# Portland, Oregon: Its History and Builders/Volume 1/Chapter 3

CHAPTER III.
1774—1814.
If the reader cares to go back into history far enough to find out how our people got started west, he will find that the same blood which moved out of and west from the dark forests of Germany, crossed over the North sea from Schleswig to the shores of Britain and over-run the country we now call England, and then crossed over the North Atlantic during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to the poverty stricken soil of the east coast of America, and there began over again the same development, more or less warlike, to capture the Continent of North America as their ancestors had utilized in the conquest of the British island. Do not imagine for a moment that this is a far-fetched suggestion, having no connection with the Oregon of the twentieth century. The blood and brains which planted civilization in England, just as surely planted the same forces in the wilds of America, and then pushed on westward to the Alleghanies, to the Ohio, to the Mississippi, to the Rocky mountains, and finally to Oregon. And as the new life and surroundings of old England developed out of the Teutonic blood which came to its shores as robbers—new laws, customs and a higher civilization, so likewise did the new world of America develop out of these descendants from ancient Germany, still newer laws, higher ideals and a more perfect civilization which over-run the wilderness west and conferred upon Oregon, the perfect flower and fruit of all the trials, struggles, sacrifices and labors of the race from its cradle in the Black Forest of Germany to its favored home by the sundown seas.
And as the Englishman was different from his German ancestor, so likewise was the American different from his English ancestor. And as the German pushed across seas westward, and the Englishman pushed across seas westward, so also the American pushed on, and on, until he reached a west that is merged in the east. These peoples carried their laws and their civilization, such as it was, with them. It was part of their blood, love and spirit. The Roman historian, Tacitus, who wrote about eighteen hundred years ago, and who was celebrated for his profound insight into the motives of human conduct and the dark recesses of character, describes the ancient German ancestors of the English, as a nation of farmers, pasturing their cattle on the forest glades around their villages and plowing their village fields. They loved the land and freedom; and freedom was associated with the ownership of land. ​They hated the cities, "and lived apart, each family by itself, as woodside, plain, or fresh spring attracts him." That description written only a hundred years after the birth of Christ, would be a good description of the American pioneer from the Atlantic to the Pacific; and of thousands of families in Oregon today.
And so we follow up the heart and core of this great movement of a conquering race, to find it building here on the banks of two rivers, uniting in one household the beautiful Willamette with the mighty Columbia, to show our readers they have the grandest foundation history in all the western world. A history they should not only know themselves, but one they should delight to teach to their children.
For these reasons this narrative will now take up those movements of population westward which have more of the political and governmental interest and direction than the commercial enterprises described in the preceding chapter. Even before the revolutionary war began, from 1774 to 1776, the pioneers of Pennsylvania, Virginia and North Carolina commenced drifting over the Alleghany mountains into what is now West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee. And during that war, these pioneers in the Ohio valley rendered a great service to their brethren who under the lead of Washington, was making heroic resistance to the British soldiers. But during the war, as a matter of necessity, all emigration to- the west ceased. Nobody knew what the outcome would be. Washington could spare no able bodied men to go west as long as he had a vindicative foe in his front. And the pioneers already in the west had all they could do to maintain their homes and position against the Indian savages, set on by the Canadian British.
But even then the leaven was working in the minds of the great leaders of the people, who were to lay the foundations of this mighty nation, to take and hold the valley of the Mississippi. More than once the question was put to Washington as to what he would do if he was finally defeated and driven back by the British army; and more than once he pointed to the Alleghanies as a sure defense behind which he could lead his veterans, and there forever defy all the hosts of King George, and build up an army and a people which would swarm back over the mountains and drive the hated English into the Atlantic Ocean. • It was to the west, the west, the vast wilderness west, the exhausted, starved, tattered and torn veterans of the Continental army turned their waning hopes to find a haven of peace and safety from taxation without representation. Fortunate it was for America, and for humanity, that our colonial ancestors had for their leaders the three greatest men ever produced in any one age of the world.
