The
Columbia River

Its History, Its Myths, Its Scenery
Its Commerce

By
William Denison Lyman
Professor of History in Whitman College,
Walla Walla, Washington

With 80 Illustrations and a Map

G. P. Putnam’s Sons
New York and London
The Knickerbocker Press
1909

Copyright, 1909
BY
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

The Knickerbocker Press, New York

TO MY PARENTS
Horace Lyman and Mary Denison Lyman
PIONEERS OF 1849, WHO BORE THEIR PART IN LAYING THE
FOUNDATIONS OF CIVILIZATION UPON THE BANKS OF
THE COLUMBIA, THIS VOLUME IS DEDICATED
BY THE AUTHOR

PREFACE

As one of the American Waterways series, this volume is designed to be a history and description of the Columbia River. The author has sought to convey to his reader a lively sense of the romance, the heroism, and the adventure which belong to this great stream and the parts of the North-west about it, and he has aimed to breathe into his narrative something of the spirit and sentiment—a spirit and sentiment more easily recognised than analysed—which we call “Western.” With this end in view, his treatment of the subject has been general rather than detailed, and popular rather than recondite. While he has spared no pains to secure historical accuracy, he has not made it a leading aim to settle controverted points, or to present the minutiæ of historical research and criticism. In short, the book is rather for the general reader than for the specialist. The author hopes so to impress his readers with the majesty of the Columbia as to fill their minds with a longing to see it face to face.

Frequent reference in the body of the book to authorities renders it unnecessary to name them here. Suffice it to say that the author has consulted the standard works of history and description dealing with Oregon—the old Oregon—and its River, and from the voluminous matter there gathered has selected the facts that best combine to make a connected and picturesque narrative. He has treated the subject topically, but there is a general progression throughout, and the endeavour has been to find a natural jointure of chapter to chapter and era to era.

While the book has necessarily been based largely on other books, it may be said that the author has derived his chief inspiration from his own observations along the shores of the River and amid the mountains of Oregon and Washington, where his life has mainly been spent, and from familiar conversations in the cabins of pioneers, or at camp-fires of hunters, or around Indian tepees, or in the pilot-houses of steamboats. In such ways and places one can best catch the spirit of the River and its history.

The author gladly takes this opportunity of making his grateful acknowledgments to Prof. F. G. Young, of Oregon University, for his kindness in reading the manuscript and in making suggestions which his full knowledge and ripe judgment render especially valuable. He wishes also to express his warmest thanks to Mr. Harvey W. Scott, editor of the Oregonian, for invaluable counsel. Similar gratitude is due to Prof. Henry Landes of Washington University for important assistance in regard to some of the scientific features of the first chapter.

W. D. L.

Whitman College,
Walla Walla, Wash.,
1909.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

PART I
The History

CHAPTER I

The Land where the River Flows

Contrasts—The Two Islands—Uplift—Volcanic Action—Flood—Age of Ice—Story of Wishpoosh and Creation of the Tribes—Outline of the Mountain Systems—Peculiar Interlocking of the Columbia and the Kootenai—The Cascade Range—The Inland Empire—The Valleys West of the Cascade Mountains—The Forests—The Climate—The Native Races and Some of their Myths—Story of the Kamiah Monster—The Tomanowas Bridge at the Cascades—Origin of Three Great Mountains—The Chinook Wind—Myths of the Unseen Life—Klickitat Story of the Spirit Baby—Beauty of the Native Names.

Wonderfully varied though rivers are, each has a physiognomy of its own. Each preserves its characteristics even in the midst of constant diversity. We recognise it, as we recognise a person in different changes of dress. The Ohio has one face, the Hudson another, and each keeps its essential identity. The traveller would not confuse the Rhine with the Danube, or the Nile with the Volga.

Even more distinctive than most rivers in form and feature is the Columbia, the old Oregon that now hears far other sounds than “his own dashings,” the River of the West, the Thegayo, the Rio de los Reyes, the Rio Estrachos, the Rio de Aguilar, the many-named river which unites all parts of the Pacific North-west. It is to its records of romance and heroism, of legend and history, as well as to its alternating scenes of stormy grandeur and tranquil majesty that the reader’s attention is now invited. Though among the latest of American rivers to be brought under the control of civilised men, the Columbia was among the earliest to attract the interest of the explorers of all nations, and the struggles of international diplomacy over possession were among the most momentous in history. The distance of the Columbia from the centres of population and the difficulty of reaching it made its development slow, and for this reason its pioneer stage lasted longer than would otherwise have been the case. In this part of its history there was a record of pathos, tragedy, and achievement not surpassed in any of the annals of our country, while, in its later phases, the North-west has had the sweep and energy of growth and power characteristic of genuine American development. Finally, by reason of scenic grandeur, absorbing interest of physical features, the majesty and mystery of its origin in the greatest of American mountains, the swift might of its flow through some of the wildest as well as some of the most beautiful regions of the globe, and at the last by the peculiar grandeur of its entrance into the greatest of the oceans, this “Achilles of Rivers” attracts alike historian, scientist, poet, statesman, and lover of nature.

“A land of old upheaven from the abyss,” a land of deepest deeps and highest heights, of richest verdure here, and barest desolation there, of dense forest on one side, and wide extended prairies on the other; a land, in brief, of contrasts, contrasts in contour, hues, productions, and history;—such is that imperial domain watered by the Columbia River and its affluents. To the artist, the poet, the scientist, and the sportsman, this region presents noble and varied scenes of shore, of mountain, of river, of lake, while to the romancer and historian it offers a wealth of native legend and of record from the heroic ages of American history.

As a fit introduction to the picture of the land as it now appears, there may be presented a brief record of the manner in which it was wrought into its present form. Professor Thomas Condon of Oregon thought that the first land to rise on the Pacific Coast was composed of two islands, one in the region of the Siskiyou Mountains of Northern California and Southern Oregon, and the other in the heart of what are now the Blue Mountains and Saw-tooth Mountains of North-eastern Oregon, South-eastern Washington, and Western Idaho. Other geologists have doubted the existence of the second of these two islands.

Those islands, if both existed, were the nuclei of the Pacific Coast region. The rock consisted of the earlier granite, sandstone, and limestone crust of the earth. For long ages these two islands, washed by the warm seas of that early age, and bearing a life now found in the tropics, were slowly rising and widening their boundaries in all directions.

Next, or perhaps as early, to respond to the pressure of the shrinking crust of the earth and to appear above the sea, was the vast cordon of pinnacled peaks which compose the present Okanogan and Chelan uplift, granite and porphyry, broken by volcanic outflow. These peaks are veined with gold, silver, and copper.

That first age of mountain uplift was ended by the coming on of the age of fire. The granite upheaval of the Blue and the Cascade Mountains was blown apart and cracked asunder by volcanic eruption and seismic force. A vast outflow of basalt and andesite swept westward from the Blue Mountains to meet a similar outflow moving eastward from the Cascades. Thus, throughout the Columbia Basin, the surface is mainly of volcanic rock overlying the shattered fragments of the original earth crust. At many points, however, the primeval granite or sandstone surface was not covered, while at frequent intervals the breaking forth of the fiery floods transformed those original rocks into various forms of gneiss, porphyry, and marble. But the greatest result of the age of volcanic outflow was the elevation of the stupendous isolated snow peaks which now constitute so striking a feature of Columbian landscapes.

With the close of the age of fire, the mountain chains were in place, as they now stand, but the plains and valleys were not yet fashioned. Another series of forces must needs come to elaborate the rude outlines of the land. And so came on the third great age, the age of flood. The upheaval of the mingled granite and volcanic masses of the Cascade and Blue Mountains, while at the same time the Rockies were undergoing the same process, imprisoned a vast sea over the region now known by Westerners as the Inland Empire. In the depths of this sea the sediment from a thousand torrents was deposited to fashion the smooth and level valleys of the Yakima, the Walla Walla, the Spokane, and lesser streams, while a similar process fashioned the valleys of the Willamette and other streams between the Cascades and the Coast Mountains westward.

But while the age of flood was shaping the great valley systems, a fourth age—the age of ice—was working still other changes upon the plastic land. The mountains had been reared by upheaval and volcanic outflow to a stupendous height. Then they became glaciated. The whole Northern Hemisphere, in fact, took on the character of the present Greenland. Enormous glaciers descended the flanks of the mountains, gouging and ploughing out the abysmal cañons which now awe the beholder, and scooping out the deeps where Chelan, Cœur d’Alene, Pend Oreille, Kaniksu, and other great lakes delight the vision of the present day.

Such were the forces that wrought the physical features of the land where the River flows. We do not mean to convey the impression that there was a single age of each, and that they followed each other in regular chronological order. As a matter of fact there were several eras of each, interlocked with each other: upheaval, fire, flood, and frost. But as the resultant of all, the Columbia Basin assumed its present form. The great forces which have thus fashioned this land manifested themselves on a scale of vast energy. Evidences of upheaval, fire, flood, and glacier are exhibited on every side, and these evidences constitute a testimony of geological history of the most interesting nature. Long before this record of the rocks had found a white reader, the native red man had read the open pages, and interpreted them in the light of his ardent fancy.

The Indian conception of the flood, involving also that of the creation of the native tribes, is one of the most fantastic native legends. This is the story of the great beaver, Wishpoosh, of Lake Kichelos. According to this myth the beaver Wishpoosh inhabited that lake on the summit of the Cascade Mountains, the source of the Yakima River.

In the time of the Watetash (animal people) before the advent of men, the king beaver, Wishpoosh, of enormous size and voracious appetite, was in the evil habit of seizing and devouring the lesser creatures and even the vegetation. So destructive did he become that Speelyei, the coyote god of the mid-Columbia region, undertook to check his rapacities.

The struggle only made the monster more insatiate, and in his wrath he tore out the banks of the lake. The gathered floods swept on down the cañon and formed another great lake in the region now known as the Kittitas Valley.

But the struggle between Wishpoosh and Speelyei did not end, and the former in his mad fury went on thrashing around in this greater lake. For a long time the rocky barriers of the Umtanum restrained the flood, but at last they gave way before the onslaughts of the wrathful beaver, and the loosened waters swept on down and filled the great basin now occupied by the fruit and garden ranches of the Cowiche, Natchees, and Atahnum. In like fashion the restraining wall at the gap just below Yakima city was torn out, and a yet greater lake was formed over all the space where we now see the level plains of the Simcoe and Toppenish. The next lake formed in the process covered the yet vaster region at the juncture of the Yakima, Snake and Columbia rivers. For a long time it was dammed in by the Umatilla highlands, but in process of time it, too, was drained by the bursting of the rocky wall before the well-directed attacks of Wishpoosh. The yet greater lake, the greatest of all, now formed between the Umatilla on the east and the Cascade Mountains on the west. But even the towering wall of the Cascades gave way in time and the accumulated floods poured on without further hindrance to the open sea.

