# History of Oregon Literature/Chapter 9

CHAPTER 9
SQUAw WIVES AND SQUAw MEN
I love thee, I love but thee! With a love that shall not die Till the sum grows cold, And the stars are old, And the leaves of the Judgment Book onfold! bayard Taylor
OF INDIAN women the first Ruth amid the alien corn was Powhatan’s daughter. Pocahontas was the first squaw wife and John Rolfe was the first squaw man. She became what modern newspaper reporters would call a social registerite and he gained rather than lost caste in the polite gregariousness of his day. It seemed a charming and appropriate marriage then, and, due to the pretty reports on it by generations of school historians, it has seemed so ever since. Be cause of the enchanting pages of those old writers, many a boy in wistful reverie has pictured that Indian girl stealing forth once more from the wigwams of her people to the gates of Jamestown; and this time he was the one for whom she asked, it was upon him she smiled—and these anachronistic longings repeated through a succession of dreaming boyhoods would have done nothing less than transform grandmother, mother and wife, all into Pocahontases. Some who were nourished on this romantic delicacy in the little school texts, will no doubt find it a harshness to their sensi bilities, a rude outspokenness, to hear John Rolfe called a squaw man. It shows that a particularized impression, as wide and long-standing as this one has been, will not always mold public opinion t... s pattern... this cas... has been snugly harbored along with general views exactly ​
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ogenerato ort... ... d , due o the ret... s o ever since. e then, asso ""...ans... ha... squa... She became " caste... seeme the opposite... has not kept other alliance... the same nature from being regularly frowned upon. Ah, but Pocahontas was a princess and very beautiful... were many Indian wive... Oregon Territory princesses, and quit... good-lookin... the freshnes... maiden hood when white men’s eyes first rested satisfyingly and selectively upon them, though age may have made a difference later, and Pocahontas died young. Marriages with Indian women, startin... auspici ousl... Jamestown, soon lost all flavo... romance an... l appropriateness. Other racial mixtures could suit Our aesthetics, our social icons and our morals. The second Lady Arnold, wif... Sir Edwin Arnold who wrote Light... Asia, was a Japanese woman, and a doughboy returning from the war with a French bride could romanticise himsel... his communit... enjoy ing peculiar bliss, his intrinsic happiness enhance... the env... other men. The tan... feminine myster... heightene... being foreign... marriage with al most any other woman outside his own nation would ad... a man’s glamor and self-importance among his neighbors. But one who marrie... Indian woman was only a squaw man. This fastidious prejudic... further show... our amazemen... captive girls afterwards given a chanc... escape but preferrin... stay. Ther... one dramatic account somewher... American histor... perhaps onl... American literatur... a white woma... the momen... such a rescue, wherein with great quick ness she ha... make her decision between getting back the things tenderly remembere... her girlhoo... making new abnegations not apparen... the white m ​en
now come to take her away; the recovered joys of civilized life were held out to her with overwhelming suddenness, but there was her Indian man looking down into her face in terrible suspense, saying nothing, only with a deep and anguished appeal in his dark eyes, and with him she fled in continuance of their love under the stars and in the broad silences. This point of view has not actually prevented a great amount of mating with Indian women but it has stifled sympathetic literature about it. How many books of fiction or of poetry can you recall, with the heroine a full-blooded Indian woman and the hero a white man? The most important Oregon novel in 90 years of Oregon novel writing is The Bridge of The Gods, in which the lovely Wallulah, daughter of Chief Multnomah, was only a half-breed. The author, Fred eric Homer Balch, was a preacher as well as a novelist, and the preachers and missionaries, for all such mar riages they solemnized, were never spiritually recon ciled to the practice. The first ones to come were hor rified at the amount of sinful living they saw all about ; and, while they quickened the consciences of several old-timers to belated and remedial ceremonies in order to make bad matters a little better, and gave formality to the start of new unions in order to keep things straight, they could never quite see that all this mixing up was a good and proper business. This view did not change but crystallized and widened, so that Balch must have felt much the same way about it while writing The Bridge of the Gods in 1890. His own sympathy was not enough to create a full-blooded
woman in star relationship to the eager pulses, deep loves and painful renunciations of his book.
The missionaries themselves were practically never squaw men. They stood out for white woman and a wise Board back. East helped them, or at any rate women came along or were soon provided, peradventure in a safeguarding awareness that strength against temptation will be less falteringly preached by those who do not also struggle with it or feel its power. While they held squeamish views of these unions even when regularized, they nevertheless propagandized and performed the marriage rite as much as they could for white men and native women. In the unholy biology that God gives to humans, it was the best thing possible, infinitely better than the horrifying status quo.
Following are the eight entries in the marriage page of the Oregon Mission record book, with explanatory notes on some of the contracting parties, who included native women or women of mixed blood in all but one of the brief, ungarnished items.