Washington, the all-wise leader, whose great soul could not be moved by great success or still greater defeat; Franklin, the diplomat, whose profound wisdom and humanity moved the whole civilized world, and whose genius compelled even his enemies to serve his cause; and Thomas Jefferson, the seer, prophet, and greatest colonizer of all the world. With three such men, supported by the self-sacrificing and invincible soldiers of the Continental army, success of the King was an utter impossibility. Our forefathers had right, justice, the sea and the land, yea also the mountains on their side. They would not fail. No! as well the tall and pillared Alleghanies fall—as well Ohio's giant tide roll backward on its mighty track.
For freedom's battle once begun. Bequeathed from bleeding sire to son.
Is ever won.
The idea of a great western movement to hold an empire of rich land for the teeming millions of men that were to come after them, was the idea of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. These two men did not always ​agree. And at least one of them was a little jealous of Washington's great name and fame. But on the western movement they did agree. Of all the great leaders of the rebellion against the British king, Washington only had been west of the Alleghanies and knew something of the great possibilities of the Ohio valley. Jefferson knew of it only from pioneer reports and French newspapers, which he could read and translate for himself. But he was continually reading and thinking, and dreaming of the vast illimitable west, away west, west, west to the Pacific ocean. At that time while Washington was leading the Continental soldiers and straining every nerve to beat back the British arms, Jefferson was stirring up trouble for the British by inciting the Virginians to support George Rogers Clark in his plans against the British in the Ohio valley. In driving the French out of Canada, the British had come into possession of old Vincennes on the Wabash and other fur trading stations and French forts south of the great lakes. The British general, Hamilton, (known in western Indian war literature as the "hair buyer," from his alleged practice of buying the scalps of murdered pioneers from the Indians) was in possession of the fort at Vincennes with a garrison of eighty British soldiers and a contingent of Indian allies. Clark was then in November, 1778, in Kentucky, as a pioneer Indian fighter, and hearing through one Frances Vigo, an Italian fur trader, that in the next spring Hamilton intended to attack their American settlers in Kentucky, he (Clark) resolved to forestall his foe and set to work enlisting a force of men to march upon Vincennes during the winter, and surprise and capture Hamilton and his whole outfit. To carry out this dare-devil exploit, Clark had to rely wholly on his own resources which were practically summed up in the individual person, George Rogers Clark and his brains, courage and energy. He had not heard from or received any aid from his friends and abettors in Virginia for a year; and there was but a scant supply of powder and lead in all the settlement in Kentucky for any purpose. But with Clark to resolve was to act; and so he set to work enlisting men and building boats and soon had a little army on its way down the Ohio with their trusty rifles. Leaving a party of his force to patrol the river and look out for an attack in his rear, he marched the rest of his men overland to the old French fort of Kaskaskia. Here his confident demeanor and captivating address captured the French and half-breeds, and especially the Creole girls, and all united to secure additional recruits to his banner—the banner of George Rogers Clark, for there was not at that time, a single American flag in all America, west of the Alleghany mountains. After a few days rest, and by these means, Clark had gathered together a motley band of one hundred and seventy Kentuckians, half-bred French, Creoles and stragglers that looked anything else than a military force to attack a fort defended by trained soldiers amply supplied with cannon of that period, and full supplies of muskets and ammunition. On the 7th of February, 1779, Clark marched his little army out of old Kaskaskia, the whole village escorting and encouraging the men, and the good Jesuit priest Gibault, adding his blessing and absolution on all those brave men. It was in the depth of winter and icy cold, in addition to which a continued downpour of rain flooded the whole country and made an inland sea of the Wabash river, which they had to cross at one place with only a few canoes, most of the men wading in ice cold water up to their arm-pits and carrying their guns and powder horns over their heads. But they finally reached their goal. To such men, nothing was impossible. Clark reached Vincennes without informing the town or fort of his approach. He surrounded the town in the night and after a short, sharp and decisive attack the British general, Hamilton, surrendered. Clark paroled the men, but sent Hamilton under guard, to Virginia, where he was kept in jail at Richmond for two years. Taken altogether, this exploit of George Rogers Clark, was the most reckless, daring, dangerous and successful military expedition in the whole course of the revolutionary war, or of any war. And in its results, it accomplished more for ​the United States than any other one military movement or battle in the war. For without this successful venture of Clark, the British would have held the Mississippi valley until the end of the war, and by the treaty of peace, England would have most surely secured every thing west of the Alleghany mountains. The success of Clark enabled our peace commissioners, Franklin, Jay and Adams, to claim that Clark had driven the British out of the Mississippi valley and successfully held it. So that the boundary line between the American possessions and the English was established on the line of the great lakes west to the headquarters of the Mississippi river, instead of at the Alleghany mountains. By this grand coup in the western wilderness, Clark added to the United States all the territory out of which has been carved and populated the seven great states of Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and half of Minnesota. This was the first great advance of the American flag from the inhabited portions of the original colonies, moving westward. And it was wholly and purely a movement to secure more territory, and wholly based on political reasons and not influenced by any commercial motive or interest.