Thus was the series of great lakes drained, the level valleys left, and the Great River suffered to flow in its present course. But there is a sequel to the story of the flood. For Wishpoosh, being now in the ocean, laid about him with such fury that he devoured the fish and whales and so threatened all creation that Speelyei perceived that the time had come to end it all. Transforming himself into a floating branch, he drifted to Wishpoosh and was swallowed. Once inside the monster, the wily god resumed his proper size and power; and with his keen-edged knife proceeded to cut the vitals of the belligerent beaver, until at last all life ceased, and the huge carcass was cast up by the tide on Clatsop beach, just south of the mouth of the Great River. And now what to do with the carcass? Speelyei solved the problem by cutting it up and from its different parts fashioning the tribes as each part was adapted. From the head he made the Nez Percés, great in council and oratory. From the arms came the Cayuses, powerful with the bow and war-club. The Klickitats were the product of the legs, and they were the runners of the land. The belly was transformed into the gluttonous Chinooks. At the last there was left an indiscriminate mass of hair and gore. This Speelyei hurled up the far distance to the east, and out of it sprung the Snake River Indians.

Such is the native physiography and anthropogenesis of the land of the Oregon.

If now one could rise on the pinions of the Chinook wind (the warm south wind of the Columbia Basin, of which more anon), and from the southern springs of the Owyhee and the Malheur could wing his way to the snowy peaks in British Columbia, from whose fastnesses there issues the foaming torrent of Canoe River, the most northerly of all the tributaries of the Great River, he would obtain, in a noble panorama, a view of the land where the River flows, in its present aspect, as fashioned by the elemental forces of which we have spoken. But not to many is it given thus to be “horsed on the sightless couriers of the air,” and we must needs use imagination in lieu of them. Even a map will be the safest guide for most. Inspection of the map will show that the distance to which we have referred covers twelve degrees of latitude, while the distance from the source of the Snake River in the Yellowstone National Park to the Pacific requires a span of fifteen degrees of longitude. The south-eastern part of this vast area occupying Southern Idaho is mainly an arid plain; arid, indeed, in its natural condition, but, when touched by the vivifying waters in union with the ardent sun, it blossoms like a garden of the Lord. Upon these vast plains where the volcanic dust has drifted for ages, now looking so dismal in their monotonous garb of sage-brush, the millions of the future will some time live in peace and plenty, each under his own vine and apple-tree. On the eastern boundary, all the way from Western Wyoming to Eastern British Columbia, stand cordons of stupendous mountains, the western outposts of the great Continental Divide. These constitute one spur after another, from whose profound cañons issues river after river to swell the torrents of the turbid and impetuous Snake on its thousand-mile journey to join the Columbia. Among these tributary streams are the Payette, the Boisé, the Salmon, and the Clearwater. Yet farther north, beyond the system of the Snake, are the Bitter Root, the Missoula, the Pend Oreille, the Spokane, and the Kootenai (we follow here the American spelling, the Canadian being Kootenay), with almost innumerable affluents, draining the huge labyrinths of the Bitter Root Mountains and the Silver Bow.

Thus our northward flight carries us to the international boundary in latitude 49 degrees.

Far beyond that parallel stretches chain after chain of divisions of the great Continental Range, the Selkirks, the Gold Range, Purcell’s Range, sky-piercing heights, snow-clad and glaciated. Up and down these interlocking chains the Columbia and the Kootenai, with their great lakes and unexplored tributaries, seem to be playing at hide-and-seek with each other. These rivers form here one of the most singular geographical phenomena of the world, for so strangely are the parallel chains of mountains tilted that the Kootenai, rising in a small lake on the western flank of the main chain of the Canadian Rockies and flowing south, passes within a mile of the source of the Columbia at Columbia Lake, separated only by a nearly level valley. Connection, in fact, is so easy that a canal once joined the two rivers. From that point of contact the Kootenai flows far south into Idaho, then makes a grand wheel to the north-west, forming Kootenai Lake on the way, then wheeling again in its tortuous course to the west, it joins the greater stream in the midst of the majestic mountain chains which stand guard over the Arrow Lakes. And meanwhile where has the Columbia itself been journeying? After the parting from the Kootenai it flows directly north-west between two stupendous chains of mountains. Reaching its highest northern point in latitude 52 degrees, where it receives the Canoe River, which has come two hundred miles or more from the north, it turns sharply westward, finding a passageway cleft in the mountain wall. Thence making a grand wheel toward the south, it casts its turbid floods into the long expanse of the Arrow Lakes, from which it emerges, clear and bright, soon to join the Kootenai. And how far have they journeyed since they parted? The Columbia about six hundred miles, and the Kootenai hardly less, though having passed within a mile of each other, flowing in opposite directions.

It will be readily seen from this description that the mountains which feed the Columbian system of rivers on the east and north, are of singular grandeur and interest. But now as we bear our way southward again we discover that another mountain system, yet grander and of more curious interest, forms the western boundary of the upper Columbia Basin. This is the Cascade Range. Sublime, majestic, mysterious, this noble chain of mountains, with its tiaras of ice, its girdles of waterfalls, its draperies of forest, its jewels of lakes, must make one search long to find its parallel in any land for all the general features of mountain charm. But over and beyond those more usual delights of the mountains, the Cascade Range has a unique feature, one in which it stands unrivalled among all the mountains of the earth, with the exception possibly of the Andes. This is the feature of the great isolated snow peaks, stationed like sentinels at intervals of from thirty to sixty miles all the way from the British line to California. There is nothing like this elsewhere on the North American continent. The Sierras of California are sublime, but their great peaks are not isolated monarchs like those of the Cascades. The high Sierras are blended together in one mountain wall, in which no single peak dominates any wide extended space. But in the long array of the Cascades, five hundred miles and more from the international boundary to the California line, one glorious peak after another uplifts the banner and sets its regal crown toward sunrise or sunset, king of earth and air to the border where the shadow of the next mountain monarch mingles with its own. Hence these great Cascade peaks have an individuality which gives them a kind of living personality in the life of any one who has lived for any length of time within sight of them.

From the north, moving south, we might gaze at these great peaks, and find no two alike. Baker—how much finer is the native name, Kulshan, the Great White Watcher—first on the north; Shuksan next, the place where the storm-winds gather, in the native tongue; then Glacier Peak, with its girdle of ice, thirteen great glaciers; Stewart next with its dizzy horn of rock set in a field of snow; then the great king-peak of all, Rainier, better named by the natives, Takhoma, the fountain breast of milk-white waters; and after this, Adams, or in the Indian, Klickitat, with St. Helens or Loowit near at hand on the west; then, across the Great River, Hood or Wiyeast, with its pinnacled crest; next southward, Jefferson with its sharp chimney whose top has never yet been touched by human foot; yet beyond, the marvellous group of the Three Sisters, each with its separate personality and yet all together combining in one superb whole; then Mt. Scott, Mt. Thielson, Diamond Peak, Mt. Pitt, and with them we might well include the truncated cone of Mt. Mazama, once the lordliest of the chain, but by some mighty convulsion of nature, shorn of crown and head, and now bearing on its summit instead the most singular body of water, Crater Lake, on all the American continent.

Fifteen is the number of the great peaks named, but there are dozens of lesser heights, snow-crowned and regal. The great Cascade chain is, therefore, the noblest and most significant feature of the topography of the land of the Columbia. Between the Rocky Mountains and the Cascades lies what is locally known as the Inland Empire, mainly a continuous prairie or series of prairies and valleys, wheat land, orchard land, garden land, fertile, beautiful, attractive, broken by an occasional mountain spur, as the irregular mass of the Blue Mountains, but substantially an inhabited land, reaching from Colville, Spokane, and the Okanogan on the north to the Klamath valleys on the south, a region five hundred miles long by two hundred wide, a goodly land, one difficult to excel in all the potentialities of use for human needs.

Such are the distinguishing features of the Columbia Basin on the east side of the Cascade Mountains.

To the west of those mountains is another vast expanse of interior valleys, not so large indeed and not more fertile, but even more beautiful, and by reason of earlier settlement and contiguity to the ocean, better developed.

This series of valleys is enclosed between the Cascade Mountains and the Coast Range, and in a general way parallels the Inland Empire already described. But this statement should be qualified by the explanation that North-western Washington consists of the Puget Sound Basin, which is a distinct geographical system, while South-western Oregon consists of the Umpqua and Rogue River valleys, and these valleys though commercially and politically a part of the Columbia system, are geographically separate, since they debouch directly into the Pacific Ocean. There is left, therefore, for the Columbia region proper west of the Cascade Mountains, the Willamette Valley in Oregon, and the valleys of the Lewis, Kalama, and Cowlitz in Washington, with several smaller valleys on each side. The Willamette Valley is the great distinguishing feature of this part of the Columbia Basin. A more attractive region is hard to find. Mountains snow-clad and majestic, the great peaks of the Cascades already described, guard it on the east, while westward the gentler slopes of the Coast Range separate it from the sea. Between the two ranges lies the valley, two hundred miles long by about a hundred broad, including the foot-hills, a succession of level plains, oak-crowned hills, and fertile bottoms. Not Greece nor Italy nor the Vale of Cashmere can surpass this earthly paradise in all the features that compose the beautiful and grand in nature.

Geologists tell us that this Willamette region was once a counterpart of Puget Sound, only with less depth of water, and that, as the result of centuries of change, the old-time Willamette Sound has become the Willamette Valley. It has now become the most thickly settled farming region of the Columbia Basin, and, as its fitting metropolis, Portland sits at the gateway of the Willamette and Columbia, the “Rose City,” handsomest of all Western cities, to welcome the commerce of the world.

The valleys on the Washington side of the Columbia make up together a region of great beauty, fertility, and productiveness, perhaps a hundred miles square, and, though yet but partially developed, contain many beautiful homes.

The larger part of the Columbia Valley west of the Cascade Mountains is, in its natural state, densely timbered. Here are found “the continuous woods where rolls the Oregon and hears no sound but his own dashings.” These great fir, spruce, cedar, and pine forests, extending a thousand miles along the Pacific Coast from Central California to the Straits of Fuca (and indeed they continue, though the trees gradually diminish in size, for nearly another thousand miles up the Alaska coast), constitute the world’s largest timber supply. The demands upon it have been tremendous during the past twenty years, and the stately growths of centuries have vanished largely from all places in the near vicinity of shipping points. Yet one can still find primeval woods where the coronals of green are borne three hundred feet above the damp and perfumed earth, and where the pillars of the wood sustain so continuous a canopy of foliage that the sunlight is stopped or filters through only in pale and watery rays. Hence all manner of vines and shrubs grow with almost tropic profusion, though with weak and straggling stems.