Saturday 7th March 1835 Mr. John Denton was married to Miss Isabel Shanagarati at the house of Lewis Shanagarati in the Willamette settlement by Jason Lee.
Saturday 25th Feb. 1837.
Mr. Webley J. Hauxhurst was married to Miss Mary of Yamhill tribe, at the Mission house Willamette settlement by Jason Lee.
According to the Hauxhurst family bible, the date was March 16. ​Later in this chapter a quotation from Reverend George Gary will tell how Hauxhurst after he got religion tried to send Miss Mary back to the Yamhill lodges and how her supplications at his door in the dead of night reinstated her in his household, and later resulted in this ceremony.
Saturday 11th Feb. 1837.
Mr. Solomon H. Smith was married to Miss Ellen of the Clatsop tribe at the house of Mr. Smith Willamette settlement by Jason Lee.
Jason Lee must have tied this knot with a very wry face. Solomon Smith had succeeded John Ball as teacher of the half-breed children at Fort Vancouver in 1833, and during the next year conducted the first school in what is now Oregon. The hundredth anniversary of this event was widely celebrated in the state in 1934 by teachers and friends of education. It was not brought out how connubially erratic he had been—only the great and lasting good he had done. As Miss Ellen stood before him. Jason Lee, if he knew her story, must have looked appraisingly at this daughter of Chief Coboway of the Clatsops to see what there was about her to make men go mad. She had been the Indian wife of a French baker at Fort Vancouver. While teaching there Solomon Smith had fallen in love with her and had run away with her and her three children. Glorious Clatsop daughter, we would have looked at you, maybe with reproof but certainly with admiration, if Jason Lee didn't—in that day of helpless womanhood men never had the wish to leave you, it was you who left them or held them at your will, and here nearly four years afterwards you bring your white schoolmaster to the altar! By 1840, we are told she "wished to return to her own people as a missionary, having experienced a change of heart; and on the 16th of May they started on their trip, and held religious services with the Indians wherever they found it convenient to land."
Elwood Evans tells the story differently. She was still living at Clatsop Plains, a beautiful old woman of 85, when his book was published in 1889, and his account was probably based on an interview with her. According to Evans, ..."it was discovered by McLoughlin that her husband, Porier, had another wife in Canada; and upon the chief factor's advice she left the Frenchman, retaining only the youngest of her three children, which she also relinquished a few years later. She took up her residence with her sister, Mrs. Gervais, at French Prairie, but was frequently at the fort. There she was first seen by Solomon Smith, and sought by him as a wife. In the absence of any civil or ecclesiastical authority, ceremony was dispensed with; but in conscience they were bound, and a few years later were form​ally joined by the missionary Jason Lee." Was her story right and that of the historians wrong? Or had the events of her romance become obscure in her memory or had long years of civilized life and conversion made her sensitive to the elopement and desertion accounts or was she parroting a more seemly version adopted by her husband? In any event it is merely a matter of historical accuracy and not at They lived together in congenial happiness for 39 years all of censure. until his death in 1876, and they had seven children, which made a total of ten for her.
Monday 3 April 1837. Mr. T. J. Hubbard was married to Miss Mary Sommata at the house of Mr. Billeck Willamette settlement by Jason Lee.
Monday 1st May 1837. Mr. John Hard was married to Miss Liset De Portes at the house of Mr. De Portes Willamette settlement by Daniel Lee.
Sabbath 16th July 1837. Were married at the Mission house Rev. Jason Lee to Miss Anna Maria Pitman, by Daniel Lee-Mr. Cyrus Shepard to Miss Susan Downing and Mr. Charles Roe to Miss Nancy an Indian girl, by Jason Lee.
   This marriage day shines out in the Oregon country as the marriages of Nellie Grant and Alice Roosevelt in the White House. But what of that other union sanctified in such immortal company? Charles Roe at this time was 31 years old and he lived with the Indian wife he took on that July Sabbath until she died several years later. Then, in 1856, he married another Indian girl, a half-breed. He killed her out of jealousy three years later and was hanged.
Tuesday 21 Nov. 1837. At the house of Mr. Leslie Mr. H. K. W. Perkins to Miss Elvira Johnson by Daniel Leslie.
Monday 22 Jan. 1838. Were married Mr. Joseph Gervais to Miss Margaret of the Clatsop tribe. Mr. Xavier La De Root to Miss Julia Gervais by Jason Lee at the house of Mr. Gervais Willamette settlement.
