Oregon! "cried the immigrants as the green pastures appeared along the Willamette. Nothing surprised the new-comers more than the tropic luxurian ​ce
of vegetation. Beyond the storm-swept Cascades a new world appeared. The moist Chinook nurtured the trees to mammoths. Shrubbery, like the hazel, grew to be trees. The maple spread its leaves like palm fans; dogwood of magnolian beauty, wild cherry, crab-apple, interlaced with Oregon holly, black-berries, rose-bushes, vines of every sort and description, and ferns, ferns filled the canyons like the jungles of the Orinoco.
"We will all own dukedoms now," said the immigrants, picking out the fairest tracts, a square mile each of land, that might have been the pride of an English manor. Six hundred and forty acres to each family was the bill in Congress.
For seeds, wheat, implements they all applied to Dr. McLoughlin. "Yes, yes, I will loan you wheat and implements, and you can pay me when you harvest," said the doctor. "Plant all you can. Another such immigration will bring a famine."
To those without stock he loaned cattle for a term of years. To those without provisions he loaned a supply for the winter, and then loaned the boat that carried them to their destination. The commissariat was kept busy weighing out salmon, the clerks kept busy measuring out cloth. "I can't have them suffering for what we can supply," he said. "The best thing for them and for us, too, is to forward them to their destination and get them settled and self-supporting as soon as possible." About the same time Ermatinger was despatched with a cargo of goods, to open a Hudson's Bay store at the settlement by the Falls.
During that winter of 1843 a village sprang up at the Falls of the Willamette Oregon City. Out of the books brought over the plains a circulating library was formed, a lyceum was organized, a Methodist
18 ​
2
church was built, the first Protestant church west of the Rocky Mountains.
"Scissors! Scissors! "grumbled Ogden, taking a run up the river. "These colonies of people are driving out our colonies of beaver. I think I'll beg a leave of absence and take a trip to England." ​
XXXII
McLOUGHLIN AND THE IMMIGRANTS 1844
T3OTH parties watched for the immigration of 1844. -* * The Americans wanted news from the States. The Hudson's Bay ship brought word of impending war with the United States. With an incoming army of hostile immigrants what might not happen at Fort Vancouver? "If they are destitute as last year, they will pillage the fort," said Douglas.
Dr. McLoughlin set his Canadians to building another bastion, and strengthened again the ever decaying stockade. "What for do you this?" asked a Canadian.
"To guard against the savages," Black Douglas answered with a frown. The Canadian nodded his head. " Sabages prom de Rocky Mountain! "
"They are afraid of us over at Fort Vancouver," was whispered in the valley. "Nay, indeed, they are preparing to make war on us," answered another. Still, when the first wagons appeared, far up the Columbia came McLoughlin's word "Do not let the poor people suffer. Help them along. Teach the Indians to do so also." The men of 1 844 started with extravagant dreams of the velvet prairies by the sea. That blessed country! " The trees forever bend with fruit," they said. " Camas-bread grows in the ground." "Salmon crowd ​
2
each other out of the streams." "Money? Why, man alive, money grows out there." "Yes, and feather-beds grow on the bushes."
With gay hearts they started as on a summer holiday, some with only the clothes they wore and a blanket slung over the shoulder. The spring was late. It rained and rained, and the camps were long and frequent along the swollen Platte. Provisions melted away.
"Courage," they said to one another. "Did not our ancestors come in six weeks' journeys from the seaboard to Ohio, to Kentucky, to Missouri? Oregon is but another journey a little farther west."
But it stretched away and away, six months and more, and still the road ran on. No one supposed that Oregon was so far, no one realized that there were no hospices through all that fearful stretch of travel. Buffalo eluded the immigrant trail. Provisions gave out. Clothing wore out. Some were sick. Infants were born on the way. Without a mentor to bid them " travel, travel, travel," winter came down upon them unprepared, and from Burnt River to the Dalles the caravan became a panorama of destitution.
Pioneer printers, pioneer lumber-kings, pioneer merchants and manufacturers, poor enough then, barefooted broke the path over the Blue Mountains through the deep, untrodden snow. Oregon is dotted with their granite pillars; for one of them California has reared a statue-crowned shaft on the spot where four years later he found the gold of Eldorado. Dr. Whitman taught his Indians to go far out and build their bonfires on the hills to guide them in. They "packed "provisions to the Grande Ronde, and yet the end of October came with five hundred people still beyond the ​
McLOUGHLIN AND THE IMMIGRANTS 277
mountains. Whitman's mission became a great inn thronged with the passing tide.
"The crowd and confusion almost drive me crazy," wrote Mrs. Whitman to her mother. "The doctor is as if a hundred strings were tied to him, all pulling in different directions."
With almost superhuman effort Dr. Whitman had extended his fields; to lighten his labors Mrs. Whitman herself had gone out to superintend the Indians gathering the garden stores.
"Can you look after an orphan family of seven children?" inquired the captain of a company at the Whitman door. "Father and mother died on the way, the youngest a baby, born on the Platte."
Dr. Whitman looked at his wife. Already they had adopted four children.
"Where are they?" he inquired, reaching for his hat.
"Back on the Umatilla."
"Have they no friends? "
"Not a relative in the world."
"Bring them on," said the doctor.
Two days later their wagon rolled in, two little boys weeping bitterly, four little girls huddled together, bareheaded, barefooted, a wee little baby, five months old, almost dead. For weeks the compassionate immigrants had cared for them and shared with them the last crust.
"We can get along with all but the baby. I don't see how we can take her," said Dr. Whitman.
"If we take any I must have the baby," cried the mother-heart of Mrs. Whitman, lifting the mite of humanity out of the arms of a tired old woman. "She will be a charm to bind the rest to me." ​
2
Little Helen Mar ran out, in her pretty green dress and white apron, and peeped at them, timidly, under her sunbonnet. "Show the children in, Helen," said Mrs. Whitman.
"Have you no children of your own, Madame?" inquired the captain.
"All the child I ever had sleeps yonder," she answered, dropping a tear on the baby's forehead.
In four days Dr. Whitman sent word to the captain: " Take no more concern for the children. We adopt them all."
"Who ever saw such herds of horses! Why, there are thousands! "exclaimed the immigrants as they passed along the Walla Walla. "And see the cattle! the finest kind of stock. These Indians will soon be rich."
Pio-pio-mox-mox, Five Crows, and Tauitau rode with the Indian herders on the hills, and watched the immigrants' lean and worn-out cattle. Every head they could, they bought. This annual influx of stock almost reconciled them to the immigrants trampling down their pastures. The Indians talked of nothing but cattle in those days.
"Let us go down to California and buy more cattle," said the young chief Elijah to his father. "The white men in the valley go down to Sutter's fort and bring up hundreds."
Immigrants camped near the Walla Walla heard the sweet notes of a chant steal out upon the air at twilight. In the morning the Cayuses rose up early and prepared for worship.
"Quite civilized Indians," said the immigrants, looking at their little plantations. "They make their grounds look clean and mellow as a garden." ​
McLOUGHLIN AND THE IMMIGRANTS 279
"Yes," said Dr. Whitman. "Great numbers of them cultivate, and with but a single horse will take any plough we have, however large, and do their own ploughing. They have a great desire for hogs and hens and cattle."
At the mission, Dr. Whitman addressed his Indians upon the duty of peace and providence for the future. Tiloukaikt, "court crier," fickle as the wind, but now loyal again, rehearsed after him in that voice like a brazen trumpet.
"Ugh-ugh," responded the Indians, "ugh-ugh," like Methodist amens.
The choir flipped over the leaves of their Nez Perce hymn-books and struck the key like old-fashioned singing-masters.
As might be expected, the immigrants of 1844 came prejudiced against the British and itching for the honor of driving them out.
"We dread meeting that old barbarian in his den on the Columbia worse than anything else," said the immigrants at the Dalles.
"If the Hudson's Bay Company does n't conduct itself properly we'll knock their old stockade about their ears," said Gilliam, an ex-captain of the Seminole War.
Again winter rains were beating up the Cascades. Already December snows were whirling around Mt. Hood. Snow-bound cattle were famishing on the mountain trails, weary mothers were dragging their children along the slippery portages. Emaciated, discouraged, exhausted, the silent tears dropped down their hollow cheeks as they thought of the comfortable homes they had left in the States; but as a rule the women were brave, braver than the men. The ​
2 8o McLOUGHLIN AND OLD OREGON
dogs were killed and eaten, the last spare garment was traded for a sack of potatoes. Wet to the skin, shivering around their green camp-fires while the damp flakes fell "as big as a hat," they even envied the comfort of the Indians, lying flat on the clean sand under the huge projecting rocks, secure from the storm, with fires in the foreground. Mt. Hood and St. Helen's were hid in fog that rolled opaquely to the sky. Men in the prime of life sat with bowed heads among the rocks, groaning as if about to die. "Hello! "There were shadows in the fog.
"Here, gentlemen; you were so late in getting down Dr. McLoughlin was afraid you might be in trouble. He has sent a bateau of provisions, also some clothing."
"But "hesitated one, thankful, yet abashed.
"Do not apologize, sir," said the agent, kindly; "take what you need. Those who can pay may do so. Those who cannot must not be left to suffer. Such are the doctor's orders. Boats are on the way to help you down to Fort Vancouver."
Such was the greeting from that "old barbarian "in his den on the Columbia.
Ragged men, tired men, grateful men, piled their wives and children and their household goods upon the welcome bateaux. With violent-beating hearts they struck into the troubled water. The wind whipped the blanket sails, eagles screamed and circled, storms swooped and dipped the spray, on frowning heights the owl and the wolf answered each other, unaccustomed hands were toiling at the oar, but miraculously, out of it all, they landed at Fort Vancouver.
"What can we do? "they asked.
"Go to the fort. The old doctor never turns people ​
McLOUGHLIN AND THE IMMIGRANTS 281
away hungry," answered the boatmen. Some had cut off their buckskin pants time and again to mend their worn-out foot-gear, so with garments scarce covering their knees, with ragged blankets tied with a string about their necks, "tatterdemalions worse clad than the army in Flanders," they knocked at the gate.
"Where can we get some provisions?"
"Goo to Dooctor Maglooglin," was the Scotch warder's answer, pointing to the office.
A large and dignified elderly gentleman with magnificent head and benevolent countenance came immediately forward and shook one after another by the hand. " Are there many left behind? "he inquired, plucking some grapes and handing them to his guests.
"Hundreds, hundreds. This is only the vanguard," was the answer.
"So many?" exclaimed the doctor, nervously. " The season is late. I fear the poor people will suffer, but I will do what I can to prevent it. Come in. Come right in." Hurriedly turning into the office he sat down at a small table.
"Stand in a line," he said, tapping the desk with a quill pen. The men stepped into place the line reached nearly around the room.
"Last year," said the doctor, "I furnished the immigrants with food and clothing here at the fort, but now that we have established a trading-house at Oregon City, you can get most of your supplies there. Provisions for immediate necessity you can obtain here."
"But, sir," broke in several, "we have no money. We don't know when or how we can pay you."
"Tut, tut, tut! Never mind that. You can't suffer," said the doctor. Glancing at the head man, "Sir, ​
2
your name, if you please. How many in the family? What do you desire?" and so of each the questions were asked and orders made out.
"Here, gentlemen, take these to the clerks; they will supply your immediate needs. The rest you can obtain later. All can be paid at our house in Oregon City when your crops come in."
Profoundly moved, one by one they bowed themselves out from the presence of that "old barbarian in his den on the Columbia," whose generosity had rescued them and their families from suffering, starvation, and possibly death.
Standing on the porch of his residence, Dr. McLoughlin beckoned to a group of young men waiting irresolute below.
"Our ship sails to-night," he said. "If any of you wish to write home, you 'd better do so. It 's the last chance you'll get for six months."
"Thank you," answered John Minto; "we would like to write, but we have no material."
"Go over there," said the doctor, pointing to Bachelors' Hall. "The clerk will furnish stationery." Pulling out his gold watch "You have just twenty minutes before dinner."
In Bachelors' Hall the lads indited the first letters since leaving St. Joe in May, letters to apprise the dear ones at home of their safe arrival at Oregon-by-the-Sea. Scarcely had they finished when a servant entered with roast beef and potatoes, and the boys dined like guests in the home of a friend.
Says one of those boys, a gray-haired grandsire now: " Mr. Douglas was urbane, civil, gentlemanly, but he could not disguise his chagrin at each addition to the number of American settlers." ​
McLOUGHLIN AND THE IMMIGRANTS 283
In after years James Douglas was knighted by Queen Victoria, "but," adds the honorable commentator, "John McLoughlin held the patent for his honors immediately from Almighty God."
Dr. McLoughlin so bestowed favors that the recipient felt honored by the contact. The warm hand-grasp, the personal interest, the bonhomie and gayety, made him seem a good fellow among them as he went out to be introduced to their wives and children. Dr. McLoughlin never forgot those pioneer women. Years after, if he met them in the grassy paths of Oregon City, his hat was off, and with the salute of a courtier he stepped aside and waited till they passed.
The immigrants prepared to embark for the Willamette. At the river-bank Dr. McLoughlin was storming at a boatman "Here, you scoundrel, what have you loaded that bateau with wagons for? I gave strict orders to bring down nothing but people, and to leave none behind."
Even as the doctor spoke the immigrants piled in, on top the wagons, under the wagons, and into every nook and cranny, till all was full. The bateau swung into the current; he looked to see it sink, but no, with three cheers from the boat-load the doctor laughed and waved his hand. "All right! all right! all right! sir," he said.
A Missourian slid down the Cascades in a canoe, and arrived in time to see the annual ship about to sail for London. Without ado, he clambered on board and began to look around. By and by he blundered into a little room where the captain sat, busy with his logbook. The captain looked up, and eying him with a calm surprise inquired, "Young man, who are you, and what do you want here?"
2 ​
"Sir, I am an emigrant, just come down the river. I do not wish to intrude, but I wanted to see the ship, as I never saw one before to recollect."
The captain wrote a moment in silence, then said, " Where do you come from, and why do you come here?"
"We've come from Missouri" answered the boy, " we 've come from Missouri across the Rocky Mountains. We've come to settle in Oregon, and rule this country' The captain scanned his unkempt hair, his corduroy clothes and worn-out shoes.
"Well, young man, I have sailed into every quarter of this globe, and have seen most of the people on it, but a more uncouth, at the same time a bolder set of men than you Americans, I never met before."
Just in time to meet the immigrants, Captain Couch re-entered the Willamette with another cargo of merchandise. With him came Lieutenant Cushing, the son of Caleb Cushing, to investigate the Oregon question and report to his father in Congress.
Captain Couch, a jolly New England tar, wedded to the most beautiful girl in Newburyport, broke the Hudson's Bay rules of exclusive trade like brittle twigs, traded with Indians and Frenchmen, and bought wheat and skins at his own prices. His little corner grocery had become a formidable rival to the square tradewindow of the Indian shop at Fort Vancouver.
The watchful Hudson's Bay Company grew uneasy as it saw the rich territory of Oregon sliding from its grasp. Overland from Canada there came Lieutenants Warre and Vavasour, of the Royal Engineers, ostensibly to strengthen the defences at Fort Vancouver. Into their ear Sir George Simpson had whispered, "Watch the doctor." ​
McLOUGHLIN AND THE IMMIGRANTS 285
They saw the advent of the immigrants of 1844.
The great spirit that could not see suffering, and that sought to conciliate and ward off war, was beyond their comprehension. Unknown to Dr. McLoughlin a secret report was sent to London. ​
w
XXXIII
ELIJAH 1844
IE want cattle, much cattle," said the Walla Walla chief in the Indian council. They all knew the gallant Captain Sutter; he passed through their country when he came to Oregon. And now, when he heard those eastern chiefs were in need of cattle, he sent them an invitation to visit his fort on the Sacramento. Pio-pio-mox-mox, Tauitau, and certain chiefs and sub-chiefs of the Nez Perces and Spokanes, agreed to go down there together, to make a trade with skins and ponies. This Walla Walla expedition constitutes one of the most remarkable commercial exploits in Indian annals. Conceived and planned and manned entirely by the chiefs, it bade fair to be a great success.
The morning sun poured over the Blue Mountains in a cataract of gold when the chiefs set out in English costume, magnificently mounted, to visit their white friend, Captain Sutter. Behind them followed a packtrain, heavily freighted with beaver, deer, and elk skins. A bevy of beautiful girls, on their Cayuse ponies, accompanied the expedition a few miles up the John Day River. Their little grass caps fitted closely over the smooth-combed hair. Their long, black braids hung over their breasts, and the chalk-whitened deerskin dresses glistened in the sun. Their noses we ​re fine
and straight, and the skin pure copper, like the statues in some old Florentine gallery. At Elijah's side rode Siskadee on her white Cayuse. The tiny, glove-fitting moccasins were laced high up the ankle. As Elijah talked the expression of her oval, oriental face changed like the play of wind on a meadow.
"When we come with the cattle I will build you a house like the white man's," he was saying. "Then we shall be married like white people. I spoke to Jason Lee and he promised. And I shall never let you carry burdens; the white men never do. You shall ride always on a pony and be my klootchman [wife]."
"And take me with you everywhere?" asked Siskadee, "as Dr. Whitman does his klootchman? "
"Yes," said Elijah.
The tall rye grass, high over their horses' heads, sometimes tangled the path, and Elijah pressed on ahead, clearing the way to an opening. The autumnal sun was past midday before the girls turned back.
"I will return when the camas blooms," said Elijah, at parting.
With Indian calls, and farewells, and gypsy laughter, the maidens galloped home. The young men followed the trail, east of the Cascades, to Spanish California. The dreaded Klamaths, the warlike Shastas, were passed in safety. Several weeks of steady travel brought them eight hundred miles over the Sierras to Sutter's fort on the Sacramento.