Throughout the entire Pacific North-west the soil is of extraordinary fertility. It is largely of volcanic dust as fine as flour and seems to contain the constituents of plant life in inexhaustible abundance. Even in the arid belts of Eastern Oregon, where to the eye of the stranger the appearance is of a hopeless waste, those same elements of plant food exist, and with water every manner of tree or vine or flower bursts quickly into perfect life.

The climate of the Columbia Basin is a puzzle to the stranger, but in most of its aspects it quickly becomes an equal delight. As is well known, the Japan ocean current exercises upon the Pacific Coast an effect similar to that of the Gulf Stream on Ireland and England. Hence the states of the Columbia Valley are much warmer in winter than regions of the same latitude on the Atlantic Coast or in the Mississippi Valley. Though the average temperature is higher, yet it is cooler in summer on the Pacific Coast than on the Atlantic. The Pacific climate has much less of extremes. The State of Washington has about the same isothermal line as North Carolina. There is, however, another feature of the Columbia climate not so well known to non-residents, which is worthy of a passing paragraph. This is the division of the country by the Cascade Mountains into a humid western section and a dry eastern one. The mountain wall intercepts the larger part of the vapour rising from the Pacific and flying eastward, and these warm masses of vapour are condensed by the icy barrier and fall in rain on the western side. Hence Western Oregon and Washington are damp and soft, with frequent clouds and fogs. The rainfall, though varying much, is in most places from forty to fifty inches a year. But east of the mountain wall which has “milked the clouds,” the air is clear and bright, the sun shines most of the year from cloudless skies, and there seems to be more of tingle and electricity in the atmosphere. The rainfall ranges from ten to thirty inches, and in the drier parts vegetation does not flourish without irrigation.

Any view of primeval Oregon would be incomplete without a glimpse of the native race, that melancholy people, possessed of so many interesting and even noble traits, whose sad lot it has mainly been to struggle against the advent of a civilisation which they could not understand nor resist, and before which they have melted away in pitiful impotency. But they have at least had the highest dignity of defeat, for they have died fighting. They have realised the conception of the Roman Emperor: “Me stantem mori oportet.”

The Oregon Indians have essentially the same characteristic traits as other Indians, secretiveness, patience, vindictiveness, stoicism; and, in their best state, fidelity and boundless generosity to friends.

The poor broken fragments of the once populous tribes along the Columbia cannot but affect the present-day observer with pity. Most of the tangible memorials of this fallen race have vanished with them. Not many of the conquerors have been sympathetic or even rational in their treatment of the Indians. Hence memorials of memory and imagination which might have been drawn from them and treasured up have vanished with them into the darkness. Yet many Indian legends have been preserved in one manner and another, and these are sufficient to convince us that the native races are of the same nature as ourselves. Some of the legends which students of Indian lore have gathered, will, perhaps, prove interesting to the reader.

A quaint Nez-Percé myth accounts for the creation as follows: There was during the time of the Watetash a monster living in the country of Kamiah in Central Idaho. This monster had the peculiar property of an irresistible breath, so that when it inhaled, the winds and grass and trees and even different animals would be sucked into its devouring maw. The Coyote god, being grieved for the destruction wrought by this monster, made a coil of rope out of grass and with this went to the summit of Wallowa Mountains to test the suction power of the monster. Appearing like a tiny spear of grass upon the mountain, he blew a challenge to the monster. Descrying the small object in the distance Kamiah began to draw the air inward. But strange to say, Coyote did not move. “Ugh, that is a great medicine,” said the monster. Coyote now took his station upon the mountains of the Seven Devils, a good deal closer, and blew his challenge again. Again the Kamiah monster tried to breathe so deeply as to draw the strange challenger into his grasp, but again he failed. “He is a very big medicine,” he said once more. And now Coyote mounted the top of the Salmon River Mountains, somewhere near the Buffalo Hump of the present time, and again the monster’s breath failed to draw him. The baffled Kamiah was now sure that this was most extraordinary medicine. In reality, Coyote had each time held himself by a grass rope tied to the mountain.

Coyote now called into counsel Kotskots, the fox. Providing him with five knives, Kotskots advised Coyote to force an entrance into the interior of the monster. Entering in, Coyote found people in all stages of emaciation, evidently having had their life gradually sucked out of them. It was also so cold and dark in the interior that they were chilled into almost a condition of insensibility. Looking about him, Coyote began to see great chunks of fat and pitch in the vitals of the monster, and accordingly he rubbed sticks together and started a fire, which being fed with the fat and pitch, soon grew into a cheerful glow. Now, armed with his knives, he ascended the vast interior until he reached the heart. He had already directed Kotskots to rouse up and gather together all the emaciated stowaways and provide that when the monster was cut open they should see how to rush out into the sunlight. Great as was the monster Kamiah, he could not stop the persistent hacking away at his heart which Coyote now entered upon. When the fifth knife was nearly gone, the heart dropped down and Kamiah collapsed into a lifeless mass. The people under the guidance of Kotskots, burst out into the sunshine and scattered themselves abroad. It must be remembered that these were animal people, not human. Coyote called upon them to wait until he should have shown them a last wonder, for, cutting the monster in pieces, he now began to fashion from the pieces a new race of beings to be called men. The portion which he cut from the head he flung northward, and of this was fashioned the Flathead tribe. The feet he cast eastward, making them the Blackfeet. So he continued, making new tribes here and there. But at the last Kotskots interposed an objection. “You have made no people,” he said, “for the valley of the Lapwai, which is the most beautiful of all.” Realising the force of the suggestion, Coyote mixed the blood of the monster with water and sprinkled it in a rain over the entire valley of the Clearwater. From these drops of blood and water, the Nez Percé tribe was formed. The heart of the monster is still to be seen by all travellers in that country, being a heart-shaped hill in the valley of Kamiah.

Perhaps the most perfect and beautiful of all Indian fire myths of the Columbia, is that connected with the famous “tomanowas bridge” at the Cascades. This myth not only treats of fire, but it also endeavours to account for the peculiar formation of the river and for the great snow peaks in the near vicinity. This myth has various forms, and in order that it may be the better understood, we shall say a word with respect to the peculiar physical features in that part of the Columbia. The River, after having traversed over a thousand miles from its source in the heart of the great Rocky Mountains of Canada, has cleft the Cascade Range asunder with a cañon three thousand feet in depth. While generally swift, that portion between The Dalles and the Cascades is deep and sluggish. There are, moreover, sunken forests on both sides visible at low water, which seem plainly to indicate that at that point the river was dammed up by some great rock slide or volcanic convulsion. Some of the Indians affirm that their grandfathers have told them that there was a time when the river at that point passed under an immense natural bridge, and that there were no obstructions to the passage of boats under the bridge. At the present time there is a cascade of forty feet at that point. This is now overcome by government locks. Among other evidences of some such actual occurrence as the Indians relate, is the fact that the banks at that point are gradually sliding into the river. The prodigious volume of the Columbia, which here rises from fifty to seventy-five feet during the summer flood, is continually eating into the banks. The railroad has slid several inches a year at this point toward the river and requires frequent readjustment. It is obvious at a slight inspection that this weird and sublime point has been the scene of terrific volcanic and probably seismic action. One Indian legend, probably the best known of their stories, is to the effect that the downfall of the bridge and consequent damming of the river was due to a battle between Mt. Hood and Mt. Adams,—or, some say, Mt. St. Helens—in which Mt. Hood hurled a great rock at his antagonist; but, falling short of the mark, the rock demolished the bridge instead. This event has been made use of by Frederick Balch in his story, The Bridge of the Gods.

But the finer, though less known legend, which unites both the physical conformation of the Cascades and the three great snow mountains of Hood, Adams, and St. Helens, with the origin of fire, is to this effect. According to the Klickitats, there was once a father and two sons who came from the east down the Columbia to the region in which Dalles City is now located, and there the two sons quarrelled as to who should possess the land. The father, to settle the dispute, shot two arrows, one to the north and one to the west. He told one son to find the arrow to the north and the other the one to the west, and there to settle and bring up their families. The first son, going northward, over what was then a beautiful plain, became the progenitor of the Klickitat tribe, while the other son was the founder of the great Multnomah nation of the Willamette Valley. To separate the two tribes more effectively, Sahale, the Great Spirit, reared the chain of the Cascades, though without any great peaks, and for a long time all things went in harmony. But for convenience’ sake, Sahale had created the great tomanowas bridge under which the waters of the Columbia flowed, and on this bridge he had stationed a witch woman called Loowit, who was to take charge of the fire. This was the only fire in the world. As time passed on Loowit observed the deplorable condition of the Indians, destitute of fire and the conveniences which it might bring. She therefore besought Sahale to allow her to bestow fire upon the Indians. Sahale, greatly pleased by the faithfulness and benevolence of Loowit, finally granted her request. The lot of the Indians was wonderfully improved by the acquisition of fire. They began to make better lodges and clothes and had a variety of food and implements, and, in short, were marvellously benefited by the bounteous gift.

But Sahale, in order to show his appreciation of the care with which Loowit had guarded the sacred fire, now determined to offer her any gift she might desire as a reward. Accordingly, in response to his offer, Loowit asked that she be transformed into a young and beautiful girl. This was accordingly affected, and now, as might have been expected, all the Indian chiefs fell deeply in love with the guardian of the tomanowas bridge. Loowit paid little heed to any of them, until finally there came two chiefs, one from the north called Klickitat and one from the south called Wiyeast. Loowit was uncertain which of these two she most desired, and as a result a bitter strife arose between the two. This waxed hotter and hotter, until, with their respective warriors, they entered upon a desperate war. The land was ravaged, all their new comforts were marred, and misery and wretchedness ensued. Sahale repented that he had allowed Loowit to bestow fire upon the Indians, and determined to undo all his work in so far as he could. Accordingly he broke down the tomanowas bridge, which dammed up the river with an impassable reef, and put to death Loowit, Klickitat, and Wiyeast. But, inasmuch as they had been noble and beautiful in life, he determined to give them a fitting commemoration after death. Therefore he reared over them as monuments, the great snow peaks; over Loowit, what we now call Mt. St. Helens; over Wiyeast, the modern Mt. Hood; and, above Klickitat, the great dome which we now call Mt. Adams.