   Miss Margaret was the sister of the vivid Mrs. Solomon Smith. ​Their father, old Chief Coboway of the Clatsops, was indeed a man with eligible daughters. The Great Spirit, in wayward gratuity, touched two little girls in the same wigwam and left them with that mysterious grace which "if you have, it doesn't matter whether you have anything else—and if you don't have, it doesn't matter what else you have," but in his capricious giving the Great Spirit also takes away, granting only a lease and never a deed, and here is a newspaper report nearly one hundred years later:
So it was at "Willamette settlement." How it was with the Mountain Men and their Nez Percé wives in the region of Fort Hall in 1 836, is told in the History of Oregon by W. H. Gray, who came out with Whitman and Spalding. Eight "mountain hunters" are presented in sketches, not by name but anonymously by number, with the introductory statement that most of them found "their way eventually into the settlement of Oregon, and becoming active and prominent men in the organization of the provisional government, as also good citizens." Six of the eight had native wives, and, although it was before the bona fide institution of marriage had come to the region, Gray's accounts, for a lay missionary, are liberal and tolerant. He even tells without being shocked how he found No. 1 teaching the innocent lips of his little half-breed papoose "just beginning to speak a few words" to form syllables of blasphemy. Following is a condensed quotation of his sketch of No. 7: ​
   A short thick-set man, with a Nez Percé wife; a good honest farmer; has done credit to himself and family in giving them every possible advantage for education and society,... ; his family are respected; his Indian wife he considers as good as some of his neighbors', that don't like her or her children. In this opinion all who are not saturated with our cultus mixture agree with him....
Mr. T. C. Elliott gives a copy of a marriage agreement in 1840 between fifteen-year-old half-breed Sarah Julia Ogden and a thirty-year-old Scotch husband, Archibald McKinlay, sufficiently affidavitted, one would say, for any marriage, though no representative of the church was present. On the basis, however, of individual cases known not to have been certificated in any way, Mr. Elliott perhaps generalizes a little too widely in believing that such notaried agreements were common among Hudson's Bay Company officers and employes, at least before 1840.
Peter Skene Ogden himself was never ritualistically married to Sarah Julia's mother, a Spokane woman, his second wife. On his death bed in Oregon City he still refused, even when urged by Dr. John McLoughlin whose own knot had been formally tied several years after the event by James Douglas as a justice of the peace and not ecclesiastically by the uppish Reverend Herbert Beaver. Ogden is reported to have declared that he would "be damned if he would," and while he lay dying said in effect that the kind of life he had lived with his wife was enough and would have to stand. And so obdurately —with final words of faith and love that ought indeed to have been as valid to the public and as precious to a wife as any certificate—he was borne to the Mountain View Cemetery in Ore​gon City. The memorial stone erected at his grave in 1923 contains no conjugal reference.
The eligibility of Indian maidens as wives began to decline with the coming of white girls across the plains and still more so when they became indigenous by birth. The record of marriages in the 40's and 50's by Reverend J. S. Griffin, pastor of church and congregation of Tualatin Plains, has been preserved in the Library of Pacific University. In a list of 29 marriages only three of the brides were native women. For the red maidens in the tepees and lodges the times were changing. They could no longer dream in the old way that by the completeness and unselfishness and tender compulsion of their own devotion they could gradually become enveloped in the enduring affection of the white men they coveted. And so disconsolately the chief's daughter herself might stand by the roaring waterfall, might sit pensively on a mossy log along a forest trail, might look out from cliffs upon an immensity of geography that was glad and upon an immensity of life that was sad, because some Anglo-Saxon face she cherished in her visions was unobtainable and out of reach. She might know that her love was stronger, that her womanly capacity to give was greater, that she could more certainly uncage the spirit of happiness. These qualifications and the beauty of her face and slender body reflected in the pools, benefitted her but seldom, and mostly left her bereft, in the covered wagon days—because her face was dark and the face of her rival was pale.
It was the kind of melancholy felt by all losers of delightful monopolies. The Indian girls had had it all ​their own way for a third of a century. According to W. H. Gray there were in the country by the fall of 1840 a total of 33 American women, and 36 American settlers, "25 of them with native wives." It was 1836 before any white women came to Oregon Territory to stay, though Jane Barnes, the English barmaid, had arrived at Astoria in 1814 to upset things for a few months with her finery, her blondness and her coquetry. So there were no white women in those early days and after they started to come it was a long time before they were enough to offset the accumulated bachelorhood. But there was plenty of Indian women, presumably in their old biological excess over men — themselves finding hyas kloshe the fair-skinned trappers; and with fathers, chiefs or otherwise, tickled beyond words to have white sons-in-law. The only alternative was celibacy, but the stuff of these robust men was not the stuff of monks.
Love, so big an element in literature, exists in early Oregon literature at all only because there were squaw wives and squaw men. Some examples are here brought together to show that in a field of such neglected or unfriendly observation, there were yet a few who could look on and understand.
1
Wallulah and the Missionary
From The Bridge of the Gods
By Frederic Homer Balch
   Wallulah in Frederic Homer Balch's Indian romance was the daughter of Chief Multnomah and of a white woman from Asia cast ashore in shipwreck on the Oregon coast. She was the "most beautiful woman in all the land of the Wauna." This is the single ​purely imaginative selection included, not by choice but by necessity, and the difficulty of finding others indicates how fiction writers have shied away from tender love stories involving white men and Indian girls.