Six years Elijah had been to school at the Methodist mission. He could read and write and speak the English well, better even than Ellice, the accomplished head chief of the Nez Percys.
Siskadee, daughter of Tiloukaikt, was a typical maiden of the upper Columbia fifty years ago, closely ​
2
covered, chaste, and modest. Tradition says, she wore the classic dress of deerskin down to the ankles, whitened and beaded and fringed and soft as chamois, ornamented with long, wide sleeves and a belt of haiqua.
Siskadee's mother was a cook and a basket-maker, learned in the camas-beds. "Observe, my child," she was wont to say as she shaped the biscuits of kouse for the winter bouillon, "observe how neat the deer and the antelope, how industrious the beaver and the bee, how cleanly the plumage of the bird. The dress of a Cayuse maid should shine like snow."
Siskadee was very industrious now. She had a marriage dress beaded to the value of a Worth gown. Every day she sat with her maids embroidering sheaths and moccasins and cradle wrappings. There was a basket of beads at Siskadee's side. In her bosom there were coils of fine dried sinews of deer that she pulled out one by one. She was embroidering a shot-pouch for Elijah. As she sat, a marriage procession passed, solemn and slow, bearing flambeaux of cedar to a spotless new tent. She heard them sing praises of the bridegroom's valor against the Blackfeet.
She thought, "So it will be when Elijah comes.'She heard the exhortation to the bride, " Be chaste, industrious, obedient, silent." Siskadee's shapely head drooped lower at her work. The copper fingers flew over the beaded shot-pouch. Poolalik, the little gray hare, hid under the sage. The wild hen cackled and scratched in the sand.
Over in the mission fields Dr. Whitman, in slouch hat, buckskin trousers and moccasins, was wielding the cradle.
"No Indian is yet able to use the cradle," said D ​r.
Whitman. "I must do that myself, except as a white man helps me."
The Indians followed behind him, raking, binding, and bearing the shocks to the threshing yard. Crowds of Indians were trying to help. He could not keep them from working. They drove their ponies into the railfenced enclosure to trample out the wheat. They gathered up the grain, and women and girls with willow fans winnowed away the chaff. It was slow work, but Indians have infinite patience. A smart breeze comes down the Columbia after dark. All night the Indians stood there, pouring and repouring the yellow grains, winnowing in the wind. At last the wheat was in the granary. Every night Dr. Whitman paid them, shirts, ammunition, fish-hooks. The women wanted needles, thimbles, rings, beads. Some in the yard were sawing and splitting wood, pine and cedar logs that they had helped the doctor raft down from the mountains when the river was high. The women carried great arm-loads and piled them in the wood-house. That meant more needles and needles from Dr. Whitman.
Then came the corn-gathering.
"Hold up your hands," said Dr. Whitman; "count ten fingers. Now, for every ten bushels you husk and bring to the house I will give you one."
Then the corn-gathering began. It was done in one day. It would have been one day had there been ten times as much, such multitudes of men, women, and children flocked into the fields to pick and husk. Every lodge-pole along the Walla Walla was hung with ears of yellow corn.
Once the Walla Walla-Cayuses talked only of war; now they talked of corn and cattle. Once the squaws
19 ​
2QO McLOUGHLIN AND OLD OREGON
dug kouse and camas. Now they began to neglect the camas-beds to hoe in their little gardens of pumpkins and potatoes and corn and carrots.
"Thank the Lord, my farm-work is done for this year," said Dr. Whitman. "My Indian trade-goods are about used up."
"I wish we could get rid of this soul-belittling, pietykilling farm-work and give our whole time to teaching and preaching," said Spalding, riding over the hills from Lapwai.
u Brother, brother," said the doctor, "'t is a part of our work. Agriculture and the gospel go hand in hand. Christianize an Indian, give him a home and a farm, and he has too much at stake to go to war with the whites."
"Yes, yes, yes," said Spalding. "You have said that before. They must have hoes and homes. We cannot teach them on the wing. I passed the cabin of Five Crows to-day. He has it complete, with floor and fireplace and doors and windows, but he can't live in it. He says it is too close, and has set up his old lodge. There they stand, the cabin and teepee side by side."
"That Indian desires civilization more than any other I ever knew," said Dr. Whitman. "He is insane now on the subject of a white wife. He thinks it would help him to become like white men."
"I know; he has talked with Mrs. Spalding about it. Three winters now he has driven his herds to the Clearwater and come with Chief Joseph to school. Both of them have made remarkable progress; they read and write with considerable fluency. Why did n't Five Crows accompany Elijah to California?"
"Mrs. Whitman thinks he stayed to meet the immigrants. Every few days he goes out to meet them, and ​
tries to buy a white wife. And he would treat her well, too. He is a kind-hearted and wealthy Indian, the richest Indian in this country."
"Yes, but "and they both laughed at this hallucination on the part of Five Crows, head chief of the Cayuse nation.
"How are your congregations, Doctor? "
"Two hundred to four hundred in spring and fall, about fifty when the young men are gone to hunt buffalo. And you?"
"Better than ever. Not less than two thousand have gathered for instruction at Lapwai. Eighty to one hundred families have planted gardens. The outward forms of Christianity, prayer and singing, are observed in almost every lodge."
"You have the most promising field in Oregon, Brother Spalding. Your Nez Perec's are more docile than my mettlesome Cayuses. These are like spirited race-horses, hard on the bit, sometimes. But I know you have trials as well as I."
"Trials? "echoed Mr. Spalding. "I think so. The Indian's never-to-be-satisfied desire for property is one. He thinks the white man's stock of goods is inexhaustible. That comes of this pernicious present system. Give an Indian an egg and he wants an ox. They seem to feel that all whites are in debt to every Indian. But regular pay for regular work will develop self-reliance."
"Yes; we must throw the Indian on his own resources," said the doctor; "make a white man of him. That will cure this childish habit of expecting presents."
"But even after I have given them presents and presents, they expect pay for every little thing they do," said Spalding. "They even expect pay for the ​
2
water, earth, and air. They even wanted pay for the stones I brought down the mountain for my mill."
"Very likely. Dr. McLoughlin once told me of a similar case. He was ballasting the barque ' Columbia for a trip to the Islands. A chief stepped up and demanded pay for the stones they were lading. The tribe looked on. With quick wit the old doctor grabbed up a stone and chucked it into the chiefs mouth. * Pay! pay! ' he roared, ' here, eat this.' The chief backed out amid the jeers of his people. Dr. McLoughlin has established the precedent that what they cannot eat or wear he does not propose to pay for. Remember, Brother Spalding, we would have trials even in teaching white children; Indians are only children, but they desire civilization and we cannot let this noble disposition expend itself in fruitless effort." Thus comforting and encouraging one another the missionaries entered the house where Mrs. Whitman sat instructing a class of bright little Indian girls, and every one had a rag dolly.
"Ha! ha! "laughed the gentlemen, "ha! ha! "
"Well/' expostulated Mrs. Whitman, "I was tired of seeing them carry sticks around on their backs for babies. Would n't mother wonder what looking objects Narcissa could make?" holding one up with a laugh. " No matter how they look. So long as it is a piece of cloth rolled up, with eyes, nose, and mouth marked with a pen, it answers every purpose. They caress and carry them around at a great rate."
Siskadee, with her beads, at the lodge door, saw the missionaries walking across the plain, but she only thought of Elijah; thought of him when as a child he wagered gravel-stones that he could shoot the little gray hare; thought of that day when he played he was ​a wolf with the wolf's hide on and ears erect; thought of that day when he sat on the hillside and calmly watched a wounded bear tear up the sod around him.
"No young brave so brave as Elijah,' she said to herself. ​
XXXIV
AT SUTTEES FORT 1844
"r I ^HESE are my friends, the chiefs of eastern A Oregon," said Captain Sutter, taking the hands of his red guests. "I have invited them down to trade in cattle."
The packhorses were driven into the fort and the beautiful peltries unrolled. The spotted Cayuse racers tried their gait on the green. The long-horned Spanish cattle were inspected, and the trade consummated to the satisfaction of all concerned. Elijah, the head and soul of the whole enterprise, was jubilant. In the soft autumn twilight Sutter's Indian boys bound fillets of leaves about their heads, and danced and sang in the soft-flowing vocals of the South. A schooner lay in the river, ready to proceed to the Columbia for a cargo of supplies. The moon rose over the Sierras, and red men and white slept in peace at Sutter's fort.
California was still in its primeval beauty. The inroads of Spanish civilization scarce scratched her vast savannas. Whole valleys and mountain flanks and forests were sacred to the Indian, the beaver, and the elk. "Let us hunt in the mountains and get more peltries," said Elijah, as they arose, refreshed from slumber. The woods were alive with game that the lazy Spaniards disdained the trouble of hunting. Their chase was with the lasso among their own herds. ​
AT SUITER'S FORT 295
The Oregon Indians rode to the hunt. Back in the mountain fastnesses they fell upon a band of Indian robbers, renegades, who swooped into the valleys, corralled herds of horses, and, under cover of the hills, retreated to some hidden pocket of streams and pastures. The suspicious banditti, anticipating pursuit from their recent raid, fired upon the Walla WallaCayuses. A sharp skirmish ensued, in which the mountain free-booters were worsted, and the victorious Walla Wallas galloped back to Sutter's fort, driving before them twenty-two head of captured horses.
"Ah, there are our horses," said the men at Sutter's fort, coming out to claim each one his property.
"No, no," remonstrated Elijah at this peremptory proceeding. "We took these horses in battle. By the laws of war they are ours."
"No," cried the white men, "they were stolen from us. You must give them up." Yellow Serpent sat on his horse. Elijah had dismounted.
"In our country," said Elijah, "six nations are on terms of friendship. If any one of these six nations steals a horse, the tribe is responsible. But if our enemies, the Crows or the Blackfeet, steal a horse, it is lost beyond recovery. Now at the risk of our lives we have taken these horses from your enemies. By the laws of war they belong to us."
At that moment an American, seeing his mule in the band, sang out, "There is my mule, and I shall have it."
"Will you? "said Elijah, glancing at a tree and passing into the lodge pitched close at hand. He came out in a moment with a loaded rifle. "Go now and take your mule," he said.
2 ​
"I hope you are not going to kill me," quavered the American.
"You? No. I am going to shoot the eagle perched on yonder oak."
The American looked at the bird, and the unerring shot, and retired to the fort.
The next day was Sabbath. Captain Sutter invited the Indians up to the fort to church. After the service, Elijah and his uncle, Tauitau, were invited into another apartment. The American of yesterday began to berate them.
"You hounds, you dogs, you thieves of the upper country! I heard of you on the Willamette. Yesterday you were going to kill me. Now you must die." Drawing his pistol he aimed at Elijah.
"Let me pray a little first," said Elijah, falling on his knees.
"Dare you, an Indian, presume to preach to me? Take that and that." With a quick jerk the American shot the kneeling boy through the heart.
A look of horror passed from face to face as the kneeling form fell back with prayer upon its lips. Blood gushed from the nose, one convulsive sigh, and the lad was dead.
Sudden terror seized the white men, lest the Indians should attack them. The death-wail had hardly sounded when the Indians turned to flee before the guns of the frightened inmates of the fort. One wicked desperado had put them all in peril. The Indians leaped to their horses. One, only, lingered a moment, and covered the face of the dead with a blanket.
"Boom! boom! "went the cannon of Sutter's fort tearing away the tree-tops above the heads of the fugitive red men. Tents, provisions, and the purchased ​
AT SUITER'S FORT 297
cattle were left, as they fled before the pursuers sent out by Captain Sutter. Six weeks later, worn and torn and bent with rage and grief, Pio-pio-mox-mox reached his lodge on the winding banks of the Walla Walla. Riderless beside him galloped Elijah's horse. Siskadee came out, and put her arms around the good steed's neck and whispered in his yellow mane. The shot-pouch was done. She handed it to Yellow Serpent and said nothing. But the warriors heard her wail on the hills at sunset, and they heard the wail of Elijah's mother, sister of the great sachems of the Cayuse nation.
A raging fire burned in the tribes on the upper Columbia. Never the death of an Indian had created such an uproar; the six allied nations had lost an idol. Apprehensive of danger, Chief Trader McKinley strengthened Fort Walla Walla and loaded his cannon with nails and grapeshot. Dr. Whitman wrote a friendly letter to Ellice, head chief of the Nez Perec's, and another to the Willamette.
"Our Indians are enraged on account of the treacherous and violent death of their educated and accomplished young chief Elijah, and also on account of their own great hardships and losses. Disaffected scamps, late from the Willamette to California, calling them dogs and thieves, have made the Indians think they have been slandered by your settlements."
The six nations, the Walla Wallas, Cayuses, Nez Perces, Spokanes, Pend d'Oreilles, and Snakes met together in council.
Seven hundred Walla Wallas stood ready to march on the Willamette, but were stopped by Tauitau.
"No," said Tauitau, going before their horses and waving them back. "The Willamette whites were our young chief's best friends. They are not to blame."
2 ​
"Let us raise two thousand warriors, invade California, and sweep the coast/' said Spokane Garry.
"Let us send Ellice down to see if the Oregon whites will interfere," said the Nez Perce Chief Joseph.
"The Americans are responsible. An American killed Elijah. Let us cut off the Americans," cried the Snakes.
"Blood for blood. A chief for a chief. Let us take Dr. Whitman," hissed the Cayuse Tamahas.
All looked toward Yellow Serpent. Afar off, strange, and mournful sounded the old chief's words.
"Dr. Whitman is our friend. Let him not be injured. My voice is as the voice of a pine-tree full of snow. I say no more."
At that moment, leaping from their fleet horses, Dr. Whitman, Mr. Spalding, and Chief Trader McKinley walked into the dimly lighted council lodge. For a moment there was tumult, but the three white men stood firm and fearless.
"What has the Great Medicine to say?" inquired Yellow Serpent, looking at Dr. Whitman. The doctor stepped forward and the Indians all craned their necks to listen.
"Chief, you have lost your noble son. We all mourn with you. I hear you want me to go away. When I came among you, you had no farms, no gardens. I have taught you to read and to work, and to live like white folks. Now I can go. I am getting old. You must tell me at once. If a majority wish me to leave I will go in three weeks' time. If you want me to stay, say so. I cannot change when I am old."
"Go! go! "cried Tamahas.
"Go! go! "brayed Tiloukaikt, in that voice like a brazen trumpet. But the other chiefs bade them be silent. ​
AT SUITER'S FORT 299
Dr. Whitman arose and went out of the lodge, Chief Trader McKinley talked to the Indians. Mr. Spalding talked. The chiefs talked. The auditors evinced their attention by now and then a pithy and sympathizing, "Ugh-ugh! "like their Amen after prayer. Then Yellow Serpent sent for Dr. Whitman.
A strange pallor, blent with wonderful resolution, seemed fixed upon the almost haughty face that reentered the council lodge. So we might imagine John Knox stood, or Luther went to the Diet at Worms. The doctor seemed to expect a sentence of banishment. To his surprise old Yellow Serpent himself advanced to meet him and took his hand.
"My brother," he said in Nez Perce", "we have decided that you must stay. When you came we had no ploughs, no hoes, no axes, not anything to work with. Now we have all these. We used to be hungry every winter. We used to have only the camas. Now we have cattle, corn, potatoes, beans, peas, wheat. Now we are no more hungry. We want you to stay and live with us always."
"Stay, stay, stay," cried the fickle Cayuses.
"Stay, stay," echoed the Walla Wallas.
Tiloukaikt brought the long-stemmed pipe of peace. Yellow Serpent placed a live coal on the tobacco, puffed it, and passed it to Dr. Whitman.
"I admit there is danger," said Dr. Whitman to his friends that night, "but I am become accustomed to danger. I should not feel to stay among the Indians in itself considered, but as we are here now I do not see how we can leave without exposing the cause of religion to reproach and repulse. There are so many things involved in our situation in this country, that I do not see that we should be discontented. I feel that vast ​results have followed us. To leave would be wrong indeed, for now, we must, as far as may be, see the end of what we have begun, both in regard to Indians and whites."
XXXV
DEATH OF JASON LEE
1845
TWELVE miles below Oregon City, in a little swale in the muffled, silent forest, a rival town was laid. A missionary hauled timber to build a church. A wandering printer set up a newspaper that he called the "Oregonian."
"The head of ship navigation, the outlet of a fertile valley, must become a metropolis," said the far-seeing Pettygrove, a Yankee merchant who had brought a cargo around the Horn from Portland, Maine. "And what shall we call our metropolis?" said Pettygrove to Lovejoy, the lawyer, as they laid out lots in the timber.
"Call it Boston," answered Lovejoy, the Bostonian.
"No, Portland," said the man from Maine, and the two wandering Yankees tossed up a penny for "heads or tails," and "Portland "won.
"Hah, Doctor, Hi did not suppose Hi should be hable to find you hout hof bed," cried Ermatinger, gayly landing at Fort Vancouver a few days later.
"Why so?" inquired the doctor.
"'Aven't you 'eard? Dumbarton of Big Pigeon 'as made the speech hof the epoch, ha great big-tree talk, ha real Hamerican stumper, you know."
"What was the subject?"
​"You. Hit was in regard to that contested mill-site at the Falls. Listen,"—Ermatinger rose, blew a blast on his bandana, and swelling with pomposity gave a mock recital of a spread-eagle speech he had heard the day before.
"Friends, neighbors, hand Hamerican citizens [through his nose], han hopportunity his now given through this hinsignificant controversy to settle the title hof the whole country hand to hexpel the governmental trespassers from every point and position hof its dominions. This will bring war between the Hunited States and Great Britain, Hireland will revolt, Canada will secede, the monarchs hof the Hindies will throw hoff their slavish yoke, Russia will snap hup Turkey, hand, hin short, the whole world will be revolutionized, hand the balance hof power haltered by the controversy hin relation to this little strip hof land."