It has been the puzzle of historical writers for more than a century, to account for the attitude of Washington to George Rogers Clark. Washington was personally acquainted with Clark and his family of which none stood higher in old Virginia. Washington must have known, and did know, the splendid military abilities of Clark. No man was a better judge of what other men could accomplish than Washington. With the exception of Greene, Washington had not a single general under his command that equaled George Rogers Clark; and no one of all his major generals, Greene not excepted, accomplished as much for his country as Clark. Then why did Washington keep him in the western wilderness with a mere handful of riflemen to be called out as the desperates straits of defense against Indians or British might require? The only answer to that long unanswered question is, that of all men possible to be sent or kept in the west to hold in check the British and their Indian allies, and hold the valley of the Mississippi for any possible result of the war, George Rogers Clark was the first choice—the man that could be trusted and who was equal to the momentous importance of the position. Clark amply vindicated the confidence of Washington; he discharged the great trust and responsibility imposed on him with "such distinguished ability as to immortalize his name in American history, and in the annals of those who have covered their names with glory in defense of liberty and just laws. And the pity of it all is, that his great services to his country, and to his nation, were never appreciated, recognized, rewarded or honored; and that one of the grandest of our national heroes, and one of the nation's greatest benefactors should have died in poverty and neglect.
On the 4th day of March, 1801, Thomas Jefferson was inaugurated as the third President of the United States. Jefferson had not taken a prominent part in the successful rebellion which had severed the colonies from the mother country. He had not taken a part in making the constitution under which the people were organized into a nation of free men; and he had been anything but a harmonious prime minister of Washington's cabinet. It looked to the historian as if Jefferson's fame would be limited to his leading part in drafting the immortal Declaration of Independence. But there was seething in his active brain, a great idea; the idea of extending the nation's boundaries from ocean to ocean. Having a natural taste for scientific studies, he longed to know what the great unfathomed west of the Rocky mountains might contain. The first opportunity he had to set anything in motion that might bring him any knowledge upon the subject came to him while he was representing the United States at Paris, in 1786. Jefferson gives an account of it in his autobiography as follows:
​"While in Paris in 1786, I became acquainted with John Ledyard, of Connecticut, a man of genius, some science, and of fearless courage and enterprise. He had accompanied Captain Cook in his voyage to the Pacific, had distinguished himself on several occasions by an unrivaled intrepidity, and published an account of that voyage with details unfavorable to Cook's deportment towards the savages and lessening our regrets at his fate. Ledyard had come to Paris in the hope of forming a company to engage in the fur trade of the western coast of America. He was disappointed in this, and being out of business, and of a roaming, restless character, I suggested to him the enterprise of exploring the western part of our continent by passing through St. Petersburgh to the Pacific coast of Siberia, and procuring a passage thence in some of the Russian vessels to Nootka sound, from whence he might work his way across the continent to the United States; and I undertook to have the permission of the Empress of Russia solicited. He eagerly embraced the proposition, and Baron Grimm, special correspondent of the Empress, solicited her permission for him to pass through her dominions to the western coast of America. But this favor the Empress refused, considering the enterprise entirely chimerical. But Ledyard would not relinquish it, persuading himself that by proceeding to St. Petersburgh, he could satisfy the Empress of its practicability and obtain her permission. He went accordingly, but she being absent on a visit to some distant part of her dominions, he pursued his course across Russia to within two hundred miles of the Pacific coast, when he was overtaken by an arrest from the Empress, brought back to Portland and there dismissed."