Cecil Gray remained in the almost deserted camp. He tried in vain to talk with the few chiefs who had not gone out to join the hunt. Missionary work was utterly impossible that day. Wallulah and the problem of his love filled his thoughts. His mind, aroused and burning, searched and analyzed the question upon every side.
Should he tell Multnomah of Snoqualmie's cruelty, representing his unfitness to be the husband of the gentle Wallulah?
To the stern war-chief that very cruelty would be an argument in Snoqualmie's favor. Should he himself become a suitor for her hand? He knew full well that Multnomah would reject him with disdain; or, were he to consent, it would involve the Willamettes in a war with the haughty and vindictive Cayuse. Finally, should he attempt to fly With her to some other land? Impossible. All the tribes of the Northwest were held in the iron grip of Multnomah. They could never escape; and even if they could, the good he had done among the Indians, the good he hoped would grow from generation to generation, would be all destroyed if it were told among them that he who claimed to come to them with a message from God had ended by stealing the chief's daughter. And had he a right to love anyone?—had he a right to love at all? God had sent him to do a work among the Indians; was it not wicked for him to so much as look either to the right or to the left till that work was done?
Amid this maze of perplexities, his tense, agonized soul sought in vain for some solution, some conclusion. At times he sat in his lodge and brooded over these things till he seemed wrought up almost to madness, till his form trembled with excitement, and the old pain at his heart grew sharp and deadly.
Then again, trying to shake it off, he went out among the ​few Indians who were left in the camp and attempted to do missionary work} but the enthusiasm was lacking, the glow and tenderness was gone from his words, the grand devotion that had inspired him so long failed him at last. He was no longer a saintly apostle to the Indians; he was only a human lover, torn by stormy human doubts and fears.
Even the Indians felt that some intangible change had come over him, and as they listened their hearts no longer responded to his eloquence; they felt somehow that the life was gone from his words. He saw it too, and it gave him a keen pang.
"I will go and see her. I will, without letting her know that I love her, give her to understand my position and her own. She shall see how impossible it is for us ever to be aught to each other. And I shall urge her to cling to God and walk in the path he has appointed for her, while I go on in mine."
So thinking, he left his lodge that evening and took the path to Wallulah's home.
2
Marriage of Comcomly's Daughter
Condensed from the Account in Astoria
By Washington Irving
   Though this is written as history, the style is definitely reminiscent of the exaggerations and railleries of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Irving's two books on Oregon have been widely read, but the history in them has been considerably panned.
M'Dougal.... suddenly conceived the idea of seeking the hand of one of the native princesses, a daughter of the one-eyed potentate Comcomly, who held sway over the fishing tribe of the Chinooks, and had long supplied the factory with smelts and sturgeons.
Some accounts give rather a romantic origin to this affair, tracing it to the stormy night when M'Dougal, in the course of an exploring expedition, was driven by stress of weather to seek shelter in the royal abode of Comcomly. Then a ​there he was first struck with the charms of this piscatory princess, as she exerted herself to entertain her father's guest....
We have more than once had occasion to speak of the shrewdness of Comcomly; but never was it exerted more adroitly than on this occasion. He was a great friend of M'Dougal, and pleased with the idea of having so distinguished a son-in-law; but so favorable an opportunity of benefitting his own fortune was not likely to occur a second time, and he determined to make the most of it. Accordingly, the negotiation was protracted with true diplomatic skill. Comcomly was extravagant in his terms; rating the charms of his daughter at the highest price, and indeed she is represented as having one of the flattest and most aristocratical heads in the tribe. At length the preliminaries were all happily adjusted. On the 20th of July (1813), early in the afternoon, a squadron of canoes crossed over from the village of the Chinooks, bearing the royal family of Comcomly, and all his court.
That worthy sachem landed in princely state, ... A horse was in waiting to receive the princess, who was mounted be hind one of the clerks, and thus conveyed, coy but compliant, to the fortress. Here she was received with devout, though decent joy, by her expecting bridegroom.
Her bridal adornments, it is true, at first caused some little dismay, having painted and annointed herself for the occasion according to the Chinook toilet; by dint, however, of copious ablutions, she was freed from all adventitious tint and fragrance, and entered into the nuptial state, the cleanest princess that had ever been known, of the somewhat unctuous tribe of the Chinooks.
3
Betrothed Unbeknownst by Quick-Thinking Ogden
   Though presented with some elaboration of color and connotation, this account holds to the essential facts of an event historically reported in the life of Peter Skene Ogden.
​Once the avenging wrath of Chief Howhow was changed to smiles by Ogden's promise that the chief's Cowlitz daughter might have a white husband from the fort. If all marriages are not arranged in heaven, this one at least was arranged to keep a man from going there. The absent youth had no idea he was being betrothed as a way out of that ticklish moment, but made good the vicarious pledge gladly enough. Even in his extremity, Ogden had not been rash. His quick mind had put together and counted on two ideas, a chief's customary eagerness for a white son-in-law and a white lad's response to the loveliness of that Cowlitz girl—for the beauty of Howhow's daughter was unusual among Indian maidens.