Ermatinger paused from his elocutionary effort. To his surprise the doctor did not laugh; he did not even smile, but arose in a nervous way and left the room. Some time after, one of his clerks ran upon him, kneeling in his office.
"I beg your pardon," said Ermatinger, humbly, that evening; "I did not suppose you took the matter so to heart, Doctor."
"The possibility of a war is what distresses me," said the doctor.
The Provisional Government, born at Champoeg and cradled in the primitive State House at Oregon City, developed with the colony. Somebody was known to be in Washington working for a steamboat route across the Panama.
"Hah," said Ermatinger through his nose, "we shall soon be sighing for the Hindian days, the squaws hand ​skins hand savages. But there, now, Hi ham ha good Hamerican, you know," he added with a wink,—so good, indeed, that he was made Colonial Treasurer at the next election.
George Abernethy, the steward of the Methodist mission, an upright man, of smooth face and agreeable manner, became Oregon's colonial governor. On a green point overlooking the Willamette and within sound of the Falls, he built his modest mansion, with gable roof, French windows, wide porch, double parlors, and fireplaces, and the American flag floating above. The streets in Oregon City were only trails, and the new governor whitewashed the stumps that he might find his way home on dark nights through the timber. Here his apple-cheeked wife gave parties in the hospitable days of early Oregon.
The governor's house was on the very spot where old Canemah once shaped his arrow-points. One night Waskema came back. There stood the governor's residence, with its pillared porch and windows of glass. She went around to a favorite Balm-of-Gilead that clapped its silver leaves in the summer night. The white chief had dug him a well, throwing out the sand on countless clippings and fragments of imperfect arrow-heads. Like a lover who looks for a lock of his mistress's hair where he dropped it long ago, so old Waskema had been wont to return to gather broken chips from the arrow-maker's shop; but now they were covered, mixed with the sands, and the brick-walled well seemed not deeper than the grave in her heart. She clutched her hands and looked up at the windows. There were lights in the governor's windows she drew near and saw the ruddy glow of the fire lighting up the fair faces of white boys and girls. Even so in the long ​
3 04 McLOUGHLIN AND OLD OREGON
ago the red men's children met in social converse on the selfsame spot. She pressed her withered face too near the glass.
"Ugh," shuddered the flaxen-haired daughter of the host, "there 's a horrible old Indian woman peeking in at the window."
Frightened glances turned that way, but the face was gone.
"She was here, just this minute. I saw her," said the girl, going out on the porch to look, followed by her companions; but nothing could be seen.
"Never mind. Twas only an old squaw. Let's play that game again," cried the merry-hearts.
Old Waskema had retreated to a rock in the governor's garden. By dint of some digging and some pushing she turned it over. Beneath, in a little cache, lay a bunch of obsidian knives, some strings of copper beads, and a handful of haiqua shells. Gathering up the rusting treasures, Waskema stole away. The next day Governor Abernethy wondered who had been digging at the stone in his garden.
The Methodist mission had not prospered. In fact, while Jason Lee was lecturing in the States, unforeseen influences had been at work in the valley. The most casual observer had noted the frightful growth of the mission graveyard. It may have been scrofulous inheritance, it may have been the sudden caging of these wild birds the Indian children perished like leaves of the forest. Jason Lee in distress had taken some favorite pupils to Fort Vancouver for treatment in vain. At this juncture some ran away; the rest were withdrawn by their superstitious parents. The history of Indian schools at Dartmouth and Hamilton repeated ​
itself here the Indian mission on the Willamette, the centre of so many hopes and prayers, became the seat of an embryo university re-dedicated to the numerous children of incoming whites.
In the midst of this toil and endeavor Jason Lee stood again at the threshold of his bridal chamber; a second wife lay dead, with an infant in her arms but the infant lived.
"' Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him/ "said the anguished missionary as he looked on the cold, white lips of his second love.
He crossed to the Sandwich Islands with the precious, flickering little life so strangely left in his hands; then came another blow, he had been superseded in the superintendency of the Oregon missions.
The waxen face of his child was flushed now with health. Turning, he laid the daintily draped morsel of pink and white in the arms of one who had received her from the bed of death.
"Take her back to Oregon," he said, "and keep her till I return." Then he sailed for Mazatlan, and struck across Mexico for the United States.
They knew he was collecting funds for the projected university that lay so near his heart, they knew that consumption had fixed its fangs upon his giant frame; still he wrote from his old home of the gray gables at Stanstead:
"Wait, brethren, and watch, some day you may see me threading my way up the Willamette in a canoe, as I used to do; "but the hand that penned it fell nerveless, the noble eyes closed in death. With the winged sail came the parting prayer for the little Lucy Anna,
"Brethren, under God I must hold you responsible to train that child for heaven."
20 ​
3 o6 McLOUGHLIN AND OLD OREGON
Jason Lee's body rests where he played when a boy on the shores of one of the beautiful lakes of Lower Canada, and in coming years that motherless waif, the little Lucy Anna, became the first preceptress of Willamette University. Love, life, hope, youth, all were given to Oregon. Who shall say the light has failed? ​
XXXVI
THE BEAR FLAG AT SONOMA 1846
LIFE glided smoothly with the hospitable, lighthearted Spaniards of California, but not so smoothly at the Hudson's Bay trading-house at Yerba Buena. There were pleasant guests; Vallejo came often, and Don Salvador. The fierce, fat little commandant came up from his ruinous Presidio; the Alcalde came, and the padres, who wandered now like vagrants in the land they used to rule. Yerba Buena was a great resort for trappers and Englishmen for trade and supplies. La Framboise camped near in winter, and the servants of the Hudson's Bay Company constituted almost the entire population of the place.
From the very beginning there was trouble with the Yankee ships from New York and Boston. Some of the unavailing anguish of Wyeth on the Columbia came to Rae as he saw the Yankee clippers sailing from port to port, vending their wares and carrying off great cargoes of hides and wheat and tallow. Sometimes weeks would elapse without a single fanega of wheat or arroba of tallow at the Hudson's Bay house. It made Rae desperate. Once he said to a Yankee captain that spread his wares on the very threshold of Yerba Buena: "It has cost the Hudson's Bay Company ^"75,000 to drive the Americans from the Northwest trade in furs, and they will drive you Yankees from California if it costs a million." ​
3 o8 McLOUGHLIN AND OLD OREGON
The Yankee only laughed, and put up his calico to ten dollars a yard and hauled in the wheat. and tallow.
And the careless Spaniards went on singing and dancing, horse-racing and gambling everybody gambled in Spanish California.
There was a new governor in California. A new governor in a Spanish- American State generally means a revolution.
"This new governor, Micheltorena, is partial to the Americans," said the Spanish Californians.
"His course is a menace to English interests," said Rae.
The Spaniards hated the Americans as much as Rae did. They often gathered at Yerba Buena to talk the matter over.
"We must depose him," said the Spaniards.
"We must fight them to the death," said Rae.
So the insurgents came to Yerba Buena for arms and ammunition. But the insurgents lost, and Rae lost.
"Curse it all! why did I let them have the arms and ammunition without a cent to show?" cried Rae, despairing. "And how shall I answer for mixing in this Spanish trouble?"
The proud chief trader groaned. He had done the best he could for his company, but the best he could would not avail. Already Sir George had sent recommends to shut up the house at Yerba Buena as a profitless venture. But Dr. McLoughlin held firm. And to disappoint the doctor now
"What if the Hudson's Bay Company is driven out of California? Am I to blame, with all these rival Yankees like the swarming rats of Hamelin nibbling on every side? "The servants heard a shot in Rae's room. ​
Eloise saw her husband fall with the smoking weapon in his hand, then she fainted.
When Eloise opened her eyes again she lay on a couch in a darkened room. Through the lattice she saw Don Salvador leap to his saddle, cutting his horse with the long and rusty rowels of his spurs. She heard the hurried voices of Spaniards, forgetting somewhat the customary stately and measured tone. She heard the voices of women skipping from consonant to consonant. She knew La Framboise had come over from the camp* Then all was dark again.
Again it seemed like morning. Through the lattice Eloise saw the Spanish dames go by to mass, with their high combs, necklaces, and earrings hidden under the "beautiful and mysterious mantilla." There was a sound of marching, and she knew it was the funeral.
La Framboise's brigade bore sad tidings up the Willamette to Fort Vancouver. David and Dugald McTavish came down in the little "Cadboro'." The business was closed, and the Hudson's Bay house was sold for a song.
Eloise took a last look at the Spanish land. The Alcalde was chasing his herds. The senoras were sewing and singing in their verandas. The Indians were ploughing the Spanish gardens, after the fashion of old Mexico in the days of Cortez.
The fierce, fat little commandant peeped out of the tile-roofed Presidio as the schooner sailed through the Golden Gate.
With the fading of Mendocino, the fandangoes, boleros, and barcaroles of old Spain faded from the life of Eloise McLoughlin, but not the face of him who was buried in the little graveyard at Yerba Buena, it lived again in her infant child. ​
3 io McLOUGHLIN AND OLD OREGON
Already immigrants on the overland route had rendezvoused at Sutter's fort. Strange rumors were current there
"The Mexicans are negotiating with England for the sale of California."
"General Castro intends to expel us from the Sacramento. He is already on the march."
They whispered with Fremont.
Scarcely had the little "Cadboro' "disappeared through the Golden Gate that day in June of 1846, when General Vallejo was captured at daylight in his house at Sonoma, along with nine brass cannon, two hundred stands of arms, and tons of copper shot.
"Fly! "cried the Senora, sitting up in bed in her night-robe.
It was too late to fly.
The Americans ran up the Bear Flag, and with Fremont's cognizance took General Vallejo and Don Salvador prisoners to Sutter's fort on the Sacramento. Vallejo did not resist. Long since he had seen that a change must come, and he favored the United States. He quietly gave up the keys, and in succeeding actions a thousand of Vallejo's best horses went under the saddles of American riflemen.
For twenty days California was a republic, then Captain Montgomery, by order of Commodore Sloat, raised the stars and stripes on the plaza at Yerba Buena. A flag was sent to Fremont, camping on the Sacramento, and was raised over Sutter's fort.
Hark! Who is this winding along the trail to California? It is Pio-pio-mox-mox, going to avenge the murder of Elijah. Warlike Walla Wallas and dark frowning Cayuses on their swift steeds bending to avoid the boughs of semi-tropic forests are following the old ​
trail to the South. Delaware Tom is there, dressed like the rest in a robe of skins, going to avenge the death of the accomplished young chief of the Walla Wallas.
There are only forty men, but a courier flies to Sutter's fort. Breathless he passes the Indian guards
"A thousand Walla Wallas are marching from Oregon to avenge the death of their young chief."
The guests leap from their wine-bowls. Artillery is primed and mounted. Runners gallop to Sonoma for reinforcements. Word even reaches Monterey. Commodore Stockton hastens to San Francisco, and preparations for defence are hurried to the North.
Meanwhile, Pio-pio-mox-mox, whose numbers have been so greatly exaggerated, is defiling down the canyon with vengeance in his heart. But his eyes are open. He hears for the first time that the old regime is over, that Sutter is out of power, and the Americans rule on the Sacramento.
"Then if the Bostons rule, to the Bostons will I present my claim for justice," said the indomitable old chief of the Walla Wallas.
Colonel Fremont met him in council, and promised redress. Under this persuasion the Walla Walla chief and his followers enlisted under Fremont's banner, and Delaware Tom, valued for his fluent use of English, became a trusted bearer of despatches and a member of Fremont's body-guard.
General Castro retreated to the South. Fremont followed on his trail and marched into Monterey.
The anxious Spaniards beheld a cloud of dust roll up beyond the city. From behind their grated windows the timid women beheld the long line of mounted Americans advancing up the street with Fremont at ​
3
their head, shaking the ground with the tread of conquest. Nothing escaped the fierce eye of that wiry leader in blouse and leggings and Spanish sombrero. Around him closed his Delaware guard. Nothing escaped the eye of his wild followers, two and two abreast, with rifles cocked on the pommel of their saddles.
The Spaniards love a spectacle. Here was power. As they watched the stern-featured horsemen with sinewy limbs and untrimmed locks flowing under their foraging caps, as they caught the gleam of pistols and the glitter of knives, a thrill shook the throng, then arose a faint, "Viva! vivan los Americanos! "
The latest governor, Don Pio Pico, fled by night from his capital at Los Angeles and escaped to Mexico with his secretary. Tradition says they carried away and buried the government archives.
The next January the Alcalde sent forth his pronunciamento changing the name of Yerba Buena to San Francisco.
Had Rae but lived he might have ruled the richest post under Hudson's Bay control. As it was, he was forgotten by all but the Spanish nobles.
XXXVII ​
"FIFTY-FOUR FORTY OR FIGHT" (1845-46)
THREE years had passed since Dr. McLoughlin wrote that letter for protection, and now word arrived from the Hudson's Bay house in London: "In the present state of affairs the company cannot obtain protection from the government. You must protect yourselves in the best way you can."
Many difficulties perplexed Dr. McLoughlin as well as the Provisional Government. Outlaws from the States found their way to Oregon. One, Chapman, boasted, "I came all the way from the States for the purpose of burning Fort Vancouver."
"Such a step would precipitate war in Oregon," said the settlers. Applegate was sent privately to Dr. McLoughlin.
"We are troubled," said Applegate to the doctor. " We want to protect you, but we cannot unless the company agrees to the articles of compact. To do that you must pay taxes and comply with the laws of the Provisional Government, which promises protection only to its adherents. Otherwise you will stand alone. Restless spirits from the States will consider you lawful prey. You need to join us. It is for your own interest."
"But how can I?" insisted the doctor. "I am a British subject, and this is British property." ​
3 14 McLOUGHLIN AND OLD OREGON
"We have altered the form of oath to meet that very point," said Applegate. "Now the compact reads ' to support the Provisional Government so far as is consistent with our duties as citizens of the United States or subjects of Great Britain.' That lets you in, you see, without interfering with your allegiance."
The doctor sat with his head on his hand, thinking. Now and then he tossed back the white locks that fell around his face.
Applegate went on: "You see, Dr. McLoughlin, it will secure the property of the company. And it will conduce to the maintenance of peace and order to have it known to the American people that the two nationalities are united in Oregon. There will be a large immigration again this fall, and you may depend upon it there will be many to annoy you."
"I realize that, I realize that," said the doctor, despairingly. "Let me call in Douglas. He has a level head."
Douglas came in, tall, dark, and formal. He did not get on so easily with people as the doctor did, and especially these Americans he held at arm's length. But if he unbent to anybody it was to the cultured Applegate, the "Sage of Yoncalla." Again the whole subject was canvassed.
"Our taxes, if assessed at their real value, would outweigh all your colony," said Douglas.
"Of course you would tax only our sales to your settlers? "suggested the doctor.
"That is fair," said Applegate.
"Very well, then, we will join you," said the doctor and Douglas after some consideration.
Mr. Applegate returned to Oregon City and put the measure through with a rush. Dr. McLoughlin and ​
"FIFTY-FOUR FORTY OR FIGHT" 315
James Douglas signed the articles and became members of Oregon's Provisional Government.
"I don't see that we could do anything else," said the doctor, snuff-box in hand, a few days later. "I am glad the suspense is over, James. If we must live with these Americans we must live in peace."
"Yes," agreed Douglas. "The property is safe now. The fact that England paid no attention to your appeal for protection justifies the step we have taken."
"I am glad they elected you Judge of this Vancouver district," added the doctor. "That was handsomely done."
Just then the gate-keeper stuck his head in at the door.
"Eh, what, Bruce? "said the doctor, rising. "Ogden back from England, and strangers, did you say? "
Dr. McLoughlin turned and met face to face the scarlet coats and gold lace of two English officers advancing up the steps.
"Lieutenant William Peel, son of Sir Robert Peel, Prime Minister of England," said Peter Skeen Ogden, advancing and introducing the taller one, a fine young fellow, well bronzed, who advanced to meet the doctor.
With quite colorless face Dr. McLoughlin shook hands with the Premier's proxy so suddenly set down on the Columbia.
"Captain Parke of the Royal Marines," turning to the other.
Captain Parke handed Dr. McLoughlin a pack of credentials.
The doctor's color rose as he broke the royal seal and read.
"What! What! What! Brother of the Earl of Aberdeen here with a fleet to protect us?" ​
3
Douglas gave an involuntary start. "Protection! Now! "
"Gentlemen, where are your ships? "inquired the doctor.
"Anchored in Puget Sound. There are fifteen warships on the coast, carrying four hundred guns," answered Lieutenant Peel.
Dr. McLoughlin's face was a study.
"Where is your ship? How did you get here? "
"Overland by way of the Cowlitz. The ' Modeste is entering the Columbia with twenty guns. Do you think that will be sufficient? She will soon be here."
"Sufficient? I should think so!" ejaculated the doctor.
With the intuitive grasp of situation for which he was noted, Dr. McLoughlin provided for his distinguished guests, thinking mightily all the time.
"The devil 's to pay now," he whispered aside to Douglas. "What have they come for? If they had only arrived six weeks sooner I should n't have signed the compact. Now we have recognized the Provisional Government the ships are not needed. Indeed, they are likely to stir up a d 1 of a row by rousing the suspicions of the Americans."
"'Tis well to have them here till we try the temper of the next immigration," said Douglas, to soothe the spirits of his chief.
"Don't you think we can bring troops overland from Canada?" inquired one of the officers, as Dr. McLoughlin re-entered the room. "If it comes to blows we will hit these Americans a good deal harder than we would other people."
"Oh, Captain Parke! Oh, Captain Parke! "ejaculated the distressed doctor. "The country is not worth a war." ​
"FIFTY-FOUR FORTY OR FIGHT" 317
"Then what are the Americans coming here for? Just speak the word and we'll give them a hint that'll take the carts all off the wheels from here to the Rocky Mountains."