This shows how much farther ahead in the outlook towards Oregon Jefferson was, compared with all others. He had started Ledyard to cross the American continent six years before Gray had discovered the Columbia river, and five years before MacKenzie had crossed the Rocky mountains. It is not only a matter of intense interest to go back and see the men who were racking their brains and exploiting their ideas about this Oregon of ours before anybody knew there was such a place, but it is also due from us to render just honors to those men who not only took the long look ahead, but followed up their great thoughts by practical statesmanship to secure this country to this nation, and for our habitation and use.
When Jefferson became president on March 4, 1801, he supposed that the vast territory known as Louisiana belonged to Spain. The Pope had given it to Spain. De Soto had claimed it for Spain, La Salle had claimed it for France and France had ceded all its rights to the country to Spain. And upon this presumption, Jefferson had planned to open negotiations as early as practicable after becoming president to purchase, or in some other way obtain the title to Louisiana for the United States. And he did not go about this great business in a hap-hazard way. He knew perfectly well the excited state of feeling that existed throughout the whole country west of the Alleghany mountains. Irritated by the exactions of the Spanish traders at New Orleans, and feeling their whole future depended on the conditions on which they could ship their produce to market by the great rivers, the pioneers of the west were ready to volunteer and drive the Spaniards out of the country by force of arms, just as they had been ready to follow George Rogers Clark in 1793-4 to drive out the Spaniards and turn Louisiana over to the French. Therefore, to prepare himself as president of the United States, to meet and control any emergency which might arise in this delicate and great national business, as soon as he became president he sent a secret agent to old St. Louis to find out the state of feeling among the Spanish at that frontier town. Jefferson desired to know the political sentiments of those old world pioneers at St. Louis, and especially their feelings towards the people of the United States. Trouble must come sooner or later from that foreign flag flying in the heart of the great Mississippi valley. For just as certain as George Rogers Clark with one hundred and seventy men had captured the British General Hamilton and his fort and forces ​at old Vincennes, that surely would some other western fillibustering Clark arise and gather an army and drive the Spaniards out of St. Louis. The man selected for this secret mission to St. Louis, was John Baptiste Charles Lucas. Lucas was a Frenchman that had studied law in Paris; had some acquaintance there of Franklin and Adams while they were representing America during the revolutionary war; and having come to America after the war, made the acquaintance of Albert Gallatin, Jefferson's secretary of the treasury, who introduced him (Lucas) to the president. Lucas was an ardent supporter of republican principles; he could speak the Spanish as well as the French language, and everything pointed him out as the man capable of serving Jefferson and his adopted country. Lucas undertook the confidential mission to- St. Louis, and after sounding the drift of personal and political feeling at that point, proceeded to New Orleans on the same mission, making his confidential reports to the president only. Upon this information the president was prepared to act, and did act as the sequel showed. He was prepared for war if the French had not backed down and offered to sell out before he had even time to submit an ultimatum.
That the services of Lucas in this national crisis were of great value, and highly appreciated by the president, is shown from the facts that when Lucas became a candidate for Congress in Pennsylvania in 1803, the Jefferson administration most heartily supported him and secured his election; and after Louisiana was formally ceded to the United States and a territorial government established in Missouri, the president appointed Lucas a United States district judge in that territory where he was heartily welcomed by the people. For although old St. Louis had a Spanish governor and Spanish soldiers, the majority of the townspeople were French and under the influence of the great fur traders, Pierre Laclede, August Chouteau and others, and already disposed to support an American president and American principles.
It is not therefore surprising, that after all this careful preparation to deal diplomatically with the Spanish king for the purchase of Louisiana, that the president and the whole country with him should have been alarmed beyond expression to find that Spain did not in fact own Louisiana; but that the great province had been secretly ceded to France two years before the publication of the event. This discovery produced intense excitement throughout the whole country, and especially to President Jefferson. It could not be divined what purpose France had in view in taking back Louisiana by a secret treaty and everybody assumed that sooner or later the nation would be forced into a war with an old friend. Writing to Livingston, the American minister at Paris, April 18, 1802, Jefferson says: "Every eye in the United States is now fixed on the affairs of Louisiana. Perhaps nothing since the revolutionary war has produced more uneasiness throughout the nation, and in spite of our temporary bickerings with France, she still has a strong hold on our affections. The cession of Louisiana to France completely reverses all the political relations of the United States, and will form a new epoch in our political course. There is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. That spot is New Orleans, through which the produce of three-eighths of our territory must pass to market, and from its fertility it will ere long yield more than half of our whole produce, and contain more than half of our inhabitants. France placing herself in that door assumes to us the attitude of defiance."