4
Indian Wives
By Thomas Nelson Strong
   This sympathetic account is from Cathlamet on the Columbia, a little book first published in Portland in 1906 and reprinted in a beautiful edition in 1930. Dr. Alexander Goldenweiser, professor of anthropology in the University of Oregon, describes it as "a miniature epic through which many characters pass and in which the old Indian is traced casually and selectively from the days of his opulence and joyful existence to the sad parting days of a dying people. The sympathy, the sensitivity, and reserve of the author's retrospect leave the reader with a sense of sadness, mellowed by the beauty of a truly literary presentation."
The relation of the white chiefs of the Hudson's Bay Company with native women presents a point of vivid interest in Indian history. For twenty years Fort Vancouver, like all other Hudson's Bay posts, was the home of fair-faced men and dark-faced women.
There is no doubt as to the standing of the women. They had been wedded in the ancient and orderly fashion of their people and in the forum of conscience were as much married as ever Queen Victoria was. They knew that their husbands could dismiss them at any time, but this was the ancient and inalienable right of the husband according to Indian ideas, ​and so without a thought or care for the future they gladly gave themselves to their white masters and made loving and dutiful wives, and being used to the country and at home, made very effective helpmeets. The men accepted them upon the same terms and not one man in ten dreamed at first of the relation becoming a permanent one. They were not of the class of the settlers, and each man expected in due time to return to England and there marry and found a family.
Some of them did dismiss their Indian wives. There were two ways of doing this. One was to pass the wife, often with a bonus of goods or furs, over to some other white man; and this, although a cruel process, was much more merciful than the other, which was to send the woman back to her own people.
No one who has ever seen an Indian wife of a white man sent back to her people ever wanted to see such a thing again. Sorrowfully gathering up her little belongings, lingering over the task as long as possible, the poor dumb creature would finally come to the last parting. Without outcry or struggle she would try to accept her fate. One or two good bye kisses, for the Indian women under the training of the white men soon learned to kiss, and then with her little bundles she would make her way back to the lodges.
For days and weeks she would bring little gifts of berries and game and lay them on her husband's doorstep, and for days and weeks would haunt the trading post or humbly stand near her husband's house, where he could see her, not daring to ask to be taken back, only hoping that his mood might change and that she might again be restored to her old place.
Resolute men broke down under the strain of such partings and took back their dusky wives for better or for worse until death should them part.
With the higher class of Hudson's Bay man the original marriage relation was very rarely dissolved. Little by little the light shone in upon him. Seeing at last clearly what he had done and strengthened by love of wife and children ​after many soul struggles, he faced his duty nobly, and calling in the minister took upon himself the marriage vows that bound him as well as the woman.
Dr. McLoughlin was married after the English fashion in 1836, eleven years after he and his wife had come to Fort Vancouver. Sir James Douglas was married at the same time, while another prominent Hudson Bay man and his wife were joined together in the white man's fashion by the same minister that married their daughter to her husband and at the same time.
Romance treats it lightly, but whole tragedies of self- renunciation were bound up in many of these marriages...
5
Family of Black Red-Skins
By Hubert Howe Bancroft
George Winslow, designated in the various histories as "a colored man," came up from California with Ewing Young and his party in 1834.
None of the others appear to have been conspicuous in any direction, except George Winslow, the negro, who took an Indian wife and settled with her in a cabin on Clackamas Prairie, six miles below Oregon City, and raised a family of black red-skins. George assumed to be a doctor, and complained to subsequent emigrants to Oregon that the advent of Doctor Barclay of the Hudson's Bay Company had "bust out" his business. He also sometimes repudiated his antecedents, and related how he came to Oregon in 1811 as cook to John Jacob Astor! Truth was never a conspicuous ingredient of his character, and in his large stories he sometimes seemed almost to forget his name; as ten years after his arrival in Oregon I find a negro calling himself Winslow Anderson living near Oregon City.
   In Ewing Young and His Estate appears this memorandum for October 24, 1840: "Winslow commenced for a years work." Winslow's name occurs many times in these records for 1840 and 1841, in the first series of entries as Anderson Winslow or Winslow and ​then as Winslow Anderson or Anderson, and twice as G. Winslow. A boy was handed the “Minets of Ewing Youngs Sail” and was told: “This man whose name had reversible parts was a negro. Check through and see what he bought.” The young research assistant could not wait to finish before coming with shining eyes to report what he had already found: “He bought, I fine vest for $5 and I pr. fine boots, Old, for $2.” It was George Winslow, “a colored man,” all right, and his squaw and chocolate-red papooses must have feasted their loving eyes on him when he rigged himself out for the first time in this and the other fine raiment the records show that he bought. But he must have reflected ruefully that he would have been still grander if “Cook Owyhee” had not been such a strong competitor at the auctions.