"That would be savage! "said the doctor.
Peel set his lips. "The United States is not going to euchre us out of Oregon. My father has said in Parliament, ' England knows her rights and dares maintain them/ and she will."
"The claim of the United States to this coast is absurd," said Lieutenant Peel. "Captain Gray was only a private speculating trader, dodging along this coast bartering for furs. He only went twelve miles up the river, he did not explore it; and as for taking possession the poor coaster never thought of such a thing. Vancouver explored a hundred miles. We have as good a right to this river as to the Thames or the Humber."
"Why, of course," laughed Parke. "The Columbia has always belonged to us. This American talk is mere bravado, like the so-called * Patriot War ' of Canada some noise and a good deal of smoke."
A sip of wine had warmed the guests, and all laughed merrily.
That Patriot War of Canada (1838) touched a tender spot in McLoughlin's heart.
"The effort of an oppressed people to free themselves is not a proper subject for merriment," he said.
"Whatever comes to pass," remarked Douglas, "these whittling Yankees talking politics are here, and more are coming. I hear that one of them is in Washington now, trying to get a steamboat route by the way of Panama."
"So? Next they'll be talking of a railroad right over the top of the Rocky Mountains! " ​
3 18 McLOUGHLIN AND OLD OREGON
At this another "ha! ha! "went round the table.
"Enemies need bayonets," said Captain Parke, as they rose from their wine- cups.
"But, my dear fellow, these are not enemies," insisted Dr. McLoughlin. "They are simply settlers, quiet, peaceable, industrious."
"And like their fellow-countrymen always smoking and chewing and spitting, eh, doctor? I 'd rather meet a grizzly than a settler."
That night Dr. McLoughlin wrote a letter to some one high in British authority, pleading against war. Somewhere, still, that letter may lie in English archives.
At the instance of the officers additional guns were mounted. The night-watch was doubled. The hourly " All is well "sounded like a cry of danger.
For eighteen months Her Majesty's warship " Modeste "lay like a policeman in the river. Five hundred men, sailors and marines, performed their daily evolutions on the green esplanade in front of the fort. A barrel of silver dollars dealt out for their pay was the first money ever seen in Oregon. Before that, barter ruled in skins and wheat.
The red-coats, running over the country with their glittering arms, might have made trouble had not Dr. McLoughlin kept up a constant counsel of peace.
"Whatever we do here will make no difference with the final outcome of the question," he kept saying. " It is better for us to keep on good terms with the settlers. These inoffensive, peaceable people are not the ones to fight."
Nevertheless the colonists had their fears.
"They'll turn the Indians loose upon us yet. I Ve seen their blacksmiths working all winter. They say they 're making axes for the trappers. No such thing; ​
"FIFTY-FOUR FORTY OR FIGHT" 319
they 're tomahawks, and you'll see 'em arming Indians, as they did in 1812. Down at Astoria, Birnie digs day after day don't tell me it 's a garden. I know better. There 's cannon buried down there at Tongue Point, and one of these days you'll hear 'em booming."
Douglas went over to Nisqually and found the warships burnishing their guns in Puget Sound.
"Ah," said the officers, as Douglas dined on shipboard. " If we could only be sent to the Columbia we 'd take the whole country in twenty-four hours."
That Oregon question had become the battle-cry of a presidential contest
"Fifty-four forty or fight."
"All of Oregon up to Alaska or war."
America listened for the drum-beat.
"A ' small meal ' will be made of the troops of the ' free and enlightened,' "said an editor on the St. Lawrence.
"The crows will soon be picking out their eyes," said an Indian chief on the northern border.
With clear vision Dr. McLoughlin saw the inflamed public of both countries. More than once he was discovered on his knees, praying that he might keep the people quiet in the disputed territory.
"I saw blood flow in 1812," he said to the son of England's premier, "I stanched the wounds of comrades at Sault Ste. Marie. As one born on the continent of America I feel that no foreign power has the right to fling her peoples into conflict. Suppose you take a ride up the valley and get acquainted with the people."
Well mounted on the best Vancouver horses, Parke and Peel went dashing up the Willamette.
It was harvest-time. Men dressed in buckskin ​
3
trousers, "hickory "shirts, and moccasins, were cutting wheat with the reap-hook. Settlers jogged along in rude carts ironed with rawhide, hauling their deerskin sacks full of grain to the river, where it was heaped on great bateaux, big as the hull of a steamer, and paddled down to Fort Vancouver, to exchange for "black strap " molasses, dirty Hawaiian sugar, and ready-made clothing. That clothing was all of one size, made in England; said to have been cut to the measure of Dr. McLoughlin. The thrifty immigrant wives clipped off the hickory shirts that came down to the feet and over the hands and were thankful for the patches. There were no old chests from which to resurrect cloaks and dresses; the American stock was soon exhausted, and the Hudson's Bay store, not contemplating such expansion, had none to sell. Old coats were threadbare, old tent covers worn out. Members of the legislature canvassed their brethren for a coat to wear in public. The singing-master met his classes in a suit of buckskin.
"You must get looms," said Dr. McLoughlin. Two immigrants set out for the States for flocks of sheep.
Everywhere Parke and Peel were met with rude but unstinted hospitality. Men who had marked the trail to Oregon with their blood, slaughtered for them the fatted bullock and sat down to dine in their shirt-sleeves. Women ground the grain for cakes in the coffee-mill and baked it in a Dutch oven set among the coals. Brisk housewives brushed up their hearths with hazel brooms, set the table with tin cups and plates, and seated the guests in the best old-fashioned cane-bottomed hickory rocker that had banged its way across the plains.
Every picturesque feature of New England, Ohio, ​
"FIFTY-FOUR FORTY OR FIGHT" 321
Missouri pioneering was repeated here. To Parke and Peel it was a revelation. Never before had they seen a people whose handbook of history was the migrations of their ancestors, whose ideal statesman was George Washington, whose model parent was Uncle Sam, Daniel Boone the chief hero, and the American eagle the favorite bird. With great good humor they heard the tales around the fires and slept at night in the cabin lofts.
"Tell me how you crossed the plains," said Peel at the house of Applegate. He told the story of 1843.
"Such men would make the finest soldiers in the world," said Peel and Parke as they went riding on.
"How do you like the country?" asked a hornyhanded pioneer.
"It is certainly the most beautiful country in the natural state that I ever saw," said Peel.
"Will England try to hold it? "
"Not against the wishes of its people," answered the nobleman.
Before Parke and Peel returned from their trip up the valley the autumn immigration came pouring in with " 54 40' or fight "blazed on their wagon covers. To eager inquiries, "Yes, that is the party cry, and Polk is elected."
Parke and Peel looked on amazed as three thousand dust-begrimed pilgrims came toiling in to stake out their claims on the Indian lands. Never before had they seen the building of a State. "Hopelessly Americanized! hopelessly Americanized! "was their frequent comment as the long line of occupation took up the country. "Ploughs are better than traps to hold a country, and farms are better than forts."
The story of 1845 has never been told, never can be
21 ​
3
told. In the face of Parke and Peel and all the British warships Dr. McLoughlin sent succor to the famishing immigrants. Far up Des Chutes they met his messengers of mercy with shouts and hallelujahs. The settlers bestirred themselves, and hurried forward pack-trains of food and horses to rescue their brethren in the mountains. There were not boats enough in the country to meet the needs of transportation, and when at Christmas all were in, the population of Oregon had been doubled.
And yet the boundary was not settled. A rumor was current at Havana that the whole British armament was sailing for the Columbia. Commodores Sloat and Stockton off the coast of California cast many a longing eye toward Oregon, but the Mexican War demanded their presence South. The Provisional Government sent the Applegates to cut a road for United States troops to enter southern Oregon.
Senator Benton said in Congress, "Let the emigrants go on and carry their rifles."
But Rufus Choate made that clarion answer: "In my judgment this notion of a national enmity of feeling towards Great Britain belongs to a past age of our history. We are born to happier feelings. We look on England as we do on France. We look on them from our new world, not unrenowned, yet a new world still, and the blood mounts to our cheeks; our eyes swim; our voices are stifled with emulousness of so much glory; their trophies will not let us sleep, but there is no hatred at all, no hatred; all for honor, nothing for hate. If you will answer for the politicians I think I will venture to answer for the people."
Webster, too, made a great peace speech that was heard on two continents. ​
"FIFTY-FOUR FORTY OR FIGHT" 323
The brother of the Earl of Aberdeen fretted on his warship in Puget Sound: "McLoughlin is right. 'Tis a beastly country, not worth a war. Nisqually plains are a bed of gravel. Curse the deer! They will not wait for me to shoot them. Curse the salmon! They will not bite with the very best flies and a patent English angling rod. I would n't give tuppence for the whole country; "and he sailed away.
Lieutenant Peel took the shortest cut to London. What he poured into the ears of his father, Sir Robert, has never been known.
Lieutenant Cushing, also, reported to his father at Washington. All at once Congress adopted conciliatory resolutions.
Said Lord Aberdeen, "I did not delay a moment, but putting aside all ideas of diplomatic etiquette I made a proposition of settlement that was immediately accepted by Congress."
With joyful countenance Sir Robert Peel announced to the House of Commons, "The governments of two great nations have by moderation, by mutual compromise, averted the dreadful calamity of war."
Word reached Vancouver in the autumn of 1846 by way of the Sandwich Islands. Douglas immediately sent the news to Governor Abernethy. The settlers fired their anvils, the bluffs flung back the jubilee. Canadians and Americans rejoiced together. "Now Congress will take us under her wing," was the joyful cry. "Now we shall have territorial rights. Now they will recognize the acts of our Provisional Government. Until then how can we be sure that we own a farm or that any transaction that we have made will stand in law?"
Then for the first time the United States began to ​
3 2 4 McLOUGHLIN AND OLD OREGON
look out of her western window to the sea. But no one thought of the Indian. With news of the boundary settlement came news of the Mexican War and the occupation of California. The front of the world had changed.
But when the Oregonians learned that the line was 49 instead of 54 40' there was an outcry "A third of Oregon gone? Polk has betrayed us. Oregon reached Alaska."
And the Hudson's Bay barque sailed as usual, with a million dollars' worth of furs.
As colonial treasurer Ermatinger gained so good an insight into the strength or weakness of the little colony for no one knows on which side Ermatinger was working that just after the departure of Parke and Peel he suddenly handed in his resignation and left with the March express for England, committing his young wife to the care of Dr. McLoughlin. There may have been a political motive for the flight at that time. If so, it failed, for before he could sight the hills of Cornwall the treaty had been proclaimed, June 15, 1846.
Ermatinger visited the scenes of his English youth. Of his old friends few were left, some were dead, some were gone, and all were changed. Homesick, he set out for his old post on the Columbia. At Montreal he met Sir George Simpson "You will hereafter be stationed at Athabasca," said the autocrat of the fur trade.
"Athabasca! "gasped Ermatinger. "Good God, can't I go to Fort Vancouver for my wife? "
"You understand the terms of this service, sir." Sir George passed on as though he had brushed a caterpillar from his sleeve. ​
"FIFTY-FOUR FORTY OR FIGHT" 325
Ermatinger, the jolly Ermatinger, staggered from the door, white as a man in ague. Too well he understood " the terms of our service, sir." He felt it was a coldblooded act to separate him from his wife because of some pique at McLoughlin. Too well he knew the military system that bound any man that accepted a commission to hold himself in readiness to starve in Labrador or freeze at the north pole. But this
"Curse it! Why did I not take Catharine with me and dig like a dog in England? There, at least, the laborer has his home."
Well he knew the heart-break of that disappointed wife, well he knew the weary distance and the danger should she try to reach him. She could not even learn of the change until the November mail packet. Then the waiting till the next brigade in March, the mountains, the rapids, and a babe in arms in anguish as never before Ermatinger felt the iron of the great monopoly.
"Perhaps Sir George has no personal feeling in the matter," thought Ermatinger; "it is the factor's duty to obey, but "like a sheath-cut came the conclusion "neither I nor any one at Vancouver can ever believe it is anything less than premeditated cussedness."
Some of his comrades tried to rally him. "Don't give up the beaver so, Erma."
"Now you can amuse yourself talking Chinook with the Chippeways."
"Or joking with the Assiniboins."
But none of these sallies could rouse the sad spirit of the prostrate Ermatinger.
"Men!" exclaimed Ermatinger, bitterly. "Men are of trifling value provided he gets furs. Wives! Wives ​
3
are encumbrances; men are not expected to have them; they interfere with the company's interests, no arrangement can be made for them. The employes of the Hudson's Bay Company, gentlemen, are tools, mere implements, machines, under Sir George." ​
XXXVIII
DR. McLOUGHLIN RESIGNS 1846
THE spies' report of Dr. McLoughlin irritated the London Board. "What right has a chief factor in our employ to meet those immigrants with boatloads of supplies, to nurse their sick in our hospital, and to loan them seed and agricultural implements to open up farms on the Willamette?" Across the sea there came a call to halt, and an account was demanded of Dr. McLoughlin.
Strong in the consciousness of his own integrity the doctor answered: "Gentlemen, as a man of common humanity I could not do otherwise than to give those naked and starving people to eat and to wear of our stores. I foresaw clearly that it aided in the American settlement of the country, but this I cannot help. It is not for me, but for God, to look after and take care of the consequences. The Bible tells me, ' If thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he be naked, clothe him.These settlers are not even enemies. If the directors find fault with me they quarrel with heaven. I have simply done what any one truly worthy the name of a man could not hesitate to do. I ask you not to bear these debts; let them be my own. Let me retain the profits upon these supplies and advances made to settlers, and I will cheerfully assume all payments to the company. All that I can do honorably for my company shall be done. Beyond that I have no pledges. ​
3
Shall I leave these Americans to starve, or drive them from the country? Gentlemen, if such be your orders, I can serve you no longer."
And so, on account of assisting the immigrants, Dr. McLoughlin resigned his position at the head of the Hudson's Bay Company west of the Rocky Mountains, and thereby sacrificed a personal income of $12,000 per annum.
As sad-faced Eloise sailed home into the Columbia she saw a great concourse at Fort Vancouver. A beautiful young lady, escorted by British officers, was christening a new sloop for the infant Prince of Wales.
"Can that be little Cecelia?" said Eloise. "How quickly she has grown! How quickly I have aged! "
In widow's weeds, with an infant in her arms, the Lady of the Pacific Coast had returned to Fort Vancouver, to find her father dethroned and Douglas reigning in his stead.
Dr. McLoughlin brought to Oregon City the same spirit of enterprise that had made Fort Vancouver the metropolis of the fur-forts. He gave employment to immigrants, built the best house, built saw and grist mills, and his loud voice might be heard in the streets directing his Indian servants as they grubbed up the stumps. Many yet living remember the white-headed man in swallow-tailed coat and brass buttons waving his cane like a truncheon at the head of the Falls " A canal can be cut from this basin to the gulch beyond the bluff, and this whole canyon can smoke with factories."
A certain element, however, could never forget that Dr. McLoughlin had been at the head of a foreign monopoly, and pointed the finger with the whispered, " Aristocrat! Aristocrat! " ​
DR. McLOUGHLIN RESIGNS 329
He applied for a ferry right across the Willamette, but was denied. He applied for a canal right; as this great public improvement would cost the public nothing, the petition was granted, and McLoughlin's men cut the first race-way in the gray rock around the Falls. He wanted to build locks at his own expense and again was checked. "Give him too much power," they said.
Late one autumn evening an immigrant unyoked his oxen under the bluff beside the Falls. As they were getting supper a venerable old gentleman came to their camp-fire. Seated in the only chair they had, he made some friendly inquiries.
"Doctor," said the immigrant, "I heard before I left the States that you were intending to put locks at the Falls, but I see nothing has been done."
"Tut, tut, tut! "said the doctor, "too much jealousy of me, too much rivalry; cannot do anything."
The doctor further endeavored to push development by giving more than three hundred lots for public and private uses, lots for squares and parks, lots for churches and parsonages, to Methodists and Baptists, to Presbyterians and Catholics and Congregationalists, eight lots for a Catholic School, and eight for a Protestant Female Seminary now used by the Oregon City High School.
In a certain sense Dr. McLoughlin was a genius, with the irritabilities of genius. He saw clearly what should be done and could brook no delay in execution. A busy man himself, he wanted all busy about him. Across the river an American held a claim. "Now there 's X in his Robin's Nest up there! "the old doctor would exclaim. "Why don't he do something? No, there he lies, and lets the skunks gnaw his toes while he waits for the country to develop." ​
3
Eminently sociable, full of talk, full of detail and incident, the ex-chief factor could never be happy without a crowd around him. Despite his detractors, he made friends with all the new-comers, stopped to talk with the men that strode the streets in moccasins and leather pantaloons whipping up their black oxen, and, indeed, the old gentleman was quite a gallant in brushing up his beaver and starting out, cane in hand, to call on the ladies. His stately form might be seen in any door, always joking, running his ringers through his hair, and inquiring after the children.
McLoughlin noted the shabby hats of the early legislators. In his own genial manner he presented each with a tall white hat, "bell-crowned and peculiar." "I would see every honorable gentleman well roofed in," he said. Then he handed to each a long-stemmed pipe with ornamented bowl. "And "(says a survivor), "the majestic law-makers meandered along the riverside whiffing the calumet of peace, while jealous Americans scowled and said, * See corporate influence/ and hated McLoughlin worse than ever."
To the end he never lost his love of dress and dancing; decked in white kids and white vest, like a gentleman of the old school, he adorned the parlor of many a gay assembly. One night he knocked at an immigrant neighbor's door with a lantern in his hand. "I am going to the party," he said. "I want you to see me." Laughingly he held up the lantern from point to point, exhibiting his ruffles and carefully combed locks, his narrow-tailed coat and satin vest. "Will I do?"