Jefferson read the future as if by inspiration. The great water ways pouring their traffic down to New Orleans at the least possible expense, and building up in the great valleys of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers an empire of population. He thought, as everybody else thought, that the trade of even Pittsburgh only four hundred miles west of the Atlantic port of Philadelphia must of necessity float down the Ohio and Mississippi, and go out to the world by the way of New Orleans. And also all the traffic west and south of ​Pittsburgh must go the same way. We of this day cannot comprehend the consternation with which that view struck the president and all of the people of the west. We could understand it if England or Japan should now in our day capture Astoria and the mouth of the Columbia and proceed to levy import and export taxes on every pound of Oregon produce or goods which goes out or comes in over the Columbia river bar. The steam railroad had not been invented at that day, and no one could then see any future for the great west except through nature's outlet by the great river to the Gulf of Mexico.
Jefferson has been by many rated as a philosopher, a scientist, a dreamer or schemer rather than a practical statesman. But the facts show that when the great occasion came he was always equal to it. He met this secret treaty move between Spain and France, with both energy and wisdom. He instructed his minister to Paris, Robert Livingston, to ascertain at the earnest moment what France proposed to do with the island of New Orleans, as the city was then called. And as matters developed, in January following his letter to Livingston he appointed James Monroe, minister extraordinary to France, with instructions to push the French court to a decision. And in his letter of instructions to Monroe, he reminds him that the French are hard pressed for money to complete the conquest of St. Domingo, and that these circumstances have prevented the French from taking possession of Louisiana. Everything seems to have been considered fair in love or war in those days as well as now, and Thomas Jefferson proposed to make the most of it for his country.
On February 3, 1803, Jefferson writes again to Livingston, "We must know at once whether we can acquire New Orleans or not." The westerners were clamoring for New Orleans and for war. The same sort of people that rallied to the appeal of Andrew Jackson ten years later and gave the British such a terrible thrashing below New. Orleans, were now ready to fight the French if they dared to come and take the country they had bought from Spain. e So anxious and so terribly was Jefferson wrought up over the condition of affairs that he tells Monroe in the letter quoted: "On the event of your mission depends the future destinies of this republic. If we cannot by a purchase of Louisiana insure ourselves a course of perpetual peace, then as war cannot be distant, we must prepare for it." The future destiny and ownership of this Oregon country was dangling in the balance right then and there.
President Jefferson was now free to pursue his life long desire to know what was in the far west. He had now cleared away all obstacles; he had added to the national domain territory enough to make thirteen more great states; he had opened the way now to find out what was in the far off Oregon country. Oregon had been in his mind ever since he had started Ledyard across Asia to reach and explore it. And that is the reason this history of the Louisiana purchase is pertinent to the history of the city of Portland. Without Louisiana, the United States could never reach Oregon, and without Oregon, there would be no American Portland.
Accordingly at the next session of Congress after the treaty of purchase from France on January 18, 1803, Jefferson sent a confidential message to congress containing a recommendation for an exploring expedition to the west, and congress promptly passed an act providing the necessary funds to make the exploration. The president lost no time in organizing the expedition known in all the histories as the Lewis and Clark expedition, appointing his private secretary. Captain Meriwether Lewis to the chief command and captain Wm. Clark, a brother of General George Rogers Clark, as second in command. As a matter of historical fact, the president had already, before he knew of the signing of the treaty of cession at Paris, perfected arrangements with Captain Lewis to go west and organize a strong party to cross the continent to the mouth of the Columbia river. This is proved by the fact that Lewis left Washington city within four days after the news was received by the president, that the treaty had finally been executed. A large part of the year was spent in making preparations for the journey, and the president was so anxious for the safety and success of the men, that he prepared with his own hands the written instructions which were to govern their conduct. We make the following extract from these instructions to show the nature of them, and the great care the President was taking to have success assured, and the natives treated with justice and consideration. "In all your intercourse with the natives," says Jefferson, "treat them in the most friendly and conciliatory manner which their own conduct will admit; allay all jealousies as to the object of your journey; satisfy them of its innocence; make them acquainted with the extent, position, character, peaceable, and commercial dispositions of the United States; of our wish to be neighborly, friendly, and useful to them, and of our disposition to hold commercial intercourse with them, and to confer with them on the point most convenient for trade and the articles of the most desirable interchange for them and for us."