6
The Beauty of Nez Percé Women
By S. A. Clarke
The beauty of the Nez Perce women was a proverb among the free trappers and fur company men.... The Hudson's Bay Company leaders generally chose wives from among the Nez Percés, and the preference seems justifiable.... They had buckskin dresses, fringed at all the seams and beautifully ornamented with bead work. Their jet-black locks hung down in front of each shoulder in heavy braids. Their eyes were large and lustrous, and their features were almost classic in the beauty of contour. The Greek model was equalled, if not excelled, and the delicate tawny skin, that was susceptible to the keenest emotions, would blush with crimson, or dimple with mirthful smiles. Their dresses, leggings and moccasins were worn with the utmost grace of negligé, and they seemed entirely conscious of the charms they possessed.
7
A Knocking at the Door at Night
By Reverend George Gary
Webley J. Hauxhurst came to Oregon with Ewing Young, and started the first grist mill. He “had been a man of rough exterior.” The Mission record of his marriage to “Miss Mary of Yamhill tribe” has been given, dated February 25, 1837. Lee and Frost report ​
.5 his conversion in January of that year. Why were not the two events simultaneous or the sequence reversed? What pioneer system of in dulgences was worked out within the church to cover that period of a month or so between baptism and the altar? Sunday, April 13 (1845). Today the funeral of Bro. Hauxhurst's child was attended. Bro. Leslie preached. This Bro. H. is more a pleasant agreeable gentleman than the ordinary class of men. He was born in Brooklyn, near New York, was formerly a sailor, left his vessel in California, came into the country nearly ten years ago with all the pro pensities of a depraved life. The cause of temperence first took him and he was rescued from his cups. In a little while, he took an Indian girl and lived with her as he pleased. Conscience troubled him, and he furnished this girl with blankets and sundry other articles, and sent her, as he sup posed, to her people. In the night, I am informed, he heard her at his door beseeching him to let her in, averring her love to him and promising to be good to him if he would let her live with him; his purpose in part yielded; h... t her in; and knowin... was wicked for the... live togethe... they had done, he... a short time, soon experienced religion, an... now a respectable ma... the community, onl... has a squaw for his wife. This... i s presumed... the source for great mortificatio... himself and afflictio... his friends; ye... i s leading a religious life; his oldest chil... a t school an... takes a great interes... his children. But the Fathe... all has taken this little one home; wher... will never suffer eithe... his feeling... relation... life for being a half-breed. 8 THE PRICE of SQUAw Wives By THEODoRE WINTHRoP This was written during a tri... the Oregon countr... 1853. The pric... blankets was abou... each... the cos... money ca... easily estimate... the following figures... . And now that I a... the tariff for squaws, dry goods buy the... Siwashdo... sometime... ​Christendom,
The conventional price is expressed in blankets. Blankets paid to papa, buy: five, a cheap and unclean article, a drudge; ten, a tolerable article, a cook and basket-maker; twenty, a fine article of squaw, learned in kamas-beds, and with skull flat as a shingle; fifty, a very superior article, ruddy with vermilion and skilled in embroidering buckskin with porcu pine-quills; and one hundred blankets, a princess, with the beauty and accomplishments of her rank. Mothers in civili zation will be pleased to compare these with their current rates. 9 Phil Sheridan's Rogue River Wife Never Forgot By Mrs. Elizabeth Collins This poignant little chronicle of a woman's love may not be found in General Sheridan's own two-volume story. Mrs. Elizabeth Collins was a pioneer of 1844. Her recollections are contained in Polk County Pioneer Sketches, compiled by a chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution and published by Earle Richardson of the Polk County Observer. Mrs. Collins in the same sketch tells about another squaw, who, when deserted by her white husband for a white girl, sought to bring repentence to her lover through vicarious suicide — by taking their little half-breed papoose down to the Yamhill River and drowning him. Of a less melancholy but more sensational nature is her explicit mention of the squaw wife and two half-breed children of General Grant. This is not without foundation in other old settler talk, but a competent investigator, after working on the matter for several months, had to report that he could find nothing definite, although he discovered a few intangible clews that might have served as the basis for such reports or have grown out of them. Could this man, even with all the power he afterwards possessed, have commanded silence to such a degree and for so long — could he have obliterated from all certain knowledge the existence of three human beings, if they had ever existed ? We know of the tears he wiped away when at Fort Vancouver he received in the mail from St. Louis the tracery of his real baby's hand. Was this only another and a parallel contradiction in one whose tenderness was like a woman's towards his own small sons but who could view the slaughter of other men's sons at Shil ​oh