"Ah, yes, you will do," said the laughing pioneer mother as the good old doctor trudged away with his lantern and a new pair of dancing-pumps under his arm. ​
DR. McLOUGHLIN RESIGNS 331
"He used to wear a long blue cloak thrown around him. To see him walking to church Sunday morning, it was really a sight," said ex-Governor Chadwick twenty-five years after, so out of keeping seemed the patriarchal figure with the modern world that was pushing in.
One of the most beautiful characteristics of the now famous doctor was his life-long devotion to Margaret, his wife of the old fur-hunting days. "He treated her like a princess," says a missionary of that day. "In public and in private he was as loyal to her as if she had been a daughter of Victoria. His gallantry to her knew no bounds."
It was well understood that a slight to the Madame was a slight to the doctor. When the "Modeste "was at Vancouver the people of the fort gave the officers a picnic. On their return the doctor perceived his wife walking alone, carrying a heavy basket. Turning to an officer, "Tut, tut, tut! What do you mean by letting a lady walk alone and carry a burden like that?" he cried, as he hastened to her assistance. If a servant entered her presence with his hat on "Your manners, sir, your manners, before ladies! "was the punctilious reprimand. Old Oregonians remember the two, sitting in their porch like the Dutch burghers of Amsterdam, greeting the passers-by. The Madame took the liveliest interest in the doctor's benevolences, going about hunting up sick immigrants and putting herself to no end of trouble to help them. Many a time she sent petitioners home with a great Indian basket full of provisions, and out of her own stores supplied needed clothing. "It is a duty put upon us by our Heavenly Father," the Madame was wont to say.
Across the hall from the Madame's room was the ​
3
reception-room. "Two sofas were there," says a lady of 1846, "and I seldom found them empty. Always the new-comer in want and in trouble was directed to the house of Dr. McLoughlin. Always the front door of McLoughlin's house stood open. 'We must never leave the house alone, mother/ he would say. ' Some immigrant might come that needed our help/"
Dr. McLoughlin had a fondness for lawyers. "Doctor," said the first chief justice of the Supreme Court of Oregon, as they sat one day in his office, "Doctor, they say that when you were governor of the Hudson's Bay Company at Vancouver those who approached you were expected to do so with their heads uncovered. How is that?"
Reddening and running his fingers through his hair the doctor stammered, "The French! the French! A very polite people, a very polite people! "
"Of course, Doctor," said the judge, "but "
"The French! very polite, very polite," said the still confused doctor. Then, casting aside his embarrassment, "Well, I will tell you. I was at the head of the Hudson's Bay Company in this country. When I came there were many Indians here. The success of the company depended on the way the Indians were treated and controlled. The lives of all the servants and employes, and the property of the company, were in my keeping. I knew enough of Indian character to know that, if those around me respected and deferred to me, the Indians would do the same."
Whenever the doctor, lively, impulsive, sympathetic, heard of a wrong his eye would flash; he was likely to blurt out a sudden oath, then blush "The Lord forgive me, the Lord forgive me," crossing himself with tears. The play of pain and pleasure on the hand ​
DR. McLOUGHLIN RESIGNS 333
some, fair, flushed face that seemed to never grow old was a constant study to his friends. The transparent, baby-like skin revealed every heart-throb as the hot blood ran up to the roots of his snowy hair. Like all generous natures, the doctor was quick-tempered none regretted it more than he. "No, no, no," might be the irritable answer to some unlucky petitioner. Then, in a moment the doctor would turn and beckon, "Here, here; what do you want?" and grant the request.
He could not hear a tale of woe without lending assistance; the multitude of such stories would fill a volume.
"He was, indeed, the Father of Oregon," says an aged American. "He came into our colony and led the procession the next Fourth of July. Every New Year's Day he used to go up one street and down another and call at every house. If any one was in trouble he saw that necessary aid was despatched at once he did not trust it to others, he saw to it himself. We would have died when we came had it not been for Dr. McLoughlin. He gave us seed and clothing and the very bread we ate."
Such was the doctor's humility that although weighed down with the responsibility of the unpaid debts of the immigrants, he never alluded to any particular act of charity, neither would he accept interest on any debt when it was paid. ​
XXXIX
THE WHITMAN MASSACRE 1847
STILL the procession was on the plains. Still echoed the crack of the ox-whip and the captain's call "Close up! close up! Why don't you keep close together? The Indians could kill all in the forward wagons before you 'd know it, and then come back and scalp the last one of you fellows here behind."
In the morning they milked the cows and put the milk in the churns. Up hill and down dale they went, jiggety-jog, all day long, until at night the butter was come.
And the Indians on the plains? At first they watched the invading whites. Still there were buffalo, still they were rich. But scant and scanter grew the pastures under the tread of immigrant cattle. Farther and farther retreated the buffalo. The timber by the streams disappeared. Bare and more barren grew the land. Unrest, distrust, collisions came. The Indians on the plains began to scalp the invading whites. More and more the march from the Black Hills to the Dalles became a rout, a retreat, a flight from pursuing famine. The measureless plains stretched under the brazen sun. The stony mountains, the grandest and most desolate on the continent, rimmed in the distant sky. The sand scorched, the dust suffocated, the wagons went to pieces. Furniture was thrown overboard; claw-footed ​tables
and carved oak bureaus, the relics of an ancestral time, were left to warp in the prairie sun. Sentinel wolves lay in wait to devour the lagging cattle; Indians hovered in front and rear and ambuscade. Killed by Pawnees, plundered by Dacotahs, scalped by Sioux, compelled by Cheyennes to pay tribute for passing through their country, corralled by Blackfeet, crossing the battle-ground of hostile Snakes, still on the immigrant pressed with the same restless spirit that inundated Europe and broke up the Roman Empire. The migration of races ebbs and flows like the waves of the sea. What if men's hearts died and women wept by the roadside? the tide swept on. Fever and cholera and Indian arrows decimated their ranks. The road to Oregon was strewn with graves. Some buried their loved ones at dead of night in the middle of the road, that no red man might discover and desecrate the tomb.
Guided at last into the Grande Ronde by Whitman's beacon, "the fiery banner of friendship," "the pillar of smoke by day and the pillar of fire by night," the weary immigrants for the first time in months fell asleep without a guard, leaving their cattle to feed at will.
Five Crows camped close beside the trail. Here and there he peered into the wagons, offering, offering everywhere horses and robes and blankets to buy a white wife. And others besides Five Crows were looking for wives. Spruce young settlers dressed in their best, gray-beard widowers, and grizzly hunters all went out to look for wives.
Immigration broke up the peaceful life at Whitman's mission. The Indians grew excited and distrustful. " I have been over to the Willamette valley," said an old ​
3
chief. "The Bostons are as many as the sands of the beach. If something is not done they will overwhelm the whole country."
Past the open prairies of Illinois, past Iowa in her primeval verdure, past the American desert that since has blossomed like the rose, five thousand people came in the autumn of 1847. Happily the granaries of Oregon were packed with wheat, thousands of bushels without a market. The lands of the Cayuses lay directly in the path of immigration. They realized as others could not the impending danger of annihilation.
Mrs. Whitman wrote to her mother: "The poor Indians are amazed at the overwhelming numbers of Americans coming into the country. They seem not to know what to make of it. Husband is wearing out fast; his heart and hands are so full all the time that his brethren feel solicitous about him. His benevolence is unbounded, and he often goes to the extent of his ability and beyond in doing good to Indians and white men."
Over in the valley the Willamette Indians shrank back and back as the settlers staked their ancestral pastures into farms. Their faces assumed an habitual look of grief and sorrow. There were some collisions.
"Pay me for my land," cried a Willamette chieftain.
The settlers went on and built their cabins, giving slight heed to "those rascally Injuns."
"Pay me for my land," demanded the chieftain.
He kept up such a disturbance that the people sent for Governor Abernethy.
"Just wait a little," said the governor, soothingly. " A chief will come out from Washington to pay you for your land."
"When?" demanded the Indian chief. ​
"With the immigrants some time this fall," answered the governor.
"So you said before," retorted the chief, crushing the grass with his haughty stride. "Wait, wait, wait. This fall, this fall, and this fall. We are dying. We shall soon be gone. Our game is gone, our camas gone. You take our land, but we get no pay, no food, no blankets."
There was friction from the Willamette to the Walla Walla. In fact, from St. Joe to the Pacific the Indians began to look upon the immigrant as lawful prey.
"Why don't government protect us?" cried the immigrants.
"Why don't they build that line of posts to guard these citizens of our country?" groaned Whitman.
"Oh, they are fiddling still at the nigger strings," sang a careless happy-go-lucky. "Only slave States are favored now."
So one great national question eclipsed another.
There was a fracas when the first wagons reached the Dalles. One immigrant was killed and two wounded. A chief and several followers fell. Governor Abernethy hurried up there.
"The Indians steal our horses," said the immigrants. " They insult and annoy us in every way."
"The white men destroy our pastures," answered the Indians. "They have driven all the game from this part of the country."
The governor settled the matter. He had scarcely reached home when news of a second outrage reached his ears.
"Why don't the government come to our aid? " cried all the distressed people. "An Indian war may break upon us."
22 ​
3
Up in the mountains Dr. Whitman had a saw-mill. The Cayuses did not love toil, they were a haughty race of herders; yet even the Cayuses had kept to work until they had fenced their little farms. But now they frowned and threw down their tools.
There was sickness in the immigration of 1847, t* 16 sickness of moving bodies subject to privation and exposure, mountain fever, dysentery, and measles.
The measles is an aggravating disease even to the whites in their cool homes in the East, very aggravating indeed to immigrants; but to Indians it is death. They tried the traditional sweat-bath and a jump into the river. Day and night Dr. Whitman visited their lodges, warning and watching, but the moment he turned his back, moaning and groaning in the height of fever, they jumped into the cold Walla Walla, to pop up dead.
"The tew-ats! the tew-ats / "cried the old men. " The Great Spirit is angry because we have discarded the tew-ats." The tew-ats came, but the sick ones died.
"Docf Whit'n," said Tamsucky, "Indian say kill all medicine men. They say take big one first, take you."
Dr. Whitman went over to the Willamette valley to consult with Dr. McLoughlin.
"Leave at once," entreated the doctor. "A Cayuse chieftain never jests."
"But I cannot leave," said Dr. Whitman. "My house is full of sick immigrants. I cannot leave. Besides, ' the hireling fleeth because he is an hireling.' "
All the way back Dr. Whitman met the plundered immigrants. They noted his careworn, anxious look. War hung in the ai ​r.
Tom McKay and his Canadians were driving cattle up the river to Fort Colvile when the measles overtook him at Fort Walla Walla. He sent for Dr. Whitman.
"I am worried about you, Doctor," said Tom. "The Indians think you are the cause of their sickness. And now since the Catholic priests are come the Indians want you to move away and let the Black Gowns open a mission."
"I know it," answered Dr. Whitman, groaning in spirit. "My poor Cayuses are distracted by their troubles. And the large number of whites stopping at the mission increases their suspicion. But what can I do? I cannot turn the poor immigrants sick and impoverished away. Can you not come and spend the winter with me, Tom?"
"I cannot, Doctor," answered the sick man. "But you must leave the Cayuses."
Pio-pio-mox-mox came up from California in October with heart still sore. Elijah was still unavenged. But what is this? His warriors fall sick around him. Death, plague, contagion lurks on every passing breeze. In every lodge the wail is heard, and yet the immigrants are pouring over the mountains.
The immigrants had warning. Far out on the foothills there came a letter from Dr. Whitman, "Make haste, the Indians are rising. Keep close together and under arms." So into the Oregon country came the worn-out immigrants of 1847.
"Be careful," said Dr. Whitman. "I fear there will be trouble. Do not provoke the savages." So with bated breath they endured every insult and pushed on into the valley.
"Shall we arm?" asked Mrs. Whitman.
3 ​
"I have not a charge of powder in the house," answered the doctor.
Tom Hill was not there; he remained with Fremont in California; Dorion was not there, but the seed of their sedition was growing in the hearts of the frightened Cayuses. "Let us go to war," said Chief Tiloukaikt in the Indian council.
"War not," said Pio-pio-mox-mox. "The Americans fight like eagles. I have seen them in California. You will all be killed."
"Dr. Whitman does this," said Jo Lewis, a half-breed renegade, who came that autumn sick and starving with the immigrants. Dr. Whitman took him in, doctored, fed, and clothed him, and gave him work. He heard the whisper of discontent; his evil nature delighted to swell and spread it. It puffed his pride to see the eager Indians hanging on his word.
"Yes," said Jo Lewis, in the Indian council. "Dr. Whitman has been writing for two years to his friends in the East for poison to kill off the Cayuses. It has just come. When I was lying sick in the doctor's room I heard them talking."
"That must be so," chimed in Nick Finley, another half-breed. "One hundred and ninety-seven Indians have died already."
"He wants to get your beautiful spotted horses," added Jo Stanfield, a third half-breed.
In a lodge on the Umatilla the conspirators whispered not with Tauitau, Five Crows, and Piopio-mox-mox. "They would betray us," said the halfbreeds.
"I am a Cherokee," said Jo Lewis. "A few missionaries came, then thousands of Americans came, and drove us away from our country." ​
"That is what the Delaware said," chorused the Indians.
"Yes, yes, yes; so they do always," added Jo Lewis. " Dr. Whitman writes to the Americans that this is a vast country, with healthy climate, rich soil, and bands of horses. Now, see how they come and bring the poison. Did not Jason Lee kill off the Willamettes? Who gave the smallpox to the Blackfeet?"
Tamahas snatched his battle-axe. "If this be true " said Tiloukaikt.
"Of course it is true. The priest said so," said Jo Lewis, as ready to lie about the priest as about Dr. Whitman.
"My wife is sick," said Tamsucky. "Let him give her medicine, and if she dies "the death-wail in a neighboring lodge ended the conclave.
Over at Lapwai Mr. Spalding's little daughter was ten years old.
"Eliza talks Nez Perce" like an Indian," said Mrs. Spalding. "Let us send her to Waiilatpu, where there are more people."
Eliza, mounted before her father, rode over the trails that terraced the hillsides. Behind them followed a dozen packhorses laden with grain to be ground at the doctor's new grist-mill. Half-way between Fort Walla Walla and the mission lay the camp of Pio-pio-moxmox. Mr. Spalding stopped to rest with the friendly chief. As he sat on the buffalo-rug a Cayuse lifted the door-curtain. "Is Dr. Whitman killed? "he asked.
That night the niece of Pio-pio-mox-mox died. They buried her at Fort Walla Walla in the morning.
"My heart shall ever be with the Americans," said Pio-pio-mox-mox, grasping Spalding's hand as he set out after the funeral. ​
3
Seventy-five souls were sheltered under the roof of Whitman's mission, orphans, and sick immigrants, who had found here an asylum for the winter. Day and night, like an angel of mercy, Mrs. Whitman passed from couch to couch. Her face was thin and her cheeks white with long and incessant watchings and labors with the sick.
"Doctor, I have my doubts," said Spalding, "about your turning your house into a hospital."
"I have no doubts about it," answered the doctor, " Looking after the immigrants is a part of my mission. That 's what I 'm here for."
"I hear that the priests are going to open a mission near you," said Spalding.
"I know it," answered the irritated doctor. "They want to buy this mission."
Just then a messenger reined up at the gate. "There is sickness at the lodges of Five Crows and Tauitau," he said. "They want you."
"I will come," said Dr. Whitman. It was thirty miles to the Umatilla.
"I will go with you," said Spalding.
They set off about sundown, and rode all night in a heavy rain. The Indian cocks were crowing when, drenched and chill, they reached the lodge of Sticcas in a low ravine. Sticcas spread fresh blankets and piled fuel on the lodge-fire. The missionaries lay down and slept till dawn.
The morning hymn of worship broke their slumbers. There was an appetizing breakfast of potatoes, squash, fresh beef, and wheat-bread baked by Sticcas' wife, taught by Mrs. Whitman. There was deathly silence in the lodge and in the village. After breakfast Dr. Whitman went over the Umatilla to the lodges of Fi ​ve
Crows and Tauitau. As he rode the red men peeped and whispered
"Bad Medicine."
"Kills our people."
"Takes our lands."
"We ought to avenge Elijah."
"Black Gowns better teachers."
Mr. Spalding preached to the Indians at the lodge of Sticcas. At four o'clock Dr. Whitman returned, pale and weary. "I met the Bishop and two priests at Tauitau's house," he said. "They invited me to tea, but I had not the heart to partake. They want to buy my mission." He dropped his head in thought. It was very hard for Dr. Whitman to give up his beloved mission, and particularly to rivals. "I told them to come over Tuesday," he resumed absently. "Now I must go."
"Not to-night," said Sticcas.
"Oh, yes; there are many sick, and I am needed." So at sundown the good horse of Dr. Whitman bore him over the hills homeward. He was weary and disheartened. How still it was! How dismal the village dirges on the November night wind! Tamsucky's wife was dead.
As the horse's hoofs died away Sticcas sat on the buffalo-rug before the fire and shook his head. Days before he had said to Dr. Whitman, "My people have decreed against you." The doctor made no reply. To-night he said to Spalding, "My people have decreed against the whites," but not another word would the old man say.
Throwing himself upon his couch of skins, the missionary could not sleep. He felt apprehensive for that lone rider in the night. On either side of him an In ​
3
dian woman rocked to and fro and chanted the deathsong. "For whom do you mourn, good woman?" he asked. But they made no answer. Only the depressing death-wail broke the silence.
Two days later Mr. Spalding turned to Waiilatpu. An old Indian woman put her hand on his horse's mane and whispered: "Go not to Waiilatpu. Look out for the people there. They are bad people."
"But I must go, good mother; my child is there."