Of the miscellaneous myths which pertain to the forces of nature, one of the best is that accounting for the Chinook wind. All people who have lived long in Oregon or Washington have a conception of that marvellous warm wind which in January and February suddenly sends them almost summer heat amid snow banks and ice-locked streams, and causes all nature to rejoice as with a resurrection of spring time. Scarcely anything can be imagined in nature more picturesque and dramatic than this Chinook wind. The thermometer may be down nearly to zero, a foot of snow may rest like a pall on the earth, or a deadly fog may wrap the earth, when suddenly, as if by the breath of inspiration, the fog parts, the peaks of the mountains may be seen half stripped of snow, and then, roaring and whistling, the warm south wind comes like an army. The snow begins to drip like a pressed sponge, the thermometer goes with a jump to sixty, and within two hours we find ourselves in the climate of Southern California. No wonder the Indians personified this wind. We personify it ourselves.

The Yakima account of the Chinook wind was to the effect that it was caused by five brothers who lived on the Columbia River, not far from the present town of Columbus. Now there is at rare intervals in this country a cold north-east wind, which the Indians on the lower Columbia call the Walla Walla wind because it comes from the north-east. The cold wind was caused by another set of brothers. Both these sets of brothers had grandparents who lived near what is now Umatilla. The two groups of brothers were continually fighting each other, sweeping one way or the other over the country, alternately freezing or thawing it, blowing down trees and causing the dust to fly in clouds, and rendering the country generally very uncomfortable. Finally, the Walla Walla brothers sent a challenge to the Chinook brothers to undertake a wrestling match, the condition being that those who were defeated should forfeit their lives. It was agreed that Speelyei should act as umpire and should inflict the penalty by decapitating the losers. Speelyei secretly advised the grandparents of the Chinook brothers to throw oil on the wrestling ground so that their sons might not fall. In like manner he secretly advised the grandparents of the Walla Walla brothers to throw ice on the ground. Between the ice and the oil it was so slippery that it would be hard for any one to keep upright, but inasmuch as the Walla Walla grandfather got ice on the ground last, the Chinook brothers were all thrown and killed.

The eldest Chinook had an infant baby at home, whose mother brought him up with one sole purpose in view, and that was that he must avenge the death of his father and uncles. By continual practice in pulling up trees he became prodigiously strong, insomuch that he could pull up the largest fir trees and throw them about like weeds. The young man finally reached such a degree of strength that he felt that the time had come for him to perform his great mission. Therefore he went up the Columbia, pulling up trees and tossing them around in different places, and finally passed over into the valley of the Yakima, where he lay down to rest by the creek called the Setas. There he rested for a day and a night, and the marks of his couch are still plainly visible on the mountain side.

Now, turning back again to the Columbia, he sought the hut of his grandparents, and when he had found it, he found also that they were in a most deplorable condition. The Walla Walla brothers had been having it all their own way during these years and had imposed most shamefully upon the old people. When he learned this, the young Chinook told his grandfather to go out into the Columbia to fish for sturgeon, while he in the meantime would lie down in the bottom of the boat and watch for the Walla Walla wind. It was the habit of these tormenting Walla Walla wind brothers to wait until the old man had got his boat filled with fish, and then they, issuing swiftly and silently from the shore, would beset and rob him. This time they started out from the shore as usual, but to their great astonishment, just as they were about to catch him, the boat would shoot on at miraculous speed and leave them far behind. So the old man landed safely and brought his fish to the hut. The young Chinook then took his grandparents to a stream and washed from them the filth which had gathered upon them during all those years of suffering. Strange to say, the filth became transformed into trout, and this is the origin of all the trout along the Columbia.

As soon as the news became known abroad that there was another Chinook champion in the field, the Walla Walla brothers began to demand a new wrestling match. Young Chinook very gladly accepted the challenge, though he had to meet all five. But now Speelyei secretly suggested to the Chinook grandfather that he should wait about throwing the oil on the ground until the ice had all been used up. By means of this change of practice, the Walla Walla brothers fell speedily before the young Chinook. One after another was thrown and beheaded until only the youngest was left. His courage failing, he surrendered without a struggle. Speelyei then pronounced sentence upon him, telling him that he must live, but could henceforth only blow lightly, and never have power to freeze people to death. Speelyei also decreed that in order to keep Chinook within bounds he should blow his hardest at night time, and should blow upon the mountain ridges first in order to prepare people for his coming. Thus there came to be moderation in the winds, but Chinook was always the victor in the end. And thus at the present time, in the perpetual flux and reflux of the oceans of the air, when the north wind sweeps down from the chilly zones of Canada upon the Columbia Basin, his triumph is but transient. For within a few hours, or days at most, while the cattle are threatened with destruction and while ranchers are gazing anxiously about, they will discern a blue-black line upon the southern horizon. In a short time the mountain ridges can be seen bare of snow, and deliverance is at hand. For the next morning, rushing and roaring from the South, comes the blessed Chinook, and the icy grip of the North melts as before a blast from a furnace. The struggle is short and Chinook’s victory is sure.

Nearly all our native races had a more or less coherent idea of a future state of rewards and punishments. “The happy hunting ground” of the Indians is often referred to in connection with the Indians of the older part of the United States. Our Indians have ideas in general quite similar. Some believe that there is a hell and a heaven. The Siskiyou Indians in Southern Oregon have a curious idea similar to that of the ancient Egyptians as well as of the Mohammedans. This is to the effect that the regions of the blessed are on the other side of an enormously deep chasm. To pass over this, one must cross on a very narrow and slippery pole. The good can pass, but the bad fall off into empty space, whence they reappear again upon the earth as beasts or birds.

The Klickitat Indians, living along The Dalles of the Columbia have a fine legend of the land of spirits. There lived a young chief and a girl who were devoted to each other and seemed to be the happiest people in the tribe, but suddenly he sickened and died. The girl mourned for him almost to the point of death, and he, having reached the land of the spirits, could find no happiness there for thinking of her. And so it came to pass that a vision began to appear to the girl at night, telling her that she must herself go into the land of the spirits in order to console her lover. Now there is, near that place, one of the most weird and funereal of all the various “memaloose” islands, or death islands, of the Columbia. The writer himself has been upon this island and its spectral and volcanic desolation makes it a fitting location for ghostly tales. It lies just below the “great chute,” and even yet has many skeletons upon it. In accordance with the directions of the vision, the girl’s father made ready a canoe, placed her in it, and passed out into the Great River by night, to the memaloose island. As the father and his child rowed across the dark and forbidding waters, they began to hear the sounds of singing and dancing and great joy. Upon the shore of the island they were met by four spirit people, who took the girl, but bade the father return, as it was not for him to see into the spirit country. Accordingly the girl was conducted to the great dance-house of the spirits, and there she met her lover, far stronger and more beautiful than when upon earth. That night they spent in unspeakable bliss, but when the light began to break in the east and the song of the robins was heard from the willows on the shore, the singers and the dancers fell asleep.

The girl, too, had gone to sleep, but not soundly like the spirits. When the sun had reached the meridian, she woke, and now, to her horror, she saw that instead of being in the midst of beautiful spirits, she was surrounded by hideous skeletons and loathsome, decaying bodies. Around her waist were the bony arms and skeleton fingers of her lover, and his grinning teeth and gaping eye-sockets seemed to be turned in mockery upon her. Screaming with horror, she leaped up and ran to the edge of the island, where, after hunting a long time, she found a boat, in which she paddled across to the Indian village. Having presented herself to her astonished parents, they became fearful that some great calamity would visit the tribe on account of her return, and accordingly her father took her the next night back to the memaloose island as before. There she met again the happy spirits of the blessed, and there again her lover and she spent another night in ecstatic bliss. In the course of time a child was born to the girl, beautiful beyond description, being half spirit and half human. The spirit bridegroom, being anxious that his mother should see the child, sent a spirit messenger to the village, desiring his mother to come by night to the memaloose island to visit them. She was told, however, that she must not look at the child until ten days had passed. But after the old woman had reached the island, her desire to see the wonderful child was so intense that she took advantage of a moment’s inattention on the part of the guard, and, lifting the cloth from the baby board, she stole a look at the sleeping infant. And then, dreadful to relate, the baby died in consequence of this premature human look. Grieved and displeased by this foolish act, the spirit people decreed that the dead should never again return nor hold any communication with the living.

In concluding this chapter we cannot forbear to call the attention of our readers to the rare beauty of many of the native Indian names of localities. These names always have some significance, and ordinarily there is some such poetic or figurative conception involved in the name as plainly reveals the fact that these rude and unfortunate natives have the souls of poets beneath their savage exterior. It is truly lamentable that some of the sonorous and poetic native names have been thrust aside for the commonplace and oft-repeated names of Eastern or European localities or the still less attractive names of discoverers or their unimportant friends.

Think of using the names Salem and Portland for Chemeketa and Multnomah, the native names. Chemeketa means “Here we Rest,” or, some say, the “Place of Peace,” for it was the council ground of the Willamette Valley Indians. But the Methodist missionaries thought that it would have a more Biblical sound and conduce to the spiritual welfare of the natives to translate the word into its equivalent, Salem. So they spoiled the wild native beauty of the name for all time. Multnomah means “Down the Waters.” But two Yankee sea captains, with a sad deficiency of poetry in them, tossed up a coin to decide whether to employ the name of Boston or Portland, the native town of each, and the latter won the toss.

Oregon has been more fortunate than Washington in its State name, for it has the unique name, stately and sonorous, which old Jonathan Carver first used for the River and which is one of the most distinctive of all the names of States. But whether Oregon is Indian, Spanish, French, or a corruption of something else, or a pure invention of Carver’s is one of the mooted points in our history. Idaho, too, has one of the most mellifluous of names, meaning the “Gem of the Mountains.”

All three States have many beautiful and appropriate names of rivers, lakes, mountains, and cities. Such are Chelan, “Beautiful Water”; Umatilla, “The Wind-blown Sand”; Walla Walla, “Where the Waters Meet”; Shuksan, “The Place of the Storm Winds”; Spokane, “The People of the Sun”; Kulshan, “The Great White Watcher”; Snoqualmie, “The Falls of the Moon God.” Seattle derives its name from the old chief Seattle, or Sealth.

The most bitterly disputed name of all is Tacoma vs. Rainier, as the name of the greatest of our mountains. The name of Rainier was derived by Vancouver from that of an officer of the British navy, a man who never knew anything of Oregon and had no part or lot in its discovery or development. Tacoma, or more accurately, Takhoma (a peculiar guttural which we cannot fully indicate), was the native Indian name, meaning, according to some, “The Great White Mountain,” and according to others meaning “The Fountain-breast of Milk-white Waters.”

With these glances at the character of the land, and its native inhabitants, we are now ready to see how they became known to the world.