and in the Wilderness with no sickness in his heart, no mist in his cold eyes? For those who care to read, Mrs. Collins' brief but very positive statements may be found in Volume One of Polk County Pioneer Sketches, sponsored by so careful and patriotic a society as the Daughters of the American Revolution, and independent personal acquaintance testimony in confirmation may be secured in the typed manuscript copies of Recollections of Portland in the ^0 ,s, 8o'$ and 90'i by Charles Mose Oliver. Meanwhile, if you will and if you can, dismiss as fable the inter racial romance of one of the two men whose fame filled the world, and read now with full belief of the great love that was given to and never taken away from the other. Lieut. Phil Sheridan often stopped at our house, and many times spent the night with us on his trips from Grand Ronde to Fort Hoskins. It was a day's ride from Grand Ronde to our home, and seven miles farther on to Fort Hoskins. Later he was stationed at Fort Hoskins... . I knew Sheridan's squaw wife, who was the daughter of Chief Harney of the Rogue River Tribe, and who has been at our home a number of times. She was a bright little wo man, very good looking, and quite likeable. Sheridan was always good and kind to her and taught her to read and do many things. They had no children. But when he went back to Washington and left her, it almost broke her heart. We all liked Phil Sheridan. One day she came to our home, pretending to be looking for a horse, but she really came to tell us that she was going on a trip to Washington, D. C. Her father had died and her brother was now Chief Harney, and he and she, along with several other Indians, influential among the tribes, had been invited to go to Wash ington, at the expense of the government. She was all fitted out in clothes and trunks and ready for the trip. I told her she would see many wonderful things and probably see Phil Sheridan, and asked her to come and tell me about her trip when she came back. It was wonderful,the things she told me afterwards about her trip and what she saw. And she did see Phil Sheridan. He came and shook hands with them all and took her hand ​
and asked about her welfare and then took them all upon the rostrum and introduced them. After that she never saw him again.
10 GOOD-BY FROM THE CLIFFS
By Joaquin Miller
Joaquin Miller in his younger days was a squaw man but his own record of his wilderness marriage is obscure and dubious. The history of Siskiyou County, California, published in 1881, seven years after his own account, says: "No one expects a poet to tell the truth, even when he makes a pretense of doing so... . He claims to have married the daughter of a Modoc chief, when he never lived within a hun dred miles of the Modocs... . He lived with a McLeod River squaw, who still gains a precarious livelihood in the cabin of another squaw man, who seems to have stuck to it longer than the poet. A few years ago he took his half-breed daughter from the mountain wilds to be educated, an act for which he deserves great credit, contrasted, as i... , with the course pursued by many pominent men, some of military fame, who have families of uncared-for children in the mountains." In reference to this statement in the Siskiyou County history, George Sterling has said
"As to the half-breed daughter, whose name was Calli Shasta... i s true that Joaquin had her venture down into 'civilization.' The education conferred, however, was no great matter, for she went merely to the public schools for a brief period. Such culture as she acquired was due to Ina Coolbrith, who was for seven years her foster-mother, and with whom she live... San Francisco... . after the girl's marriage had proved a failure, she went to live with her father on The Hights, died there shortly, an... buried on the westward-giving hillside... " In Unwritten History: Life Amongst the Modocs, sometimes called Paquita the Indian Heroine, Miller wrote on one page: "The mar riage ceremony of these peopl... not imposing. The father gives a great feast, to which all are invited, but the bride and bridegroom do not partake of food." On the next page, without any intervening or previous description of a romance, he concluded the chapter cryptically: "Late in the fall, the old chief made the marriage-feast, and at that feast neither I nor his daughter took meat. .. ." Subsequently, until the last chapter, his references to her remained meager and vague, advisedly so: "In the sprin... . . pushed back over the moun tains to my Indians. All were there, Paquita, Klamat, the chief, and his daughter, who, although she was much to me, I shall barely m ​en
tion in these pages. This is a book not of the Indian woman's love, ..." Then he told of a farewell which he meant at the time not to be permanent: "Good-byes were said, I led my steed a little way, and an Indian woman walked at my side. Some things shall be sacred. Recital is sometimes profanity. It was a sudden impulse that made me . . . unwind my red silk sash, wave a farewell wit... , tos... to her, and bid her kee... till my return... . " Finally, after wha... liked to tell the reader was a delicate and hallowed reserve all through the book, but what was actually an ingenious trick of literary suspense, he described with greater detail the final parting with the daughter of "the great chief of the Shastas" but not with Cajli Shasta: Why had I returned here? The reasons were many and all-sufficient. Among others I had heard that another had come upon the scene. A rumor had reached me that a little brown girl was flitting through these forests; wild, frightene... the sight of man, timid, sensitive, and strangely beautiful. Who was she? Was she the last of the family of Mountain Joe? Was she one of the Doctor's children, half prophetess, half spirit, gliding through the pines, shunning the face of the Saxon, or was she even something more? Well, her... a little secret which shall remain hers. Sh... a dreamer, and delights in mystery. Who she was or who sh... I have hardly a right to say. Her nam... Calli Shasta. What was I to do? Leave her to perish there in the gath ering storm that was to fall upon the Modocs and their few allies, or tear her away from her mother and the mountains? But where was the little maiden now, as I looked from the battlement on the world below? They told me she was with my Modocs away to the east among the lakes. I waited, enquired, delayed many days, but neither she nor her mother would appear. Her mother, poor, broken-hearted Indian woman, once a princess, was afraid I would carry away her little girl. At last I bade farewell and turned down the wind ing hill. I heard a cry and looked up. There on the wall she stood, waving a red scarf. Wa... the same? Surel... was the same I had thrown her years and years before, when I left the land of fugitive. There was a little girl beside her, too, not so brown ​as