Fear made him fleet. The very air whispered. Across the Walla Walla he met a horseman coming to meet him. It was the priest who was to visit that day at Waiilatpu. Riding ahead of the interpreter and the son of Tiloukaikt, who were lighting their pipes, he motioned to Mr. Spalding.
Apprehensive of evil, "What is the news? "he asked.
"Dr. Whitman is dead," answered the priest.
"Mrs. Whitman?"
"Dead also. Killed by the Indians."
"And my child?"
"Is safe with the captives. Escape! escape! "as he saw the interpreter and the son of Tiloukaikt approaching. "Here is my wallet there is bread in it. Go! "
"But where shall I go?" was Spalding's despairing cry.
"I know not. You know the country better than I. All that I know is that the Indians say the order to kill Americans has been sent in all directions." Dazed, stunned, the missionary took the bread and turned into a bank of fog, just as the interpreter and the son of Tiloukaikt approached Father Brouillet.
Over the sugar-loaf barren hills a messenger came riding post to Lapwai. He dashed through the missi ​on
flower-beds, crushing the bachelor's buttons with his moccasins as he passed. An Indian never knocks. He sets his gun outside, lifts the latch, enters edgewise, shakes hands, and sits upon the floor. This messenger did not shake hands, did not sit down; he sidled along the wall of the schoolroom to the fireplace. Mrs. Spalding was teaching a class. Resting his elbow on the mantel he clutched his fingers in his tangled locks and looked at her. There was excitement and glitter in his eye. Mrs. Spalding felt nervous. She sent the children out of the room. "What news?" she asked in the Nez Perce tongue.
"Doct 1 Whit'n killed. All killed. Injun coming. Hurry." The runner sidled out of the room, strode over the flowers, dashed over the sugar-loaf barren hills, and out of sight.
Although naturally nervous Mrs. Spalding was very wise, very quiet, and in an emergency calm. She turned to her assistant "What shall we do?"
"Escape as quickly as possible," he answered.
"No," said Mrs. Spalding. "We will throw ourselves upon the sympathy and protection of our Indians. Call Jacob and Eagle."
The two friendly chiefs were close by. They took Mrs. Spalding and her children to their camp. Scarcely had they gone when a troop came tearing over the hills, led by their own Chief Joseph, the Nez Perce. The house was ransacked, beds and bedding were stripped and taken away. Every drawer was opened, and the precious little keepsakes, brought from home, were taken and divided among the pillagers.
"Chief Joseph! "exclaimed Mrs. Spalding in amaze. " I cannot think it. We trusted him more than any other. His conduct has been most exemplary. Alas, ​
3
indeed, I am confused! The more we know our Indians the less we know them."
Half crazed, worn and torn, on foot up the river Touchet (Toosha), in six days Mr. Spalding reached Chief Timothy's camp. He listened. His Nez Perces were calling his name in prayer. It gave him hope. He entered. His Indians leaped with joy, and bore him to his wife, safe in the care of Jacob and Eagle. But his daughter?
There were dead people lying all around at Waiilatpu. Narcissa Whitman's fair hair floated in blood. A few escaped; the women and children were captives; the rest, thirteen or more, were dead. There was a smell of blood and powder in the air, the windows were broken, the mission plundered.
"Mamma! mamma! "cried the parched lips of little Helen Mar Meek, sick with the measles. But mamma could come no more, and the sweet child died of neglect.
Narcissa, the snowy Joan, led all the host of women to the conquest of the West, an innumerable train that is following yet to this day. The snowy Joan led her hosts; and, at last, like Joan of old, she ascended to God with the crown of a martyr.
Pio-pio-mox-mox sat in his lodge. Again the Cayuse lifted the door-curtain. "Docf Whit'n is killed."
Pio-pio-mox-mox sat very quiet while the voluble young man ran over that day of horrors.
"What part had you in it?" inquired the chief, fixing his Egyptian eye upon the herald. Proud of his exploits, intent only on making them great as possible, the runner said, "Me? I wounded one, I struck one, and I killed one." ​
"Take that young man and hang him to the nearest tree," cried Pio-pio-mox-mox, in a tone of thunder.
The attendants seized the boaster, and before he realized it was not a jest, the noose tightened about his neck. In a few moments a corpse dangled from the boughs of a rugged old cottonwood.
Five Crows heard the awful tale. Then he rode over to the mission. There was a beautiful girl there, a young school-teacher, with eyes like Mrs. Whitman's. She was just from the East, and sick with a fever. Her rose-and-lily beauty captured the heart of the savage who had tried so long to buy a white wife. They dragged her shrieking to his lodge. The rest were distributed among the Indians.
McKinley had removed to another post. The new man in charge at Fort Walla Walla seemed afraid to assist the Americans in this time of trouble. He turned away the few fleeing fugitives that struggled to his door. He did, however, despatch a messenger to Fort Vancouver.
The thunderbolt had fallen. Douglas at once sent word to Governor Abernethy at Oregon City. Chief Factor Ogden set out the same day with sixteen armed Canadians, in December snow and rain, up the inclement Columbia to ransom the captives.
The colonial legislature was in session when the panting messenger from Fort Vancouver landed at the Falls. All that morning they had been listening to the governor's annual message, treating chiefly of the embarrassments of the Indian question. When at two o'clock Governor Abernethy communicated the fact of an actual massacre, the excitement knew no bounds. Nesmith leaped to his feet with a resolution to despatch fifty riflemen to protect the mission at the Dalles. The ​
3
session adjourned to call a mass meeting of citizens that night. Several members went over immediately to consult with Dr. McLoughlin.
"Dead? Oh, those treacherous Cayuses! I warned him, I warned him," cried the old doctor, pounding the floor with his cane. "Why did he not heed?" Presently recovering himself, "Yes, yes, if there is to be an Indian war the Dalles is your Gibraltar. Hold the Dalles."
In fifteen hours from the time they enrolled their names, the Spartan band of fifty were on their way to the upper country.
The governor issued a call for five hundred men to rendezvous at Oregon City on Christmas day. Those whom Whitman had befriended leaped to avenge his death; heroes who had toiled at his side in 1843, and immigrants of succeeding years who had hailed his mission as the first civilized landmark beyond the Rockies.
Applegate, Lovejoy, and Abernethy on their personal credit secured a loan at Fort Vancouver. The women of Oregon City baked and sewed and tore up their last sheets for shirts, and out of bits of bunting made a flag. Trembling fingers sewed the stripes and stitched on the stars. Farmers on horseback came packing through the woods old buffalo-guns and flint-locks, beans and bacon, and lead and blankets whatever could be spared from their scanty stores. Joe Meek, the trapper, resigned his seat in the legislature to go overland as a delegate to Washington with despatches for aid.
The Indians regarded the settlers at Champoeg as their own people.
"Will they desert us? Will they join their Indian kindred? "queried the anxious settler ​s.
Happily Tom McKay solved that. Like a centaur he rode up and down the prairie. In French, in English, in Chinook he gathered them in: "Pierre, Francois, Antoine, come, come to the war! "
The snow proved too deep to get word over the Sierras to California. Shut in, Oregon must fight her way alone. ​
XL
THE CAYUSE WAR 1848
A T the peril of his life Ogden went into the Indian ^*- country and despatched couriers calling for a council. The chiefs came to Fort Walla Walla to treat with their old friend, the fur-trader, and if possible to ward off the retribution they feared from the angry Bostons. The great fire of driftwood from the Spokane forests roared in the chimney. The chiefs spread their palms to the blaze and waited. Ogden noted a troubled look in certain faces, but he was not there to secure the murderers. He only hoped to secure the unhappy captives before news came up from the lower country. His short, fat figure, in marked contrast with their tall ones, appeared still more rotund from his bulging, ample cloak. His otter-skin cap lay on the floor. With the grizzly locks trailing over his shoulders and his keen eye fixed on theirs, the trader began:
"Friends and relations, I regret to see that all the chiefs are not here. Repeat to them what I say. We have been among you for thirty years without shedding blood. We are traders, and of a different nation from the Americans. But recollect, we do not supply you with ammunition to kill the Americans. They are the same color as ourselves, speak the same language, are children of the same God. Their cruel fate causes our hearts to bleed. Besides this wholesale butchery, have you not robbed the Americans passing peacefu ​lly
through your country and insulted their women? You tell me your young men did this without your knowledge. Why do we make you chiefs, if you have no control over your young men? You are unworthy the name of chief. You, hot-headed young men, you pride yourselves on your bravery. You think no one can match you. Do not deceive yourselves.
"If the Americans begin war, war will not end until every one of you is cut off from the face of the earth. Your people have died. So have others. Dr. Whitman did not poison them. God commanded they should die. We are weak mortals. We must submit. It is merely advice that I give you. I promise you nothing. We have nothing to do with your quarrels. On my return, if you wish it, I will see what can be done for you. I do not promise to prevent war. Deliver me the captives. I will pay a ransom. That is all."
Silence followed for a space of ten minutes. Then Tauitau rose up slowly and spoke with deliberation:
"The fur-traders are married to Indian women. They are our brothers. I cannot refuse my brother's request."
Another silence; then Tiloukaikt rose, tall and dark, dignified and savage:
"They are our brothers. They bury their dead along with ours. Chief, your words are weighty, your hairs are gray. We have known you a long time. You have had an unpleasant journey to this place. I cannot keep the families back. I make them over to you, which I would not do to another younger than yourself."
"I have nothing to say," said Pio-pio-mox-mox. "I know the Americans are changeable. Still, I agree with my brother. The whites are our best friends; we follow your advice. The captives shall be given up." ​
3
All day the council lasted, and at night they still talked by the flickering light of the driftwood fire. Outside, the snow beat up against the windows.
Blankets, shirts, guns, ammunition, to the value of $500, lay on the council floor.
"There," said Ogden, as an attendant displayed the tempting array, "these are for you. Hasten, now; bring me the captives and receive the ransom."
On Christmas Eve the messengers were speeding over the new-fallen snow to Lapwai, to the Umatilla, to every lodge where a prisoner lay waiting her uncertain doom.
What joy to the poor captives, terrified by old women fierce as Waskema, who came round flourishing their dull tomahawks, only too eager to put them to death; girls who had seen their fathers slain, women who had been snatched from their husbands and brothers, all to be dragged to lonely lodges, a prey to savage passion.
It was yet early morning when the chiefs came to the lodge of Five Crows. On a couch of costly skins lay the beautiful white girl. For a savage Five Crows had been kind to his white wife.
"Don't go," he pleaded. "All horses," he waved his hand toward the herds on the hills, "all cattle," feeding in the lower meadows, "all skins," they were heaped in the lodge of this rich Indian, "all slaves," there were dozens at his command, "all house," close by stood Five Crows' log house with glass windows, " all land," with a gesture toward the young woman " yours."
She only shook her head.
"Then let me go with you, live with white people," begged the Indian suitor.
Still she shook her hea ​d.
He waved the staring domestics back. With his own hands the Cayuse chief broiled her venison, and brought her tea, and knelt before her couch of skins. Tradition says he was a handsome Indian, taller than his halfbrother, Chief Joseph, and fairly educated. But the white girl dreaded his eagle plumes and raven hair; she shrank from the touch of his moccasined toe, the brush of his painted robe. She did not hate, she feared him.
The impatient chiefs outside kept calling and spatting their hands, "Oh, Five Crows! Five Crows! Five Crows! "
Those voices seemed her deliverance. Still flushed with fever, she tottered toward the door. Five Crows sprang to her assistance, pleading at every step. He spread a new blanket and a tanned robe on the saddle of her horse and still he would detain her. His was a lover's parting, reluctant, seeking every pretext for delay. The chiefs interfered and ended the scene. Supported by her savage escort, the poor girl reached the fort.
Mr. Ogden came out. The tender-hearted trader lifted her in his arms as a father would.
"Thank God; I have got you safe at last! I had to pay the Indians more for you than for all the other captives, and I feared they would never give you up."
Scarcely were the captives in his hands when a rumor reached the fort "The Americans are coming up the Columbia."
"Tell it not to the Indians. T will be our death," said Ogden.
It turned his hair white to think of the situation with all those suspicious Indians camped around the illdefended fort. The Spaldings had not arrived. Dare he wait? They might be cut off. Two days and two
23 ​
3
nights Ogden paced the fort and listened; he dared not sleep. Then came the Spaldings, escorted by their Nez Perec's from Lapwai. Ogden paid their ransom and hurried them into the ready boats.
It was the morning of New Year's Day of 1848.
"The wind is cold; cover, cover," said old Sticcas, taking off his cap for one of the rescued ones. "Cover ears," he said, compassionately tying his handkerchief over the head of another.
"How fiercely yon Indian rides! "exclaimed Spalding, as the boats shoved off with their shivering passengers.
A howling horseman came into sight, lashing his pony, white with foam, with the cruel doublethonged whip tied to his wrist. Another came, and another, fifty infuriated Cayuses dashed down to the water and followed along the river's edge with angry shouts. They had caught the rumor, "The Bostons are coming." The trader and his ransomed had but escaped.
Ogden prudently kept his boats on the farther side, and his Canadians rowed for life. It was an exciting moment.
"Sing," cried Ogden, in tense agitation.
The Canadians struck up the spirited
"Sur la feuille ron don don don" to steady their strokes as they shot away.
Outwitted, sold, the wrathful Indians jerked up their steeds by the cruel horsehair bits. Blood dripped with the foam. The usual Indian adieu is a gay yell. This was a taunting, scornful, satanic laugh, as they waved their tomahawks and watched them, singing, glide beyond their grasp. Then they turned to the lodge of Pio-pio-mox-mox and threatened his life, because ​he
and his Walla Wallas would not arm to meet "the Bostons."
Even Tauitau said: "If the Bostons come to fight us I will not raise my gun. I will sit in my house. If they will, they may kill me. I shall not resist."
The Nez Perec's refused to join them. Only Five Crows and the murderers were left to lead the hostiles.
Swiftly gliding down the Columbia the rescued ones met the fifty riflemen landing at the Dalles. Ogden was amazed at the daring of this handful.
"Go back with us, go back," he urged. "You can do nothing. All the tribes will unite against you. The idea of sending a party up there this winter is the wildest notion I ever heard of. You had better burn the mission buildings here and go back to the valley."
But the Americans firmly answered, "No," and proceeded to fortify the mission at the Dalles.
Worried, troubled, nervous from loss of sleep, Peter Skeen Ogden went on to Fort Vancouver. Douglas immediately despatched a letter to the anxious settlement at the Falls.
It was Sunday morning when the courier arrived and found the governor and his people at church. The welcome message was read from the pulpit:
Mr. Ogden has this moment arrived with three boats from Walla Walla, and I rejoice to say he has brought down all the women and children from Waiilatpu and Mr. and Mrs. Spalding. . . . Mr. Ogden will visit the Falls on Monday. . . .
In haste, yours respectfully,
JAMES DOUGLAS.
Portland was but a village in the woods, but it fired a salute as the boats went by; again the salute rang out as the gray-haired old hero landed his burden of sixty ​
3
two souls at the city by the Falls. Governor Abernethy received the rescued ones, and in the name of humanity thanked the courageous chief factor for his inestimable service.
Many of the women were nervous wrecks. Dr. McLoughlin received some; Governor Abernethy some; the doors of every home were open, as borne on beds they were distributed among the settlers.
Fired at the sight, scarcely better equipped than the patriots at Valley Forge, the little army of five hundred pressed into the Indian country. Fort Vancouver looked on amazed as the daring boats went by.
"Wildest attempt I ever heard of," muttered Ogden, who had returned to the fort. "All the Indians of the country will be upon us. The Cayuses, the Walla Wallas, and the Nez Perec's are so intermarried they will fight as one."
The old chief factor's hands trembled. More than anything else the company dreaded an Indian war. It meant the ruin and rout of their business, the breaking up of fur brigades, and the end of big returns to London.
"I hear that they have prohibited the sale of ammunition to the Indians," continued Ogden, shaking his disapproving locks. "They even found fault with me because I paid them a few handfuls for portage at the Dalles."
"Prohibited the sale of ammunition! "exclaimed Douglas. "That is a dangerous measure. It will only excite them more and more. They will starve without ammunition, and distress may drive them to dangerous courses. They will prey upon the settlements and slaughter cattle when they can no longer hunt the deer." ​
"Just so, just so," assented Ogden from his lookout on the porch. "If they tumble the nations down on their heads we are not to blame. There goes another boat-load."
With the whoops of the old voyageurs McKay's men dragged the only piece of artillery, a rusty nine-pounder, around the Cascades in a driving snow.
The painted Cayuses were out on their painted horses, galloping on the hills. It was a thrilling sight. Every eminence was filled with Indian men and women, as on a grand review, to witness the defeat of the Bostons. They looked with contempt on these immigrants. Had they not borne with meekness and patience the insults and robberies of the preceding autumn, and autumns and autumns before?
"Ho-ha-ha-ha-ha a! "laughed the demoniac chorus on the hills. "The Bostons are women. We will kill them with clubs. We will go to the valley and steal their women. Never shall the Americans drink of the waters of the Umatilla."
"Ho-ho-ho-ho o! "screamed War Eagle, chief of the dreamer-drummers, prancing out in face of the foe. " I am a great tew- at. I bear a charmed life. I can swallow molten lead; powder and shot cannot harm me! "
"Well, then, let him swallow this," said Tom McKay, raising his silver-mounted rifle. One click the boaster headlong bit the dust. A shot from another shattered the arm of Five Crows. He dropped his gun like smoke the Indian cavalry disappeared, demoralized by the sudden and unexpected loss of their leaders whom they had supposed invulnerable. In Homeric song the leaders fought the battles; so here in this Pacific Iliad. The spectators melted from the hills.
3 ​
"That is the Indian of it; they fight and flee," exclaimed the impetuous American, Colonel Gilliam. " They did it in the Black Hawk War, they did it in the Seminole."