CHAPTER II

Tales of the First White Men along the Coast

Nekahni Mountain and Tallapus—Quootshoi and Toulux—Original Beauty of Clatsop Plains—The Story Told by Celiast and Cultee—Casting of the “Thing” upon the Beach—The Pop-corn—Burning of the Ship—Konapee, the Iron-worker—Franchère’s Account of Soto—The Treasure Ship on the Beach at Nekahni Mountain—The Black Spook and Mysterious Chest—The Inscription Still Found on the Rock—The Beeswax Ship—Quiaculliby.

We have told something of the mountains, rivers, and lakes which make up the framework of our Pacific North-west. We have also tried to see the land through the eyes of the native red men, and have called back a few of the grotesque, fantastic, sometimes heroic, sometimes pathetic legends which they associated with every phase of their country.

Now the very centre of Indian lore, the Parnassus, the Delphi, the Dodona, of the lower Columbia River Indians, is the stretch of mingled bluff, plain, lake, sand-dune, and mountain, marvellously diversified, from the south shore of the Columbia’s mouth to the sacred Nekahni Mountain. It is a wonderously picturesque region. From it came Tallapus, the Hermes Trismegistus of the Oregon Indians. Its forests were haunted by the Skookums and Cheatcos. From the volcanic pinnacles of Swallallochast, now known as Saddle Mountain, the thunder bird went forth on its daily quest of a whale, while at the mountain’s foot Quootshoi and Toulux produced the first men from the monstrous eggs of that same great bird. In short, that region was rich in legend, as it was, and still is, in scenic beauty.

It is said by the Indians that a hundred years or more ago it was much finer than now, for the entire breadth of Clatsop Plains was sodded with deep green grass and bright with flowers almost the whole year through. This bright-hued plain lay open to the sea, and across its southern end flowed three tide streams, having the aboriginal names of Nekanikum, Ohanna, and Neahcoxie.

It was a veritable paradise for the Indians. The forests were filled with elk (moosmoos) and deer (mowitch), while fish of almost every variety thronged the waters, from that king of all fish now known as the royal chinook of the Columbia down to such smaller fry as the smelt and the herring, which even now sometimes so throng the lesser streams that the receding tide leaves them by the thousands on the muddy flats. On the beach were infinite numbers of clams; and as an evidence of their abundance we can now see shell mounds by the acre, in such quantity, indeed, that some of the modern roads have been paved with shells.

This favoured region was the home of the Clatsops. There, too, according to the legends, the first white men landed. The story of the first appearance of the white men has reached our own times in various forms, but the most coherent account is through the word of Celiast, an Indian woman who died many years ago, but who became the wife of one of the earliest white settlers and the mother of Silas Smith, now dead, but known in his time as one of the best authorities on Indian history. Celiast was the daughter of Kobaiway, a chieftain whose sway extended over the land of the Clatsops in the time of the Astor Company a century ago. Celiast was in fact the best authority for many of the Indian legends. But she is not alone in the knowledge of this appearance of the white men, for a number of other Indians tell the substance of the same tale. Among others an old Indian of Bay Centre, Washington, by the name of Charlie Cultee, related the story to Dr. Franz Boas, whose work in the Smithsonian Institute is known as among the best on the native races. This is the story, a composite of that of Celiast and that of Cultee.

It appears that an old woman living near the ancient Indian village of Ne-Ahkstow, about two miles south of the mouth of the Great River (the Columbia) had lost her son. “She wailed for a whole year, and then she stopped.” One day, after her usual custom, she went to the seaside, and walked along the shore towards Clatsop. While on the way she saw something very strange. At first it seemed like a whale, but, when the old woman came close, she saw that it had two trees standing upright in it. She said, “This is no whale; it is a monster.” The outside was all covered over with something bright, which they afterwards found was copper. Ropes were tied all over the two trees, and the inside of the Thing was full of iron.

While the old woman gazed in silent wonder, a being that looked like a bear, but had a human face, though with long hair all over it, came out of the Thing that lay there. Then the old woman hastened home in great fear. She thought this bearlike creature must be the spirit of her son, and that the Thing was that about which they had heard in the Ekanum tales.

The people, when they had heard the strange story, hastened with bows and arrows to the spot. There, sure enough, lay the Thing upon the shore, just as the old woman had said. Only instead of one bear there were two standing on the Thing. These two creatures,—whether bears or people the Indians were not sure,—were just at the point of going down the Thing (which they now began to understand was an immense canoe with two trees driven into it) to the beach, with kettles in their hands.

As the bewildered people watched them they started a fire and put corn into the kettles. Very soon it began to pop and fly with great rapidity up and down in the kettles. The pop-corn (the nature of which the Clatsops did not then understand) struck them with more surprise than anything else,—and this is the one part of the story preserved in every version.

Then the corn-popping strangers made signs that they wanted water. The chief sent men to supply them with all their needs, and in the meantime he made a careful examination of the strangers. Finding that their hands were the same as his own, he became satisfied that they were indeed men. One of the Indians ran and climbed up and entered the Thing. Looking into the interior, he found it full of boxes. There were also many strings of buttons half a fathom long. He went out to call in his relatives, but, before he could return, the ship had been set on fire. Or, in the language of Charlie Cultee, “It burnt just like fat.” As a result of the burning of the ship, the Clatsops got possession of the iron, copper, and brass.

Now the news of this strange event became noised abroad, and the Indians from all the region thronged to Clatsop to see and feel of these strange men with hands and feet just like ordinary men, yet with long beards and with such peculiar garb as to seem in no sense men. There arose great strife as to who should receive and care for the strange men. Each tribe or village was very anxious to have them, or at least one of them. The Quienaults, the Chehales, and the Willapas, from the beach on the north side, came to press their claims. From up the river came the Cowlitz, the Cascades, and even the Far-off Klickitat. The different tribes almost had a battle for possession, but, according to one account, it was finally settled that one of the strange visitors should stay with the Clatsop chief, and that one should go with the Willapas on the north side of the Great River. According to another, they both stayed at Clatsop.

From this first arrival of white men, the Indians called them all “Tlehonnipts,” that is, “Of those who drift ashore.” One of the men possessed the magical art of taking pieces of iron and making knives and hatchets. It was indeed to the poor Indians a marvellous gift of Tallapus, their god, that they should have a man among them that could perform that priceless labour, for the possession of iron knives and hatchets meant the indefinite multiplying of canoes, huts, bows and arrows, weapons, and implements of every sort. The iron-maker’s name was Konapee. The Indians kept close watch of him for many days and made him work incessantly. But, as the tokens of his skill became numerous, his captors held him in great favour and allowed him more liberty. Being permitted to select a site for a house, he chose a spot on the Columbia which became known to the Indians, even down to the white occupancy of the region, as “Konapee.”

Among other possessions, Konapee had a large number of pieces of money, which, from the description, must have been Chinese “cash.” From this some have inferred that Konapee must have been a Chinaman, and the wrecked ship a Chinese or Japanese junk. This does not, however, follow. For the Spaniards had become entirely familiar with China, and any Spanish vessel returning from the Philippine Islands or from China would have been likely to have a supply of Chinese money on board.

There is an interesting bit of testimony which seems to belong to this same story of Konapee. It is found in the book by Gabriel Franchère in regard to the founding of Astoria, the book which was the chief authority of Irving in his fascinating narrative entitled Astoria. Franchère describes meeting an old man, eighty years old, in 1811, at the Cascades, whose name was Soto, and who said that his father was one of four Spaniards wrecked on Clatsop beach many years before. His father had tried to reach the land of the sunrise by going eastward, but having reached the Cascades was prevented from going farther and had there married an Indian woman, Soto’s mother. It is thought likely that the father of Soto was Konapee. The two stories seem to fit quite well. If this be true, it is likely that Konapee’s landing was as early as 1725. If all the details of Konapee’s life could be known, what a romance might be made of it! There is no reason to suppose that he ever saw other white men or ever got away from the region where the fortune of shipwreck had cast him. Yet he was in possession of one of the greatest geographical secrets of that country, for the hope of the discovery of some great “River of the West,” the elusive stream which many believed to be a pure fabrication of Aguilar and other old navigators, had enticed many a “marinere” from many a far “countree.”

In any event it is probable that the Columbia River Indians had got a general knowledge of the whites and their arts from Konapee long before the authentic discovery of the river was made. Especially it seems that from him they got a knowledge of iron and implements fashioned from it. Captain Cook mentions that when he visited the coast in 1780 the Indians manifested no surprise at the weapons or implements of iron. In fact even all whites who supposed themselves to be the first to visit this coast found the Indians ready to trade and especially eager to get iron. A new era of trade and business seems to have been inaugurated among these Clatsops and Chinooks dating from about the supposed time of Konapee. But he was by no means the only one of his race to be cast upon the Oregon shore. There is a story of a treasure ship cast upon the beach near Nekahni Mountain. This mountain, the original home of Tallapus, while on its summit the great chief god Nekahni himself dwelt, is one of the noblest pieces of Nature’s art all along the shore. Fronting the ocean with a precipitous rampart of rock five hundred feet high and thence rising in a wide sweeping park clad in thick turf, and dotted here and there with beautiful spruce and fir trees, to an elevation of twenty-five hundred feet, the sacred Nekahni presents as fine a combination of the beautiful and sublime as can be seen upon a whole thousand miles of coast. It was a favourite spot with the natives. For lying upon its open and turfy slopes they could gaze upon many miles of sea, and could no doubt light up their signal fires which might be seen over a wide expanse of beach. Very likely there, too, they celebrated the mysterious rites of Nekahni and Tallapus.

One pleasant afternoon in early summer, a large group of natives assembled upon the lower part of Nekahni, almost upon the edge of the precipitous cliff with which it fronts the sea. Gazing into the offing they saw a great object like a huge bird drawing near from the outer sea. It approached the shore, and then from it a small boat with a number of men and a large black box put out to land. Coming to the beach the men took out the box and also a black man whom the Indians supposed to be a spook or evil demon. Going a little way up the beach the men dug a hole into which they lowered the box, and then having struck down the black man they threw him on top of the box and, covering it up, they returned to the ship, which soon disappeared from sight. On account of the black man buried with the box, the superstitious Indians dared not undertake to exhume the contents of the grave. But the story was handed from one generation to another, and it came to constitute the story of the “treasure ship.”

In recent times the idea that here some chest, with gold and jewels in the most approved style of buried fortunes, might be found has caused much searching. The ground has been dug over for the sight of the regulation rusty handle which is to lead to the great iron-bound chest with its doubloons of gold and crucifixes of pearls. Parties have come from the Eastern States to join the search. One party even secured the guidance of spirits who professed to locate the treasure. But though the spirit-led enthusiasts turned over every stone and dug up the sand for many feet along the beach, they found never an iron-bound chest, and never a sign of the treasure. There is, however, in plain sight now, on a rock at the foot of Nekahni Mountain, a character cut in the rock bearing a rude resemblance to a cross. Some think it looks more like the letters, I.H.S., the sacred emblem of the Catholic Church. There is also what seems to be quite a distinct arrow pointing in a certain direction. But the treasure remains unfound.