​The purchase of Louisiana and the great exploring expedition which followed the purchase is unique and unexampled in the history of mankind. After more than a century of enlightenment, consideration and development of this vast region, the momentous influences and consequences of that great transaction, are not fully comprehended to this day. Vast regions and great nations, even those with more or less of what we call civilization, have in the history of the world, passed under the dominion of overwhelming military power, and lingered in decay or gone down to oblivion. But here is an Empire of natural wealth in a vast region claimed and owned by the then foremost military power on the globe, quietly, speedily and with a friendly hand passing over to the youngest member of the family of nations, to be by it, in its inexperience in government, ruled and developed for the happiness and blessing of mankind. Not only does this ruling military power of the world, led and ruled by the most successful and brilliant soldier in the history of mankind, turn over this empire of rich territory to the keeping of the young republic of the west, but a greater power than the wealth and resources of the land goes with it—the power to rule two great oceans and dictate the peace of the world. Of the two master minds that wrought this great work, one has been denounced as an infidel, and everything that was dangerous to the well being of his fellowman; while the other condemned throughout the world as an unprincipled adventurer to whom fickle fortune gave for an hour the evanescent glory of accidental success. Shall we dare say, that these two men did not consider the welfare of their fellow-man in this great transaction? Shall we say they wrought wiser than they knew? Or shall we concede that there is a Divinity that shapes our ends?
So that in tracing the steps of this unorthodox president in the great task of acquiring almost half the territory of the United States, and setting up therein, the ways, means and influences' of education and civilization, we may form some opinion of his real character and great work. Neither President Jefferson nor anybody else outside of the native Indians knew anything about the vast region which had been acquired. Exploration of it by competent observers was necessary to find out what the wilderness was worth. Captains, Lewis and Clark, organized their party of twenty-seven men and one Indian woman in the winter of 1803, and made their start for Oregon in the following spring of 1804. There were no steamboats in those days, and the ascent of the river from St. Louis to the Mandan Indian village on the Missouri river, almost one thousand miles as the river runs, above St. Louis, paddling and poling their boats up stream occupied nearly five months time. Of course the party stopped along the river to hunt game for their subsistence. But as game was everywhere in plenty, this could not have delayed them very much, which shows what a slow toilsome undertaking these men had entered upon. And it shows the vast changes in the country in a hundred years, where now railroad trains running on both sides of the river will whisk the traveler over an equal distance in one day.
On this up-river trip the volunteer explorers from Ohio and Kentucky found many animals they had never seen before. The vast numbers of buffalo, the antelope, mule deer, coyote, and prairie dog were all new to these men, and excited the wonder of both leaders and privates. With all the Indian tribes the explorers held councils, telling them of the changes of governors and of President Jefferson who was so anxious for their welfare. The Indians professed to be pleased with this news, and as the explorers distributed gifts, purported to come from the great father at Washington, the natives agreed to everything. They always did that when there was anything to be had by being good. It is scarcely possible that the Indians at that day had any idea of a government, or the exercise of control by one man over a vast population, traveling as they did wherever they pleased.
In the spring of 1805, after sending back ten of the men who had enlisted to go only to the first winter quarters, and who carried back with them the record of their exploration, thus far, with some specimens of pelts and plants, Lewis and Clark broke camp and struck out through the boundless plains, due west from Fort Mandan. The party now numbered thirty-two persons all told. Sergeant Floyd, had died on the way up river, and was buried on the bluffs where Sioux City is now located. Three men had joined the party at Mandan, including the French trapper, Chaboneau, together with his Shoshone wife—Sacajawea, now represented in the bronze statue in the Portland city park. They were now far beyond Jonathan Carver's explorations, and in a country never before trod by the foot of a white man. But few Indians were seen; but the whole country literally swarmed with wild game, vast flocks of sage hens, prairie chickens, ducks of all kinds, cranes, geese and swan, and vast herds of big game, buffalo, elk, antelope, white and black tail deer, big horn sheep, and so unfamiliar with the race of men as to be easily approached, great herds of elk would lie lazily in the sun on the sand bars until the party was within twenty yards of them.