she, waving one pretty hand as she held to the woman's robe with the other. I stopped and raised my hat, and called a kind farewell, and undertook to say some pretty things, but just that moment my mule, as mules always will, opened his mouth and brayed and brayed as if he would die. I jerked and kicked him into silence, and then began again ; and again the mule began, this time joined by Limber Jim's. Limber Jim swore in wretched English, but it was no use — the scarlet banner from the wall was to them the signal of war, and they refused to be silenced until we mounted and descended to the glorious pines, where I had rode and roved the sweetest years of my life. Yet still the two hands were iifted from the wall, and the red scarf waved till the tops of the pines came down, and we could see no more. Then I lifted my hat and said, "Adieu! I reckon I shall never see you any more. Never, unless it may come to pass that the world turns utterly against me. And then, what if I were to return and find not a single living savage?" I think I was as a man whose senses were in another world. Once I stopped, dismounted, leaned on my little mule, look ing earnestly back to the rocky point as if about to return; as if almost determined to return at once and there to remain. There was a battle in my heart. At length awakened, I mounted my mule mechanically and went on. We have a cabin here among the oaks and the pines, on a bench of the mountain, looking down on the Sacramento valley, a day's ride distant... . We? Why, yes! That means little "Calli Shasta," the lit tle shy, brown girl that tried to hide, and refused to see me when I first returned to the mountains. She is with me now, and wears a red sash, and a scarf gracefully folded about her shoulders under her rich flow of hair. I call her Shasta because she was born here, under the shadows of Mount Shasta, many stormy years ago. How she can ride, shoot, ​
hunt, and track the deer and take the salmon! Beautiful? I think so. And then she is so fresh, innocent and affection ate. ... She is learning to read, and believes everything she has yet found in the school books... . We went down to the busy world below, . . . And little Calli Shasta, the last of her tribe? At school in San Francisco. Her great black eyes, deep and sad and pathetic, that seem to lay hold of you, that seem to look you through and understand you, turn dreamily upon the strange, strong sea of people about her, but she gazes unconcerned upon it all. She is looking there, but she is liv ing elsewhere. She is sitting there in silence, yet her heart, her soul, her spirit, is treading the dark and fragrant wood. She is listening to the sounding waterfall, watching the shin ing fish that dart below the grassy border. Seeing all things here, she understands nothing at all. What will become of her. The world would say that she should become a prodigy, that she should at once become civilized, lay hold of the life around her, look up and climb to eminence; crush out all her nature, forget her childhood; compete with those edu cated from the cradle up, and win distinction above all these. The world is an ass! "And whose child is she?" I hear you ask. Well now, here is a little secret. On her mother's side you must know that the last and best blood of a once great tribe is in her veins. And her father? Ah, that is the little secret. We only know. We laugh at the many guesses and speculations of the world, but we keep the little maiden's secret. If I fail in my uncertain ventures with an unschooled pen, as I have failed in all other things, then she is not mine; but if I win a name worth having, then that name shall be hers. Getting along in her new life? Well, here is a paragraph clipped from an article of many columns in a San Francisco jou ​rnal:—
She is now fifteen years old, and is living in San Francisco, sup ported from the poet's purse. She is described as strikingly beautiful. She has her mother's deep, dark eyes, and wealth of raven hair, and her father's clear Caucasian skin. Her neighbors call her the beautiful Spanish girl, for they know not her romantic history; but to her own immediate friends she is known as the poet's gifted child. It is but justice to this rough, half-savage man, to say that he is exceedingly fond of her, and does everything in his power to make her comfort able and happy. What a joke it would be on . . . this monster daily press... ... i n this cas... shoul... utterly mistaken! Wha... this busy, searching, man-devouring press, which has compelled m... ad... this narrative... live and die misunderstood, should discover after all that this little lad... only the old Doctor’s daughter sent dow... the cit... my car... be educated? What will becom... her? The poor little waif, when I look into her great wondering eyes, I fancy sh... a little rabbit, startled and frightened from the forest into the clear ing, where she knows not whethe... retur... bound for ward, an... sits still and look... wonderment around her.