The next legend of the prehistoric white man is that of the “Beeswax Ship.” This, too, has a real confirmation in the presence of large quantities of beeswax at a point also near Nekahni Mountain, just north of the mouth of the Nehalem River. Some naturalists claimed at one time that this substance was simply the natural paraffine produced from the products of coal or petroleum. But more recently cakes of the substance stamped with the sacred letters, “I.H.S.,” together with tapers, and even one piece with a bee plainly visible within, may be considered incontestable proof that this is indeed beeswax, while the letters, “I.H.S.” denote plainly enough the origin of the substance in some Spanish colony. An interesting point in connection with this is the historical fact that on June 16, 1769, the ship San José left La Paz, Lower California, for San Diego, and was never heard from again. Some have conjectured that the San José was the “Beeswax Ship,” driven far north by some storm or mutiny. As to the peculiar fact that a ship should have been entirely loaded with beeswax it has been conjectured that some of the good padres of the Spanish Missions meant to provide a new station with a large amount of wax for the sake of providing tapers for their service, the lighted candles proving then, as they do now, a matter of marvel and wonder to the natives, and, with other features of ceremonial worship, having a great effect to bring them into subjection to the Church.

The Indian legend runs on to the effect that several white men were saved from the wreck of the “Beeswax Ship,” and that they lived with them. But having infringed upon the family rights of the natives, they became obnoxious, and were all cut off by an attack from them. One story, however, asserts that there was one man left, a blue-eyed, golden-haired man, that he took a Nehalem woman, and that from him was descended a fair-complexioned progeny, of which a certain chieftain who lived at a beautiful little lake on Clatsop plains, now known as Culliby Lake, was our Quiaculliby.

Such in brief survey, are some of the stories which preserve the record of the space betwixt the Indian age of myth and the period of authentic discovery.

CHAPTER III

How all Nations Sought the River from the Sea and how they Found it

Search for Gold—Economic Effects—Early Extension of Exploration Westward—Cortez—Magellan—Aguilar—Fables of the Sea—Shakspere and Swift—Maps—Great Wars of the Seventeenth Century and Downfall of Spain—Long Delay—Resumption of Exploration—Spanish Settlement of California—Russia and Behring—Perez—Heceta—Cook—Fur-trade—Gathering of Nations—The Yankees—Gray and Kendrick—Meares and Vancouver—The Complete Discovery—Strife between England and the United States.

The period of the Renaissance is one, which by reason of splendid achievements in literature, in art, in science, and in discovery, can hardly be duplicated. We are here especially concerned with the discoverers. A mingling of motives impelled those dauntless spirits onward, and among the most potent was the greed for gold. Much American history is bound up with the mad rush for the precious metals, and the spread of exploration from the West Indies and Mexico, the first centres of Spanish power, was one of its results. Only eight years after the landing of Columbus on San Salvador, the Portuguese Gaspar Cortereal had conceived the idea of a north-west passage, which in some unexplained manner became known as the Strait of Anian. In 1543, the Spaniards Cabrillo and Ferrelo coasted along the shores of California, and the latter was doubtless the first white man to look upon the coast of Oregon. In 1577, England appeared in the person of that boldest and most picturesque of the half-discoverers, half-pirates, of that time, Francis Drake. In that year he set forth on the wonderful voyage in which he plundered the treasures of the Spanish Main, cut the golden girdle of Manila, queen of the Spanish Orient, skirted along the coast of California and Oregon, and at last circumnavigated the globe. Brilliant as were Drake’s exploits, they did not result in the discovery of our Great River. In 1592, just a century after Columbus, Juan de Fuca, whose name is now preserved in the strait leading to Puget Sound, is said to have made that voyage which is regarded by most historians as a myth, but which affords so fascinating a bit of narration that it ought to be true. Two hundred years later John Meares, the English navigator, attached the name of the stout old Greek pilot to that inlet now familiar to ships of all nations. With the passage of a few years more, explorations upon the western shore of America began to assume a more definite form. In 1602 the best equipped squadron thus far sent out left Acapulco under command of Vizcaino, with the aim of carrying out Monterey’s great purpose for the northward extension of Spanish power. The fleet being scattered by storm, the fragata in command of Martin Aguilar ran up the coast as far as latitude 43 degrees. There they found a cape to which they attached the name still held, Cape Blanco. From that point, following the north-westerly trending of the coast, they soon came abreast of a “rapid and abundant river, with ash trees, willows, and brambles, and other trees of Castile upon its banks.” This they endeavoured to enter, but from the strength of the current could not. “And seeing that they had already reached a higher latitude than had been ordered by the viceroy and that the number of the sick was great, they decided to return to Acapulco.” Torquemada, the historian, from whom the account is taken, goes on to say:

It is supposed that this river is one leading to a great city, which was discovered by the Dutch when they were driven thither by storms, and that it is the Strait of Anian, through which the vessels passed in sailing from the North Sea to the South Sea; and that the city called Quivera is in those parts; and that this is the region referred to in the account which His Majesty read, and which induced him to order this expedition.

The interesting question arises, Was the river the Columbia? It is the only large river on the Oregon coast, though the Umpqua, if at flood stage, might have given the impression of size. The latitude is not right, either, though the Spanish narrator does not say how far north of Cape Blanco they went. But whether or not Aguilar really went so far north as the Columbia, his voyage was one of much interest. It gave Spain a warrant to claim the western coast of America; it still further strengthened the idea of the Strait of Anian; it seemed to confirm the romantic conception of a great city or group of cities with civilised inhabitants along that passage way, and it gave the first name to the river, the Rio de Aguilar.

Thenceforth the navigators of all nations accepted as the primary object of their search some great river of the West. Hidden in the fogs of fancy, as it lay shrouded in truth in the mists of the ocean, the supposed Rio de Aguilar yet held the spell of enchantment over many an “ancient mariner” of many a land. Whatsoever nation could actually find the river and establish a definite claim to first discovery, would have, by the generally accepted usage of nations, the right of occupation and ownership.

That was a fruitful time for fables of the sea, and around the Great River many of them gathered. The original of Baron Munchausen seems to have existed in the persons of Captain Lorenzo Ferrer de Maldonado and Admiral Pedro Bartolomé de Fonte. The first of these worthies, whose voyage was said to have been made in 1588, describes in a very circumstantial manner his passage through the Strait of Anian and his exit upon the Asiatic side of the continent. This he averred was marked with a very remarkable rocky eminence which rendered it wonderfully adapted to fortification and defence, the mountain being so steep, in fact, that a missile dropped from the summit would fall directly upon a ship in mid-channel. It is thought by some students that some unchronicled Spanish navigator may have actually made the inland passage up the Alaskan coast and that some report of it may have become transformed into Maldonado’s story. Fonte’s story seems to have first appeared in a London publication in 1708, though his voyage was alleged to have been made in 1640. He told a marvellous tale of a great river which led to a magnificent lake on whose banks stood a great city. The river he located in latitude 53 degrees, and he named it the Rio de los Reyes, or River of Kings. This is far north of the Columbia, but the account persisted in popular idea for a long time. The name became associated with those of the Rio de Aguilar and the River of the West.

These and other similar tales, the flotsam and jetsam of ocean myths, gave something of inspiration and suggestion to literature. For even long before the alleged exploits of Fonte, the fertile mind of Shakspere had conceived of Caliban and Ariel and other fancies of the age of Western adventure. And in the next century the prince of political satirists, Jonathan Swift, had located almost exactly at the mouth of the Rio de Aguilar, the land of the Brobdingnagians, while the countries into which the veracious Gulliver was thrown at a later time, Luggnagg and Blubdubrib, were in the Pacific at a somewhat indefinite distance from the land of the Giants.

The land of the Oregon was in short, the land of the great unexplored and of boundless fancy. Some of the old maps illustrating that period are of much interest. Zaltieri’s map of 1566 shows a generally accurate conception of the eastern part of America and of the western coast of Mexico and California, but the entire continent above about latitude 60 degrees is occupied with a mare septentrionale incognito. Luck’s map of 1582 presents a fairly good conception of Florida and Mexico, but is entirely astray on the western coast. The Wytfliet-Ptolemy map of 1597 has a singularly indented coast running nearly east and west in the location of Oregon, while Cape Blanco and a river, the Rio de los Estrachos, in about latitude 51 degrees, seem to be an attempt to denote Aguilar’s cape of 1543, and to locate the river by still another name, though in a higher latitude. Maldonado’s map of the Strait of Anian of 1609 is manifestly manufactured to suit the occasion, and is interesting only as showing how far mendacity and gullibility could travel hand in hand.

But now the first age of discovery on the coast of Oregon drew to a close. It cannot be said that much of tangible knowledge had been attained. Puzzling questions had been raised. Labyrinths of conjecture, with no definite clues for exit, had been entered. Fascinating romances had been so interwoven with probable fact that no one could untangle them. A general conception of a great river and a great north-west passage had been held up with some distinctness as the goal of navigators. Finally, most important of all, what had been seen was of so enticingly interesting a nature and seemed to promise results so important, that they furnished a motive for continued exploration. It certainly looked as though the nations would continue the search for the Great River of the West. Spain had the inside track of all, though Drake and Cavendish and Hawkins had run down many a richly laden treasure galleon and had laid the booty at the feet of the Virgin Queen, and many an embittered buccaneer of French or English race had hounded the flag of Spain across the breadth of half the seas.

But a great change was impending. There was a new shuffle of the cards in the hands of the Fates and the Furies as the seventeenth century moved on apace. Spain’s time had come. Her cup of iniquity was now full. Her whole measure of national policy had been the sword for the pagan and the inquisition for the heretic. The banished Moors of Granada and the murdered “Beggars” of Holland and the wasted Incas and Montezumas of America united to call down the vengeance of Nemesis upon the destroyer of a fair world’s peace.

The stupendous struggles engendered by the Reformation, culminating in the Thirty Years’ War, went on almost without pause for over a century. That strife, ending at Westphalia in 1648, saw Spain prostrate and the principle of religious toleration triumphant. But almost immediately another struggle arose, the natural successor of the first, the struggle against the absolute monarchy of the Bourbons. As may well be seen, the nations of Europe were so enchained in the strife against Pope and King that they had little thought for new discoveries. Over a hundred and sixty years passed after the voyage of Aguilar before there was another serious movement of discovery on the coast of Oregon.