Where hundreds had lately stood, now a barren and apparently unoccupied country stretched out in silence. But every rock and ravine and hillock and sand-hollow along the old immigrant road sheltered a foe. All day until sunset they sprang from their ambuscades in the masterly attacks and retreats of Indian warfare. All day the Indian fusees picked off the volunteers in their march to the upper country. At night for miles ahead the Cayuse signal-fires burned like sleepless red eyes on the hilltops. Without water, almost without food, without tents, and half clad, in the dead of winter, the little army hurried on toward Waiilatpu. Exhausted, famished, chilled, the Americans reached the camp of Pio-pio-mox-mox. The old chief came out to meet them. At his belt hung Siskadee's shot-pouch.
"We are not one with the Cayuses," he said. "We have no part in the war."
"We are glad to hear it," answered Colonel Gilliam. " We hear that you fought with Lieutenant Fremont in California and that you acted bravely. Your conduct convinces us that you are an honorable Indian. Have you beef to sell?"
Pio-pio-mox-mox drove up his herds. In an hour the savory odor of kouse and bouillon filled the camp. The old chief remained to watch proceedings, and smoked his pipe in a long and friendly talk. Over toward Waiilatpu a few thin lodge-fires rose against the sky.
"That is the spot," said the old chief, pointing. "My people were not there." ​
The volunteers found only a heap of burned adobes on the site of the Whitman mission. Torn letters, shattered glass and china lay among the trampled poppies. Even the orchard was tomahawked away. Wolves had uncovered the shallow graves, and the remains of the martyr-missionary and his household lay scattered on the wintry plain. Tresses of tangled gold identified the disfigured brow of the queenly Joan of the West.
The bodies were gathered up and reinterred, and above the mound of his little Helen Mar the old trapper, Joe Meek, swore vengeance as he hastened on to Washington. Six weeks later he met his old comrade, Captain Bridger, in a mountain pass.
"And my little Mary Ann?" he asked.
"She, too, is dead," said the trapper by the camp-fire.
Poor old Sticcas! evading the gibes and threats of his countrymen, he hunted up the doctor's cattle, and collecting what he could of the stolen property, delivered them to the volunteers, money, watches, books, and then with Tauitau left for the mountains to wait till the war was over.
"Stay a moment," cried the colonel. "Before you go, tell me, where are the murderers? "
With a frightened look to see that he was unobserved by his people, old Sticcas waved his hand and whispered, " Fleeing up the Tucanon."
Colonel Gilliam had thrown up a fort out of the burned adobes. Leaving his wounded there, he continued the pursuit. On the fifth day, after an all-night march, he surprised a camp at the mouth of the Tucanon. An old man came out with one hand on his head and one on his heart.
"We are the people of Pio-pio-mox-mox," he said in bad Chinook; "we are friends."
3 ​
"He lies. It is a cloak," muttered the impatient volunteers.
The camp was full of painted warriors, apparently just making their toilet for battle.
Still the old man reiterated, "We are Pio-pio-moxmox tilicum [people]."
The volunteers had their fingers on their triggers.
"Don't shoot," commanded the colonel. "Where are the murderers? "
"Fled to the land of Red Wolf," pantomimed the Indian.
"Fleeing, fleeing, fleeing," muttered the disappointed colonel. "Who can catch an Indian in his native hills?"
"This is their stock take it," said the old man, waving his hand around toward the cattle Tiloukaikt's cattle.
The hills were covered with herds. Riding up the precipitous highlands, the little army looked down on the winding Snake. It was full of horses and cattle swimming over by thousands and ascending the opposite bank.
"Collect the stock," commanded the colonel. Dark faces peeped and whispered in the shadow of the camp.
The volunteers set out to drive five hundred head before them to Fort Walla Walla.
A flash, a whoop; the land was alive with Indians in all the fury of savage warfare. The painted camp was out, the Palouses sprang from the very earth, the herds were lost in the fierce-running battle of the Tucanon.
For thirty hours the firing never ceased. At last the struggling, fighting, fleeing remnants of the almost entrapped Americans escaped beyond the Touchet. After the hand-to-hand struggle at the ford the con ​
fusion of battle gave way to the death-wail on the farther shore. Nothing but the superior arms and ammunition of the Americans saved them from utter rout.
"Something must be done, and done at once," ran the report sent to Governor Abernethy, "or we shall have the Indians in the valley in a month. There are one hundred and fifty of our boys in the very heart of the enemy's country almost without ammunition and wholly without bread."
Just then the United States transport "Anita "entered the Columbia, seeking recruits for the Mexican War raging below. The captain whistled when he discovered Oregon herself in arms.
"Our settlers are scattered throughout the valleys," said Governor Abernethy, "many of them isolated and lying in such a position that they could be swept off in a night, and the Indians be in the mountains out of reach next morning. Our policy is to keep the Indians busy in their own country, and by this means keep them out of the valley, but we have no money, no munitions of war. Our patriotic volunteers are destitute of clothing, tents, and provisions, even while in the field. Our powder is gathered up in half-pounds and parcels as the settlers have brought more or less in for their own use. This will soon give out."
The transport left the Columbia and returned to Monterey, promising to get word to the United States as soon as possible. Then more than ever isolated, Oregon felt itself at the end of the world. How long would it take for an envoy to reach the capital? How long for a ship to double Cape Horn?
The measles had followed the track of the immigrants and found a nesting place in the Willamette valley. ​
3
Whole Indian villages lay prostrate. Old Waskema in distress flitted from camp to camp; she squatted by every fire. With her knotted cane in hand she stood on the edge of the forest and pointed toward the settlements "Skookum turn-turn gone. Squaw man stay. Quick in the night, quick, cut down the Boston people," hoarsely she whispered to Koosta, chief of the Molallas.
In old time Waskema told the fortunes of chase and of battle. Could she still divine? Koosta sat in his smoky hut and watched her with the luminous eyes of a hunted deer. But he made no move. The moans of his children filled the hut. Waskema flew wild, stamping her feet and tearing her hair. "Shame! shame! shame! "she cried. "Sick, all die. No medicine, no food, no powder. Boston take land, take game, poison us, starve us." Her frenzy was fearful to look upon. A sick baby stretched its thin hand for a wee little muskrat toasting on the coals. A skinny old man came in with a sack of bread, begged at Champoeg.
Old Waskema's tamanowas (spirit) had a strange charm for the young men. Down in the damp marsh grew the Oregon yew; they were shaping it into arrows. She sanctioned what they desired bloodshed and plunder.
Eighty Klamaths came over the southern mountains, and camped at the head of Abiqua creek, a branch of the Willamette, near Koosta's camp. Another force camped in the passes of the Callapooias waiting. The Warm Spring Indians hung like a cloud at the foot of Mt. Jefferson. The Klickitats were riding down the zigzag mountain passes ready to join them.
It was March, raw and windy and squally with sno ​w,
when the howling Klamaths sounded the whoop on the hills. They began shooting cattle, raiding cabins, and closing round the house of the hyas tyee, the principal white man, into whose log house the frightened settlers fled. A postman came in sight; he put spurs to his steed and gave the alarm up the valley. Before sunset sixty men and boys had chased the Klamaths to their rock-walled, brush-covered camp on the Abiqua bottom. From a rocky ledge at early dawn there came a flight of arrows. The American rifles blazed. In the cold and drizzling rain lay the dead. Among the fallen warriors was an Indian woman, withered and shrunken, with a drawn bow in her dying grasp. It was old Waskema.
The Klamaths fled over the southern mountains. The rising in the valley was quelled, but the measles went on silently, surely, depopulating the camps of the red men.
Governor Abernethy issued a third call for men. With dismay the Indians beheld a second army advancing into the upper country. Already their herds were ruined, ammunition gone, their families scattered. The Cayuses as a people had no heart in the war. Every day at sunset the mothers lamented the act that had brought this trouble upon them. The opposition narrowed to the few who had participated in the massacre, and some sympathizers who had assisted their escape. In April the army summed up the situation:
"Where are the murderers? "
"Fled beyond the Rockies."
"Will you, Pio-pio-mox-mox and Tauitau, deliver them up on their return?"
"Yes, if you will give us peace."
"Where is Jo Lewis?"
3 ​
"Escaped to the Mormons."
"Who are the Mormons? "
"Dwellers in a magic city that has risen on Salt Lake."
"Where is Five Crows? "
"Dying at the camp of Chief Joseph."
"Where is Chief Joseph? "
"Quiet in his own valley. He has taken no part in the war."
"And Chief Ellice?"
"Dead. He and sixty of his men went to hunt elk in the mountains and all died of the measles."
Declaring the Cayuse lands forfeited to the United States, and leaving a garrison at the Whitman Fort to watch for the murderers and meet the autumn immigrants, the volunteers gave up the chase and returned to their homes. But Colonel Gilliam came not back he, too, was numbered with the dead.
An autumn immigration of a thousand people entered the country unmolested but yet no word from Washington. Unaided the little colony had fought it out alone. ​
XLI
THE BARQUE "JANET" 1847
T)ASSING to and fro, Dr. McLoughlin noted the -L growth of the brisk young settlement of Portland. He decided to establish David there, and with a small fortune in gold McLoughlin's son became the junior partner in the rising firm of Pettygrove & Crosby.
The finest ship that traded on the coast in those days was the teakwood East India built barque "Janet," owned and run by Captain Dring, an Englishman. The captain was a tar of furious temper and iron will. His meek little wife sailed with him, and his lovely blond daughter, Trottie, the Queen of the Sea.
The "Janet" entered the Willamette for a load of wheat. The firm of Pettygrove, Crosby & McLoughlin despatched their junior partner to the ship. There David McLoughlin's eye fell on the captain's laughing daughter with her brown curls flying in the wind. Trottie, too, saw the young merchant with black locks waving on his velvet collar. The captain saw no flush, no blush of pleasure; the two had met and passed before, in rocking ships in an English harbor.
Gala evenings followed, as the teakwood ship lay in the Willamette. Whale-oil lamps flickered and lanterns were hung aloft when the deck was cleared for dancing. Grave elders sat around on tea-chests and bales of merchandise, beating time with their toes to the piping sailor's band. And under the Oregon stars Trottie ​
3
danced with David. Trottie' s mother smiled upon the young American, he had travelled, he had read, he could sing, his dress was faultless, his manners Parisian. In the jig, the reel, and the Highland fling he outstepped them all, and his contagious laughter was a tonic. People said, "David the heir will marry the captain's daughter."
Just then the Whitman massacre upheaved the Oregon world. All the men were hurrying away to the war. But David stayed and stood with Trottie before the captain.
"Good God, Trottie! What are you thinking of, to tie yourself up in this unheard-of corner of the world, where Indians come in and massacre settlers without warning! I 'd rather bury you at sea. And is n't that Frenchman waiting for you up there at the Islands? What will he say when I get back to Honolulu? "Trottie turned white.
David was thunderstruck, but Trottie clung to his arm, and the bluff captain dared not send him from the ship. The cargo was not complete; David could hold him a little. He must go to the Champoeg warehouse that day; he felt sure the captain would relent on his return. So David went tearing up the Willamette, revolving a thousand plans for winning his Queen of the Sea.
How impatient the young man was! How snail-like the Indian packers carried the wheat on their backs from the storehouse to the bateau! How slow the swift-glancing paddles beat the foam! "Faster, faster," he cried.
"He is mad," said the Indians, as they tore back down the Willamette. All was hushed save the rapping rowlocks and the rough breathing of the heavy working rowers. Some one hailed him at the Falls. He heard not. His father watched him with regret. ​
"Halt! Carry! "By main strength and awkwardness, under the Chinook moon the Indians transferred the wheat to the barge below the Falls. All night he flew; obstacles vanished; new hope filled his heart as he neared the old familiar dock. He laughed. He will greet her in a moment. He was opposite the shingle camp called Portland, where the store of Pettygrove, Crosby & McLoughlin was most conspicuous on the shore.
"The ship! where is the ship? "he cried.
"Gone," said an idler on the shore. "Sailed yesterday. Carried news of the Whitman massacre to the Islands."
A few empty canoes rocked idly on the sea-green water. He stepped into one; two fishing Indians took the paddles. Without rest, without food, he gave the word, "Vancouver."
But the wharf at Vancouver was vacant and deserted.
"Send out the ' Cadboro'; ' chase her. I must catch the 'Janet/ "he cried to Douglas. But the "Cadboro' " had gone the day before. He called to the voyageurs, " Fifty beaver skins to the crew that makes the ' Janet* to-day."
David's barque flew down the Columbia. He leaned forward, glass in hand, to catch the gleam of a sail. Oak Point, Coffin Rock, Pillar Rock, Astoria, a day, a night, at last there, beyond the bar, with sails set, the "Janet" stood leagues away at sea. And the crew sang on
"Thy heart was made for laughter,
My heart 's in tears to-day; Tears for a fickle mistress, Flown from its love away.
I 've loved thee long and dearly, 1 11 love thee, sweet, for aye! " ​
3
Crouched in a berth, her long, overhanging curls swaying with that sea-rocked ship, lay Trottie Dring, her eyes hot and tearless, and her heart numb. Away into the great Pacific she went, never again to catch a glimpse of the Oregon coast. The surf-beaten rocks on the shore seemed not harder than the flinty heart that divided herself and her lover.
From that day the veneering of civilization fell ofif from David like an egg-shell. He lost all interest in the store. Indian impatience of restraint, Indian instincts and inherited tendencies triumphed over the Scotch in his veins. He roved continually. He gave himself up to dissipation, and was happy only with his red friends in the forest. He wedded the daughter of a chief. ​
T
XLII
THE DISCOVERY OF GOLD 1848
HE volunteers came home to their wives and sweethearts the Indian scare was over. The old idyllic life went on, more united, more ideal after the tempest. Up and down the tributary valleys of the Willamette many a young couple staked out their square mile. Like shadows the Indians drew back into the forest, dumb, patient, vanishing. The volunteers put aside their buffalo-guns. The war-horse captured in battle was hitched to the plough. Harvest was at its height when a schooner from Yerba Buena came into the Willamette. Almost before his barque was moored the Yankee trader began to buy knives, spades, picks, pans, flour.
"What are you going to do with that sort of cargo, Cap'n?" inquired the settlers, handing over their unused picks and spades.
"Oh, hardware for the Spaniards," was the nonchalant reply as he stacked them away in the schooner. With lading complete and sails trimmed, the Yankee captain, by way of good-bye, held up a sack of golddust. "The hills of California are made of that," he said. An incredulous burst of laughter followed the retreating ship.
The brig from Newburyport came rushing in for picks and pans and flour. Douglas entered the Columbia from the Islands at the same time. "Pooh-pooh!
24
3 ​
't is all a fake," he said, but certain letters dispelled all doubt. Marshall, one of those enthusiasts of 1844, had really reached the land where money grew.
The quietude of that summer was broken. The Cayuse pony and the Chinook canoe carried the news to the remotest settlement. The farmer left his plough in the furrow, his sickle in the wheat, crops remained unharvested. Women and boys took charge of the shops and stores in Oregon City, men left their wives to hold their claims, milk the cows, and keep the children. The editor ran off and left the paper, the blacksmith quit his anvil, the carpenter his plane and saw, the legislature adjourned for want of a quorum. Judge Burnett, the chief justice of Oregon, left the bench and said to Dr. McLoughlin:
"What shall we do? Can we make the trip with a wagon?"
"Yes/' said the doctor. "Get Tom McKay for a pilot. He has been back and forth with pack-trains for twenty years. He knows the road better than any one but La Framboise."
In eight days Burnett's "ragged regiment "held a barbecue feast, and one hundred and fifty men and fifty wagons rolled out on the California road, with provisions for six months and planks for gold rockers in the bottom of their wagons.
Pettygrove sold the site of the city of Portland for a pack of leather and left for the mines. In a few weeks the trappers' heavy trail became a broad and beaten highway, thronged every hour with men and boys on foot, in wagons and on horseback. The soldiers, fresh from the Cayuse war, rich in tales of adventure, passed their evening in song and dance around the camp-fires in the valleys, while the signal fires of Shastas, Rogues, and ​
Klamaths glowed on neighboring heights. The Indians, who had never seen such invading armies of palefaces, fled to their mountain fastnesses in consternation, or now and then, from behind some shelving rock, discharged a shower of bright reed arrows pointed with volcanic glass. One evening, as the sun sent his last lingering rays against the lofty range of the Sierras, the Oregonians camped in the shining valleys of gold. These sons of adventure, who had blazed the way to Oregon and had trounced the savage, now gayly raced the hills in search of the gilded treasure.
"What if the Indians should come?" said the women left in Oregon City.
"Don't be afraid," laughed the fatherly Dr. McLoughlin. "I set a watch on the bluff every night to look after the settlement."
Panthers howled on the bluff. Indians pitched their teepees in the dark wood, and once, some years before, they shot their arrows down into the village.
The lately silent river became noisy with commerce. From a village in the woods, Portland leaped to a city, with twenty vessels waiting for cargoes at a time, all paying in bags of gold-dust, and all heading for California. Provision stores opened everywhere, prices went up among the stars; four bushels of apples from the Willamette brought five hundred dollars in San Francisco. Tons of Oregon eggs sold for a dollar apiece on the Sacramento.
One hundred and fifty Canadians deserted Fort Vancouver in a body. Douglas and Ogden hired Indians to supply their places.
The rush from Oregon began in 1848, almost a year before the rest of the world heard of the find at Sutter's mill. After six weeks on the Yuba the Oregonians ​
3
were ready to return with their sacks full of gold-dust, but how? The harbor was full of ships rotting at the wharves. As in Homer's lotus-land, every sailor that touched the golden shore straightway forgot home and friends and native land and longed ever to remain eating the golden poppy.