On the Yellowstone river, Clark encountered on the return voyage, a herd of buffaloes, wading and swimming across the stream where it was a mile wide, and so many in the herd that the exploring party had to draw up in a safe place and wait for an hour for the herd to pass before they could proceed. The party of course had to live on meat as their mainstay, and they got it fresh every day without going out of their course to find it, and they generally ate up one buffalo, or an elk and one deer, or four deer a day. And here for the first time, they struck that terror of the rocky mountains,—the grizzly bear. No other traveler or explorer ever gave any account of this bear prior to what we hear from Lewis and Clark. The grizzly was the terror of the Indians. They had never been able to devise any means of trapping him, and they had no guns to fight him with; and their only safety from him, was in flight. The first accounts given to the people of the United States of this monster bear wers printed in the early school books, and were extracts from the journals of this expedition. The summer trip up the Missouri in their little boats was very pleasant. But the fall season of the year was rapidly approaching before they had reached the Rocky mountains, and they were warned by early frosts that great expedition was now necessary to enable them to pass over the mountains and strike some branch of the Columbia to float westward upon before the deep snows shut them in or out for the winter. Lewis and Clark crossed the Rocky mountains about three hundred miles north of the point where the Oregon trail crosses. And here they found their salvation in the sturdy little Indian woman, Sacajawea. They got to a point that their white man's reason could not guide them, but Sacajawea had been there when a child, and she "pointed ​the way" to the Columbia's headwaters, and to safety and success. And by her aid as an interpreter, and her kinship to the Shoshones, the party was enabled to procure horses from a band of wandering Shoshones, and by "caching" their boats, and packing their goods and blankets on the ponies, they got out of the labyrinth of mountains, crossed over the great divide, struck the middle fork of the Clearwater, and made their way down to where the city of Lewiston now stands.
Here they got canons from the Nez Perce Indians, and floated down the Snake river to the Columbia, and on down the Columbia to where Astoria now stands, and paddled around Taylor's point and crossed over Young's bay and built log huts at a point named Fort Clatsop, where they went into winter quarters until the spring of 1806.
With the troubles and experiences of the exploring party, during the long rainy season of 1805-6 at Fort Clatsop, we have no concern. The men put in their time hunting, fishing, mending their clothes, making moccasins for the long tramp homeward in the spring, and in making salt by the seaside out of the Pacific ocean water, and some remains of the old furnace in which they placed their kettles to evaporate the salt water, being still in existence after the lapse of one hundred and four years. As early in the spring of 1806 as it was practicable to travel, the party started on their return to the states. Whether the expedition, as a party, ever camped on the present site of Portland, is uncertain. The probability is very strong that they did camp on the river flat in front of the town of St. Johns, which is a suburb of this city, and it is certain that members of the party came up the river as far as Portland townsite. On their return up the Columbia, the explorers camped at the mouth of the White Salmon river on the north side of the Columbia, and there it was that Tomitsk (Jake Hunt), the Klickitat Indian, pictured on another page, saw the explorers, the first white men he had ever seen, when he was a little boy, eleven years of age, making Tomitsk one hundred and fifteen years old now, and probably the oldest Indian on the Pacific coast.
Yet alive, one hundred and fifteen years old; saw the Lewis and Clark party in 1806.
Many persons have entertained the idea, that, with the exception of the leaders, who were educated, and came from distinguished families in old Virginia, the rank and file were rough and inconsequential characters, picked up around St. Louis. This is a great mistake; for they were nearly all of them, men of great natural force and ability, and selected by their leaders because of their inherent force of character. As the author of this history was personally acquainted with one member of the party, and with the family of another member of the party, the following sketches of them are given as fair samples of the whole force, and which will show our reader what character of men it was that braved the dangers of the unknown wilderness, and risked their lives in the most dangerous and arduous toils to navigate wild streams and scale frowning mountain barriers to uncover and make known to the world this old Oregon of ours.