This new movement of Pacific exploration, destined to continue with no cessation to our own day, was ushered in by Spain. There was even yet much vitality in the fallen mistress of the world. Impelled by both religious zeal and hope of material gain, the immigration of 1769 went forth from La Paz to San Diego and Monterey. That inaugurated the singular and poetic, in some aspects even beautiful, history of Spanish California, an era which has provided so much of romance and poetry for literature in the California of our own times. The march of events had made it plain to the Spanish Government that, if it was to retain a hold on the Pacific Coast, it must bestir itself. Russia, England, and France, released in a measure from the pressure of European struggles, were fitting out expeditions to resume the arrested efforts of the sixteenth century. It seemed plain also that colonial America was going to be an active rival on the seas. And well may it have so seemed, for, in the sign of the Yankee sailor, the conquest was to be made.

But just at that important juncture a most favouring condition arose for Spain. The government of England precipitated the struggle of the American Revolution. France soon joined to strike her island rival a deadly blow by assisting in the liberation of the colonies. For the time, Spain had nearly a clear field for Pacific discovery, so far as England and France were concerned. As for Russia, the danger was more imminent. Russia had, indeed, begun to look in the direction of Pacific expansion a long time prior to the Spanish immigration to California. That vast monarchy, transformed by the genius of Peter the Great, had stretched its arms from the Baltic to the Aleutian Archipelago, and had looked from the frozen seas of Siberia to the open Pacific as a fairer field for expansion. Many years elapsed, however, before Peter’s great designs could be fulfilled. Not till 1741 did Vitus Behring thread the thousand islands of Sitka and gaze upon the glaciated crest of Mt. St. Elias. And it was not till thirty years later that it became understood that the Bay of Avatcha was connected by the open sea with China. In 1771 the first cargo of furs was shipped directly from Avatcha to Canton. Then first the vastness of the Pacific Ocean was comprehended. Then first it was understood that the same waters which lashed the frozen ramparts of Kamchatka encircled the coral islands of the South Sea and roared against the stormy barriers of Cape Horn.

The Russians had not found the Great River, though it appears that Behring in 1771 had gone as far south as latitude 46 degrees, just the parallel of the mouth of the Columbia. But he was so far off the coast as not to see it.

Three Spanish voyages followed in rapid succession: that of Perez in 1774, of Heceta in 1775, and of Bodega in 1779. The only notable things in connection with the voyage of Perez were his discovery of Queen Charlotte’s Island, with the sea-otter furs traded by the natives, the first sight of that superb group of mountains which we now call the Olympic, but which the Spaniards named the Sierra de Santa Rosalia, and finally the fine harbour of Nootka on Vancouver Island, named by Perez Port San Lorenzo, for years the centre of the fur-trade and the general rendezvous of ships of all nations. But no river was found.

With another year a still completer expedition was fitted out, Bruno Heceta being commander and Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra, second in command. This voyage was the most important and interesting thus far in the history of the Columbia River exploration. For Heceta actually found the Great River, so long sought and so constantly eluding discovery. On June 10, 1775, Heceta passed Cape Mendocino, and entered a small bay just northward. There he entered into friendly relations with the natives and took solemn possession of the country in the name of His Catholic Majesty of Spain. Sailing thence northward, he again touched land just south of the Straits of Fuca, but there he met disaster at the ill-omened point subsequently named Destruction Island. For there his boat landing for exploration was set upon by the savage inhabitants, and the entire boat-load murdered. Moving southward again, on August 15th, in latitude 46 degrees 10 minutes, Heceta found himself abreast of some great river. Deciding that this must be indeed the mysterious Strait of Fuca, or the long concealed river of the other ancient navigators, he made two efforts to enter, but the powerful current and uncertain depths deterred him, and he at last gave up the effort and bore away for Monterey. Three additional names were bestowed upon the River at this time. Thinking the entrance a bay, Heceta named it, in honour of the day, Ensenada de Asuncion. Later it was more commonly known as Ensenada de Heceta, while the Spanish charts designated the river as Rio de San Roque. The name of Cabo de Frondoso (Leafy Cape) was bestowed upon the low promontory on the south, now known as Point Adams, while upon the picturesque headland on the north which we now designate as Cape Hancock, the devout Spaniards conferred the name of Cabo de San Roque, August 16th being the day sacred to that saint.

The original account given by Heceta is so interesting that we insert it here:

On the 17th day of August I sailed along the coast to the 46th degree, and observed that from the latitude 47 degrees 4 minutes to that of 46 degrees 10 minutes, it runs in the angle of 18 degrees of the second quadrant, and from that latitude to 46 degrees 4 minutes, in the angle of 12 degrees of the same quadrant; the soundings, the shore, the wooded character of the country, and the little islands, being the same as on the preceding days.

On the evening of this day I discovered a large bay, to which I gave the name Assumption Bay, and a plan of which will be found in this journal. Its latitude and longitude are determined according to the most exact means afforded by theory and practice. The latitudes of the two most prominent capes of this bay are calculated from the observations of this day.

Having arrived opposite this bay at six in the evening, and placed the ship nearly midway between the two capes, I sounded and found bottom in four brazas [nearly four fathoms]. The currents and eddies were so strong that, notwithstanding a press of sail, it was difficult to get out clear of the northern cape, towards which the current ran, though its direction was eastward in consequence of the tide being at flood. These currents and eddies caused me to believe that the place is the mouth of some great river, or of some passage to another sea. Had I not been certain of the latitude of this bay, from my observations of the same day, I might easily have believed it to be the passage discovered by Juan de Fuca, in 1592, which is placed on the charts between the 47th and the 48th degrees; where I am certain no such strait exists; because I anchored on the 14th day of July midway between these latitudes, and carefully examined everything around. Notwithstanding the great difference between this bay and the passage mentioned by De Fuca, I have little difficulty in conceiving they may be the same, having observed equal or greater differences in the latitudes of other capes and ports on this coast, as I will show at the proper time; and in all cases latitudes thus assigned are higher than the real ones.

I did not enter and anchor in this port, which in my plan I suppose to be formed by an island, notwithstanding my strong desire to do so; because, having consulted with the second captain, Don Juan Perez, and the pilot Don Christoval Revilla, they insisted I ought not to attempt it, as, if we let go the anchor, we should not have men enough to get it up, and to attend to the other operations which would be thereby necessary. Considering this, and also, that in order to reach the anchorage, I should be obliged to lower my long boat (the only boat I had) and to man it with at least fourteen of the crew, as I could not manage with fewer, and also as it was then late in the day, I resolved to put out; and at the distance of three leagues I lay to. In the course of that night, I experienced heavy currents to the south-west, which made it impossible to enter the bay on the following morning, as I was far to leeward. These currents, however, convinced me that a great quantity of water rushed from this bay on the ebb of the tide.

The two capes which I name in my plan, Cape San Roque and Cape Frondoso, lie in the angle of 10 degrees of the third quadrant. They are both faced with red earth and are of little elevation.

On the 18th I observed Cape Frondoso, with another cape, to which I gave the name of Cape Falcon, situated in the latitude of 45 degrees 43 minutes, and they lay at an angle of 22 degrees of the third quadrant, and from the last mentioned cape I traced the coast running in the angle of 5 degrees of the second quadrant. This land is mountainous, but not very high, nor so well wooded as that lying between the latitudes of 48 degrees 30 minutes, and 46 degrees. On sounding I found great differences: at a distance of seven leagues I got bottom at 84 brazas; and nearer the coast I sometimes found no bottom; from which I am inclined to believe there are reefs or shoals on these coasts, which is also shown by the colour of the water. In some places the coast presents a beach, in others, it is rocky.

A flat-topped mountain, which I named the Table, will enable any navigator to know the position of Cape Falcon without observing it; as it is in the latitude of 45 degrees 28 minutes, and may be seen at a great distance, being somewhat elevated.

It may be added that the Cape Falcon of Heceta was the bold elevation fronting the sea, known now as Tillamook Head, while the Table Mountain was doubtless what we now call Nekahni Mountain, both points especially the scenes of Indian myth.

Such was the actual discovery of the Columbia River, and as such the Spaniards justly laid claim to Oregon. Their treaty with the United States in 1819 was the formal conveyance of their claims to us. Nevertheless Heceta only half discovered the River. It seems very strange that with the all-important object of two centuries’ search before him, he should so readily have succumbed to the fear of the powerful outstanding current. But the Spaniards were not in general the patient and persistent students of the shores that the English and Americans were. Their charts were in general worthless. Nevertheless Spain came nearest “making good” of any of the European powers. In 1779 Bodega and Arteaga sailed far north and sighted a vast snow peak “higher than Orizaba,” which was doubtless St. Elias. In the same year Martinez and De Haro established themselves at Nootka. Subsequent voyages of Bodega, Valdez, and Galiano, and their first circumnavigation of Vancouver Island (named by them Quadra’s Island, but, by mutual courtesy and good-will of the British and Spanish rivals, designated Vancouver’s and Quadra’s Island), gave them a clear title to the Pacific Coast of North America from latitude 60 degrees to Mexico.

But “that is another story.” What of the Great River? In the very year of the declaration of American independence, the most elaborate expedition yet fitted out for western discovery, set forth from England in command of that Columbus of the eighteenth century, Captain James Cook. After nearly two years of important movements in the Southern Hemisphere and among the Pacific Islands, Cook turned to that goal of all nations, the coast of Oregon. But the same singular fatality which had baffled many of the explorers thus far, attended this most skilful navigator and best equipped squadron thus far seen on Pacific waters. For Cook passed and repassed the near vicinity of both the Straits of Fuca and the Columbia River, but without finding either. Killed by the treacherous natives of Hawaii in 1778, Cook left a great name, a more intelligent conception of world geography than was known before, and greatly strengthened claims by Great Britain to the ownership of pivotal points of the Pacific. Of all the great English navigators, Cook is perhaps best entitled to join the grand chorus that sings the Songs of Seven Seas. But he did not see the Great River of the West. What had become of it? After the fleeting vision which it accorded to Heceta, it seemed to have gone into hiding.

But a new set of motives came into play immediately after Cook’s voyage. The two ships, the Resolution and Discovery, took with them to China a quantity of furs from Nootka. A few years earlier, as previously stated, the Russian fur-trade from Avatcha to China had been inaugurated. A great demand for peltries sprang up at once. A new régime dawned in Chinese and East India trade. Gold, silver, and jewels had not thus far rewarded the search of explorers. They were reserved for our later days of need. But the fur-trade was as good as gold. The North Pacific Coast, already interesting, assumed a new importance in the eyes of Europeans. The “struggle for possession” was on. The ships of all nations converged upon the fabled Strait and River of Oregon. English, Dutch, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Americans, began in the decade of the eighties to crowd to the land where the sea-otter, beaver, seal, and many other of the most profitable furs could be obtained for a trifle. The dangers of trading and the chances of the sea were great, but the profits of success were yet greater.