In February a hundred Oregonians were waiting for passage from San Francisco. Finally the captain of the old East India ship, "Janet/ 'accepted $10,000 to make a flying trip to Oregon. So the Argonauts came home, bringing the Golden Fleece, bags full, tea canisters full, pockets full of the beautiful shining dust. It was weighed like wheat or bran at $16 an ounce in trade. Men carried gold-dust in pails through the streets, women stored it away in coffee-pots and picklejars. Milk-pans full of it sat on the shelves. Homecomers on horseback threw sacks of it over the fence into the tall grass to lie over-night, or until they took a bite of supper. So great waste resulted from continual measurements that the colonial legislature concluded to mint it into dollars, and a missionary mechanic hammered the dies out of wagon tires. Thus, the Oregon colony exercised all the prerogatives of an independent power, organized government, levied taxes, coined money, raised armies, and carried on war.
Clerk Allen of Fort Vancouver was on that ship with gold from Captain Sutter in payment of his almost outlawed debts at Fort Vancouver. As he came up the Columbia the quick eye of Allen caught sight of Chief Factor James Douglas and his family and servants in a brigade of canoes just entering the Cowlitz.
A hurried colloquy ensued.
"I am removing to Fort Victoria," said Douglas. "You will find Mr. Ogden at the fort ​."
The haughty Douglas stood in his canoe and watched the Argonauts go by. Nelia, his wife, never looked more matronly than on that spring morning of 1849 when sitting there, with her rosebud family around her, she looked her last on Oregon. Allen dropped off at Fort Vancouver, and with him some of the Canadian servants with their piles of $30,000 and $40,000 apiece. Ogden sat with his head on his hand; the fort was desolate, trade abandoned.
"Yes, Douglas is gone," he said sadly. "He saw how matters were going. He could n't stand it, he left; he was too strict a disciplinarian to stay and see the rack and disorder."
Allen had a conference with Ogden in the office, then he took $150,000 in silver coin, nailed it in little boxes, loaded it into a canoe, and followed Douglas up to Puget Sound. They reached Fort Victoria on Vancouver's Island in safety. Three years later James Douglas became the first governor of British Columbia, and his first official act was to summon all the Indians around Victoria and pay them in full for their lands. Sir James, knighted by the queen, ruled long and wisely. Settlers came from England and built their ivied halls and wayside inns, and for many a year Lady Douglas led the noble dames of British Columbia in graces of person, mind, and heart.
There were other passengers in that ship from San Francisco.
After infinite trials, Joe Meek, the trapper, had made his way to Washington, to find his own Virginian cousin the charming Lady of the White House.
He says: "When I heard the silks rustling in the passage I felt more frightened than if a hundred Blackfeet had whooped in my ear. A mist came over my ​
3
eyes, and when Mrs. Polk spoke to me I could n't think of anything to say in return." .
The White House was full of his relatives, from cousins and nephews down to the mulatto servant he played with when a boy. In short order the barber and the tailor transformed the unkempt, buckskin-clad Oregon trapper into a fashionable "Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary from the Republic of Oregon to the Court of the United States! "
The handsome trapper, no longer "old," returned to Oregon with the star of a United States Marshal on his breast. With him came General Joe Lane, the " Marion of the Mexican War," with the sword of Santa Anna at his belt, appointed by President Polk to be the first United States Governor of Oregon Territory.
That same month a company of United States troops were stationed at Fort Vancouver. At last the little colony had been heard, but it was only after Whitman was dead and homes had been desolated by an Indian war. The Whitman massacre awakened and united the settlers of the sparsely peopled valleys, it roused Congress from her dreams, and brought recognition to the first American settlement on the Pacific.
Congress admitted Oregon to territorial rights, and ratified the laws and acts of the Provisional Government the very day that schooner brought in the news of gold from Yerba Buena. Before the trapper-marshal could get back presto! change! Gold brought in the world!
The Acadian days were ended. Governor Abernethy handed over the gavel to Governor Lane, and the technically illegal, yet efficient, Provisional Government was no mor ​e.
But the gold brigade went on. Even sleepy old Champoeg was roused; unquiet crept in as the serpent crept into Eden. In 1849 Canadians and half-breeds went to the mines. A strange epidemic swept among them, so that out of six hundred only one hundred and fifty returned alive. A dozen years later Champoeg itself was carried off in a flood.
The farms on French Prairie were sold to Americans. Little tow-headed Missourians sported in the barns and rifled the flower-gardens. Yankee boys and girls wondered what meant so many huts all in a row back of each Canadian manor house, huts of the Indian slaves of the old Champoeg days.
One of the first acts of the new governor of Oregon Territory was to call in $50,000 of gold coin in five and ten dollar pieces minted at Oregon City. Every coin bore the stamp of a beaver a reminiscence of the Hudson's Bay regime when the beaver-skin was legal tender. When the money was melted at the U. S. mint at San Francisco every piece was found to contain ten per cent more gold than government money. Oregon was honest as well as brave.
The last act of that same administration occurred one still and smoky day when Tiloukaikt and four accomplices of the Whitman massacre were hung in great solemnity at Oregon City. The United States marshal at the gallows was Joe Meek, the trapper. ​
XLIII
THE DEATH OF DR. McLOUGHLItf 1849-57
OREGON politics took on a vivid hue in 1849. A young fire-eater from the States, of surpassing oratory, espoused the anti-Hudson's Bay cause and rode on the popular wave to Congress. Congress, that had looked for some lean and bearded trapper from the far-away West, was startled by the youth, the beauty, the boldness, and the eloquence of Oregon's first delegate, a boy from Maine, scarce two years out. They leaned to catch the fiery invective of this brilliant but misinformed young man, who pictured Dr. McLoughlin, the "old monopolist," holding the savages in leash upon the trembling immigrants of Oregon.
Naturally prejudiced, it took but little to carry the tide. Every other settler in Oregon was confirmed in his title to land, but Dr. McLoughlin's was taken away. The old philanthropist, who had filed his papers for American citizenship, and had been the Father of Oregon, was left without a foot of land in all that territory that he had opened up to trade. When the news reached the Pacific, the Oregonians themselves were astonished few had known of this conspiracy, and fewer still approved.
On the other hand, a great conflagration was kindled in England. Fitzgerald's "Hudson's Bay Company " was published to prove that the Hudson's Bay Company, and especially Dr. McLoughlin, had been in ​imical
to British interests in America. All the old charges against Dr. McLoughlin as assisting Americans were re-cited here. A parliamentary investigation of Dr. John McLoughlin's conduct was demanded, and the fact that he was called "The Father of Oregon "was cited against him in the House of Commons. So in Congress and in Parliament the conflagration raged around one devoted old man, who had tried to keep the peace, and to do his duty to God and humanity.
In those days Dr. McLoughlin gave his heart to good deeds and to prayer. Only now and then did his quick temper emit a volcanic flash. Distrusted by England because he had befriended Americans, distrusted by Americans because he had been an Englishman, he exclaimed bitterly:
"In my old age I find myself a man without a country. Having renounced my allegiance to Great Britain, now I am rejected by the United States."
The Klickitats came down from the mountains to trade for the last time. To their surprise they saw the " Bostons" picketed in the sacred enclosure at Fort Vancouver. They shook their heads and galloped away, riding like mad up the hillsides. Beaver had dropped to nothing.
"Furs? "said Chief Factor Ogden to a visitor. "Lord bless you, man, we lived in furs, dressed in furs, slept in furs. We purchased furs and piled up furs, until the presses were packed from sill to rafter. Five years ago beaver brought eight dollars a skin now, since some pestilent fellow has invented silk nap for hats, it does not pay to transport the skins to London. It 's all one, now, the game is up, the Americans hold the country.
"Lord bless you, man, I was the first white trapper on the lava plains of the Snake. Many a time have I ​
3
entered a mountain pocket where never foot of white man trod before, and trapped my fifteen beaver in a night. Along the Missouri, twenty years ago, a good hunter could trap a hundred in a month. Many an industrious Flathead laid up six hundred in a season. It 's a great business, a great business," continued Ogden, lighting up with his old pride. "The loss of Oregon is a paltry matter all the North is ours. Our boats will carry British manufactures to the remotest wilds, and bring back furs, furs, furs. Wherever the smoke of a wigwam curls you will find our gay ribbons, and beads and bells and scarlet cloth."
Peter Skeen Ogden sat with hand clutched in his grizzly locks, while Bonneville, hero of Irving's tale, the very Bonneville driven back in 1834, came in, and right under his nose laid off a United States military reserve on the old Hudson's Bay ground.
At last the day came to give up the keys. The trapping clans gathered for their last banquet. Dugald McTavish came down from Victoria, and Donald Manson who had built the fort in 1824. Birnie came up from Cathlamet, McKinley from his farm in the Willamette, and Gagnier, who one time ruled the Umpqua. The old hall rang to the last bout and wassail. General Harney was guest where on the morrow he would be master. All night the puncheon floor sprang to the steps of dancers. When the fiddle-strings snapped and the candles flared, McTavish opened the window. The red sun rolled up like a wheel of fire beside Mt. Hood, gilding the dawn of United States possession of Fort Vancouver. By order from Washington, General Harney demolished the old fort, and to-day the prettiest military post in the United States covers the grassy greensward on the north ba ​nk
of the Columbia, six miles from the city of Portland.
Ogden died and was buried under the stars and stripes.
Soon after, Dr. McLoughlin took to his bed. The chill of nearly fifty years before, in the icy Lake Superior, had never left his bones. Dr. Barclay had followed Dr. McLoughlin to Oregon City, and was his constant attendant. Mrs. Barclay, beautiful in person and character, ran over frequently from the cares of her young and growing family. Eloise was a true daughter in directing the servants, in consoling her mother, in watchings many at the bedside of her father.
"Comment allez-vous?" asked the good old wife, as his end drew near. With an upward glance and smile he answered, "A Dieu" It was his last word. In the still nights now and then a groan was heard. The long, white locks curled on the pillow, and silent tears rolled from the closed eyelids. So he died. The Father of Oregon sleeps on the banks of the Willamette within sound of the Falls he loved so well. Peace be with him.
The familiar form that had passed up and down the streets, thinking of others and never of self, had been laid to rest. Carlyle says the sceptic does not know a hero when he sees him! Five years before McLoughlin's death the Oregon legislature had pigeon-holed a resolution thanking him for his generous conduct toward the early settlers. How could they thank him while they withheld his land? In the mean time there had been a great talking and thinking among the people. Men paused when they heard his funeral knell, and women wept. The scales of party strife fell from their eyes.
"This was a good man," they said.
3 ​
"He saved our lives."
"He gave us seed."
"He gave us food."
"His good deeds cannot be told."
"He has been foully dealt with."
"We have brought his gray hairs in sorrow to the grave."
The murmur for restitution grew high and higher, until, five years after his death, the State Legislature by special act restored the land claim to his heirs, too late, alas! to gladden the philanthropic heart.
The peculiar circumstances under which he was situated, make McLoughlin's benefactions unique in history. It is a trite saying on the Columbia, that had any other than a John McLoughlin been at the head of the Hudson's Bay Company's affairs in Oregon, American settlements might have been crushed in their inception. With all the savages at his command, a single hint could have hurled the adventurous immigrants back across the Rocky Mountains, and the United States would never have carried a war of invasion so far from her frontier. The conduct of McLoughlin, his humanity and magnanimity, lift him above the range of common heroes into the sublimated realm of Christian ideals, where he and Whitman walk together, the Father and the Martyr of the Pacific Northwest.
Not in vain did Nathaniel Wyeth, the first American, knock at the gates of Fort Vancouver, not in vain did he sink $100,000 in his Oregon enterprise, not in vain did Whitman fall or the immigrants toil across the Rockies. Out of McLoughlin's semi-barbaric empire has risen the better empire of to-day. From the ceded territory Oregon had been cut, a part of Montana, Washington with her Mediterranean, and Idaho with ​
her wealth of mines. Now the summer tourist flies across the continent in a week. From his palace window he catches glimpses of the old immigrant road, winding through alkali-sand and dust, a road that was lined with graves and wet with blood and tears.
"The Americans are mad! "cried Sir George Simpson, but it is the madness that has strung our cities from Plymouth Rock to the Philippines.
The moccasin age is past. The evanescent fur trade is over. Cavalcades of merry trappers wind over the hills and glide on the streams no more. Those daring men, more worthy than many fictitious heroes of romance, have passed with the passing of the red man. Where the little "Cadboro ' "and occasional ships from London fluttered the triangular pennon sixty years ago, the fleets of all nations come in, bearing away, like busy ants, their burdens of lumber, fish, and grain.
An interesting scene was enacted in Oregon's State House the other day, when the pioneers gathered to dedicate a portrait of the Hudson's Bay governor who befriended them on their first arrival across the plains. There was a hush, and few dry eyes, as they heard again the story of his virtues. "And now," said Oregon's foremost judge, pointing to the face that smiled benignly from the canvas, "it is to be hung in the State Capitol, where you may look at it, and show it to your children, and they to their children, and say: 4 This is the old doctor, the good doctor, Dr. John McLoughlin.' " ​ ​
THE BRIDGE of the GODS
A ROMANCE OF INDIAN OREGON
BY F. H. BALCH
New Seventeenth Edition, enlarged size. With eight full-page
illustrations by Laurens Maynard Dixon. tamo.
280 pages. Gilt top. Net $1.00
T7 NCOURAGED by the steady demand for Mr. Balch's fine romance, JQ, the publishers issued an attractive new edition (the eighth), embellished with notable drawings by Mr. Laurens Maynard Dixon. This tale of Oregon in the seventeenth century has fairly earned its lasting popularity, not only by the intense interest of the story, but by its faithful delineation of Indian character.
From the legends of the Columbia River the author has derived a truthful and realistic picture of the powerful tribes that inhabited the Oregon country two centuries ago. The tragic fate of the young minister who came from New England to convert the Indians is the climax of a story of exceptional strength, in which savage superstitions and Christian courage struggle for mastery.
Mr. Dixon's work on the illustrations is remarkable for its strength and realism, and for his perfect understanding of the type he portrays. Although comparatively young, he is rapidly becoming recognized as one of the best men in his particular field.
"The Bridge of the Gods "falls very little short of being a great book in its way. If it falls at all short of that goal, it is because great books of any kind are very rare indeed; but if judged by the standard of the present day, then we must emphatically call " The Bridge of the Gods "a great romance. Syracuse Herald.
It is a work of unusual strength and interest, and well deserves the success denoted by the attractive illustrated edition. The Dial.
The new edition of the book is illustrated with pictures by L. Maynard Dixon, who has studied his subject among the survivors of the tribes. The book in its new edition deserves the attention of the serious, because it summarizes knowledge not to be found in any single volume outside the Bancroft library. Boston Journal.
The powerful Oregon tribes, as they were two centuries ago, are powerfully depicted and well used. Savage superstitions and Christian courage appear in its pages. The illustrations by L. Maynard Dixon are especially to be recommended. Louisville CourierJournal.
The book lives in a new dress, with new illustrations, but with the original fire and pathos. Denver Times.
"The Bridge of the Gods "is strong in its description of aboriginal life, customs, and manners. . . . There is a charm in the telling of the tale that lingers long after its perusal. San Francisco Chronicle.
To those who have traversed the ground, and know something of Indian character and the wild, free life of pioneer days, the story will be charming. Chicago Inter-Ocean.
It is a truthful and realistic picture of the powerful Indian tribes that inhabited the Oregon country two centuries ago. ... It is a book that will be of value as an historical story of interest and charm there are few novels that can rival it.
Boston Traveller.
A. C. McCLURG & CO., Publishers ​
THE CONQUEST
By EVA EMERY DYE
BEING THE TRUE STORT OF LEWIS AND CLARK
SIXTH EDITION
12mo. Gilt top. 504 pages. $1.50
NO book published in recent years has more of tremendous import between its covers, and certainly no recent novel has in it more of the elements of a permanent success. An historical romance which tells with accuracy and inspiring style of the bravery of the pioneers in winning the western continent should have a lasting place in the esteem of every American.
Stirring deeds, stirringly recorded. New York Sun.
Mrs. Dye has covered the field. New York Times Saturday Review.
Every American should read it to understand the beginnings of his country. N. Y. Commercial Advertiser.
Mrs. Dye achieves what we conceive to be the true aim of the historical novelist the catching and fixing the reflex from individual lives of the greater happenings that belong to history proper. The Churchman, New York.
Brilliant to the point of inspiration. It is written with a rush and vigor which reproduces the breathless race of the Anglo-Saxon over the land. The Interior, Chicago.
The author's style is strong and graphic, the grasp of her subject so firm that it inspires confidence and, despite its wealth of historic lore, has not one dull page. Detroit News.
Mrs. Dye has produced a book of extraordinary strength and power, setting forth in splendid style one of the greatest episodes of American history. Los Angeles Express.
None of the popular historical novels of the last two or three years can compare with this in value, or will be apt to keep pace with it in popularity. San Francisco Bulletin.
There is in this book the best picture in fiction of George Rogers Clark and of his brother William. Never before has been packed between covers such a wealth of enterprising material. Louisville Courier-Journal.
The style is brilliant, dramatic, and enthusing. The reader is carried on from one exciting episode to another, and a series of vivid pictures is rapidly presented, keeping the interest alive from the first page to the last. Cleveland Plain Dealer.
Ought to popularize the wonderful story of the subduing of the American wilderness. . . . Destined to be one of the popular books of the New Year. Chicago RecordHerald.
The virility of the book is fairly amazing. It does not seem at all like a woman's work, and indeed, would be worthy of the pen of any of the foremost American writers. Troy Daily Times. ​Page:McLoughlin and Old Oregon.djvu/391 ​Page:McLoughlin and Old Oregon.djvu/392 ​Page:McLoughlin and Old Oregon.djvu/393 ​Page:McLoughlin and Old Oregon.djvu/394