Patrick Gass: This member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition was undoubtedly the most vigorous and energetic character of the entire party; and notwithstanding some excesses in living outlived all his compatriots. Gass was the son of Irish parents, born near Chambersburg, Pennsylvania in 1771, and died at Wellsburgh in the state of West Virginia, April 30th, 1870, nearly one hundred years old. The Gass family moved from Chambersburgh, when the boy was a mere child carried in a creel on the sides of a pack horse, and settled near Pittsburgh. There were no schools in those days in the frontier settlements, and Patrick Gass grew up as other boys of his day, schooled to hardships and dangers, ready and eager for adventure of any sort. He was not long in finding an opportunity and joined a party of Indian fighters under the lead of the celebrated Lewis Wetzel, and had his experience in Indian warfare in Belmont county, Ohio, where the author of this book subsequently first saw the light of day forty years afterwards. Like other young fellows at that time Gass made trips down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans, in "flat boats" in trading expeditions, returning home by ship to Philadelphia and thence to Pittsburgh with freight teams.
Gass learned the carpenter's trade; but when war was threatened with France in 1799, he joined the army and was ordered to Kaskaskia, Illinois, and while at that station, met Captain Meriwether Lewis who was hunting for volunteers for the great expedition to the Pacific. With the aid of Lewis, he managed to get released from his enlistment in the army, and safely made the trip from St. Louis to the mouth of the Columbia and return to the Ohio. He kept a journal of his great trip, which shows he had by his own efforts, picked up some book education, and his journal was the first account published, of the expedition. When the war of 1812 broke out, he again joined the army and served along with the writers grand-father at the battle of Lundy's Lane, where he was severely wounded. The remainder of his life was spent at and near Wellsburgh, West Virginia. In 183 1, at sixty years of age, he was married and lived a happy life thereafter, having seven children born to him. At ninety years of age when the southern rebellion broke out, he volunteered to fight for the union of the states, but of course his age precluded an acceptance of his patriotic offer. Soon after this event he became converted to the Christian ​(Campbellite) faith, and was baptized by immersion in the Ohio river in front of the town of Wellsburgh, the entire population of the town turning out to honor the event; and thereafter the soldier of three enlistments and two wars; the hero of the great expedition across the continent, faithfully upheld the banner of the cross. I am thus particular in making this record to preserve a suitable account of two of the most important and capable subalterns of the Lewis and Clark expedition, not only because they were upon, or very near the site of this city, one hundred and five years ago, rendering great services to their country and to Oregon, but also because we were all from Ohio. The writer was personally acquainted with Patrick Gass, having met the venerable old patriot at Wellsburgh, Virginia in 1857. He was then at eighty-six years of age a very bright and interesting man, and gave me a brief account of his great trip across the continent to the Pacific ocean, and of his trouble in preserving his journal of that trip.
George Shannon: The writer was personally acquainted with the Shannon family, whose name and fame is cherished as a part of the heritage of "Old Belmont County" Ohio; and with Wilson Shannon, youngest brother of George Shannon, who was twice elected governor of Ohio, minister to Mexico, one of the argonauts to California in 1849, practicing law in San Francisco, and territorial governor of Kansas. Like Gass, Shannon was Protestant Irish, of splendid stock, his father a brave soldier of the revolution, and a leader among men. George was sent to school in Pennsylvania and ran away from school to join the Lewis and Clark expedition. After returning from the Pacific coast, he entered the university at Lexington, Kentucky, graduated, studied law in Philadelphia, married Ruth Snowden Price at Lexington in 1813, was made a judge of the state circuit court at Lexington, and rendered honorable service as a judge for twelve years; removed from Lexington to St. Charles, Missouri, where he was again placed on the judicial bench, and died suddenly while holding court at Palmyra, Missouri, in 1836. He was unquestionably the man of the most talent, culture and ability of all who made that world renowned trip across two thousand miles of unexplored mountains, plains, deserts and wilderness. Several decendants of the Shannon family now reside in this city.
It would seem, that as far as natural justice and common sense could influence the settlement of the proposition, that the discovery of the Columbia by Gray and the exploration of the country by Lewis and Clark, ought to have given the United States a clear title to Oregon as against England. In all the contentions between the so-called civilized nations, the Indian title to the land has never counted for anything. And the equities in favor of their title will be discussed in the chapter on the title of this country. But this seems to be the right place to consider the movement of the British in seizing Astoria on December 12th, 1813.
Private in the Lewis and Clark Expedition, publishing the first account of it.