The fur-trade began to take the place of the gold hunt as a matter of international strife. The manner in which our own country, weak and discordant as its different members were when just emerging from the Revolutionary War, entered the lists, and by the marvellous allotment of Fortune or the design of Providence, slipped in between the greater nations and secured the prize of Oregon, is one of the epics of history, one which ought to have some native Tasso or Calderon to celebrate its triumph.

Following quickly upon the conclusion of the American War, came a series of British, French, and Russian voyages, which gradually centred more particularly about Vancouver Island and Nootka Sound. The British exceeded the others in numbers and enterprise. Among them we find names now preserved at many conspicuous points on the northern coast: as Portlock, Hanna, Dixon, Duncan, and Barclay. The most notable of the French was La Pérouse, who was best equipped for scientific research of any one. A number of Russian names appear at that period, most of which may yet be found upon the maps of Alaska, as Schelikoff, Ismyloff, Betschareff, Resanoff, Krustenstern, and Baranoff.

But none of them set eyes on the River, and it seemed more mythical than ever. As a result, however, of their various expeditions, incomplete though they were, each nation followed the usual practice of claiming everything in sight, either in sight of the eye or the imagination, and demanded the whole coast by priority of discovery.

Never did a geographical entity seem so to play the ignis fatuus with the world as did the River. Thirteen years elapsed from the discovery of the Rio San Roque by Heceta before any one of the dozens who had meanwhile passed up and down the coast, looked in again between the Cabo de Frondoso and the Cabo de San Roque. Then there came on one negative and two positive discoveries, and the elusive stream was really found never to be lost again.

The negative discovery was that of Captain John Meares in 1788. Since England afterwards endeavoured to make the voyages of Meares an important link in her chain of proof to the ownership of Oregon, it is worthy of some special attention. It happened on this wise. Meares came first to the coast of Oregon in 1786, in command of the Nootka to trade for furs for the East India Company. With the Nootka was the Sea-Otter, in command of Captain Walter Tipping. Both seem to have been brave and capable seamen. But disaster followed on their track. For having sailed far up the coast, they followed the Aleutian Archipelago eastward to Prince William’s Sound. Separated on the journey, the Nootka reached a safe haven, but her consort never arrived, nor was she ever heard of more. The Nootka, after an Arctic winter of distress and after losing a large part of the crew through the ravages of scurvy, abandoned the trade and returned to China. Discouraged by the outcome, the East India Company abandoned the American trade and confined themselves henceforth to India.

But Meares, finding that the Portuguese had special privileges in the fur-trade and in the harbour of Nootka, entered into an arrangement with some Portuguese traders whereby he went nominally as supercargo, but really as captain of the Felice, under the Portuguese flag. With her sailed the Iphigenia with William Douglas occupying a place similar to that of Meares. In estimating the subsequent pretensions of Great Britain, the student of history may well remember that these two mariners, though Englishmen, were sailing under the flag of Portugal.

Reaching again the coast of Oregon, Meares looked in, June 29, 1788, at the broad entrance of an extensive strait which he believed to be the mythical Strait of Juan de Fuca of two centuries earlier, but which he did not pause to explore. He had resolved to solve the riddle of the Rio San Roque or the Ensenada de Asuncion or de Heceta, and turned his prow southward. On July 5th, in latitude 46 degrees 10 minutes, he perceived a deep bay which he considered at once to be the object of his search. Essaying to enter, he found the water shoaling with dangerous rapidity and a prodigious easterly swell breaking on the shore. From the masthead it seemed that the breakers extended clear across the entrance. With rather curious timidity for a bold Briton right on the eve of a discovery for which all nations had been looking, Meares lost courage and hauled out, attaching the name Deception Bay to the inlet and Cape Disappointment to the northern promontory, the last a name still officially used.

Meares left as his final conclusion in the matter, the following memorandum: “We can now assert that there is no such river as that of St. Roc exists, as laid down in the Spanish charts.” In view of this statement of the case it would certainly seem that he could not be accepted as a witness for English discovery, even if the Portuguese flag had not been flying at his masthead.

After bestowing the name of Lookout upon the great headland christened Cape Falcon by Heceta and known to us as Tillamook Head, Meares squared away for Nootka, and there he spent a very profitable season in the fur-trade.

But into the harbour of Nootka that same year of 1788, there sailed the ship of destiny, the Columbia Rediviva, in command of John Kendrick. With the Columbia came the Lady Washington, commanded by Robert Gray. These were the advance guard of Yankee ships which the energies of our liberated forefathers were sending forth as an earnest of the coming conquest of Oregon by the universal Yankee nation.

Gray and Kendrick were engaged in the fur-trade, and their energy and intelligence made it speedily profitable. It took a long time and a long arm, sure enough, in that day, to complete the great circuit of the outfitting, the bartering, the transferring, the return trip, and the final sale;—three years in all. The ship would be fitted out in Boston or New York with trinkets, axes, hatchets, and tobacco, and proceed by the Horn to the coast of Oregon,—six months or sometimes eight. Then up and down the coast, as far as known, they would trade with natives for the precious furs, making a profit of a thousand per cent. on the investment. Gray on one occasion got for an axe a quantity of furs worth $8000. The fur-barter would take another six or eight months. Then with hold packed with bales of furs, the ship would square away for Macao or Canton, six or eight months more. In China, the cargo of furs would go out and a cargo of nankeens, teas, and silks go in, with a great margin of profit at both ends. Then away again to Boston, there to sell the proceeds of that three years’ “round-up” of the seas, for probably ten times the entire cost of outfitting and subsistence. The glory, fascination, and gain of the ocean were in it, and also its dangers. Of this sufficient witness is found in vanished ships, murdered crews, storm, scurvy, famine, and war. But it was a great age. Gray and Kendrick were as good specimens of their keen, facile, far-sighted countrymen, as Meares and Vancouver were of the self-opinionated, determined, yet withal manly and thorough Britons.

Among other pressing matters, such as looking out for good fur-trade in order to recoup the Boston merchants who had put their good money into the venture, and looking out for the health of their crew, steering clear of the uncharted reefs and avoiding the treacherous natives, Gray and Kendrick remembered that they were also good Americans. They must see that the new Stars and Stripes had their due upon the new coast.

The first voyage of the two Yankee skippers was ended and they set forth for another round in 1791, but with ships exchanged, Gray commanding the Columbia on this second voyage. The year 1792 was now come, and it was a great year in the annals of Oregon, three hundred years from Columbus, two hundred from Juan de Fuca. The struggle between England and Spain over conflicting rights at Nootka, which at one time threatened war, had been settled with a measure of amicability. As a commissioner to represent Great Britain, Captain George Vancouver was sent out, while Bodega y Quadra was empowered to act in like capacity for Spain. Spaniards and Britons alike realised that, whatever the Nootka treaty may have been, possession was nine points of the law, and both redoubled their efforts to push discovery, and especially to make the first complete exploration of the Straits of Fuca and the supposed Great River. There were great names among the Spaniards in that year, some of which still commemorate some of the most interesting geographical points, as Quimper, Malaspina, Fidalgo, Caamano, Elisa, Bustamente, Valdez, and Galiano. A list of British names now applied to many points, as Vancouver, Puget, Georgia, Baker, Hood, Rainier, St. Helens, Whidby, Vashon, Townsend, and others, attests the name-bestowing care of the British commander.

In going to Nootka as British commissioner, Vancouver was under instructions to make the most careful examination of the coast, especially of the rivers or any interoceanic channels, and thereby clear up the many conundrums of the ocean on that shore. With the best ship, the war sloop Discovery, accompanied by the armed tender Chatham, in command of Lieutenant W. R. Broughton, and with the best crew and best general equipment yet seen on the coast, it would have been expected that the doughty Briton would have found all the important places yet unfound. That the Americans beat him in finding the River and that the Spaniards beat him in the race through the Straits and around Vancouver Island, may be regarded as due partly to a little British obstinacy at a critical time, but mainly due to the appointment of the Fates.

On April 27, 1792, Vancouver passed a “conspicuous point of land composed of a cluster of hummocks, moderately high and projecting into the sea.” This cape was in latitude 46 degrees 19 minutes, and Vancouver decided that here were doubtless the Cape Disappointment and Deception Bay of Meares. In spite of the significant fact that the sea here changed its colour, the British commander was so prepossessed with the idea that Meares must have decided correctly the nature of the entrance (for how was it possible for an English sailor to be wrong and a Spaniard right?) that he decided that the opening was not worthy of more attention and passed on up the coast. So the English lost their second great chance of being first to enter the River.

Two days later the lookout reported a sail, and as the ships drew together, the newcomer was seen to be flying the Stars and Stripes. It was the Columbia Rediviva, Captain Robert Gray, of Boston. In response to Vancouver’s rather patronising queries, the Yankee skipper gave a summary of his log for some months past. Among other things he stated that he had passed what seemed to be a powerful river in latitude 46 degrees 10 minutes, which for nine days he had tried in vain to enter, being repelled by the strength of the current. He now proposed returning to that point and renewing his effort. Vancouver declined to reconsider his previous decision that there could be no large river, and passed on to make his very elaborate exploration of the Straits of Fuca and their connected waters, and to discover to his great chagrin, that the Spaniards had forestalled him in point of time.

The vessels parted. Gray sailed south and on May 10, 1792, paused abreast of the same reflex of water where before for nine days he had tried vainly to enter. The morning of the 11th dawned clear and favourable, light wind, gentle sea, a broad, clear channel, plainly of sufficient depth. The time was now come. The man and the occasion met. Gray seems from the first to have been ready to take some chances for the sake of some great success. He always hugged the shore closely enough to be on intimate terms with it. And he was ready boldly to seize and use favouring circumstances. So, as laconically stated in his log-book, he ran in with all sail set, and at ten o’clock found himself in a large river of fresh water, at a point about twenty miles from the ocean.

The geographical Sphinx was answered. Gray was its Œdipus, though unlike the ancient Theban myth there was no need that either the Sphinx of the Oregon coast or its discoverer perish. The River recognised and welcomed its master.

The next day the Columbia moved fifteen miles up the stream. Finding that he was out of the channel, Gray stopped further progress and turned again seaward. Natives, apparently friendly disposed, thronged in canoes round the ship, and a large quantity of furs was secured.

The River already bore many names, but Gray added another, and it was the one that has remained, the name of his good ship Columbia. Upon the southern cape he bestowed the name of Adams, and upon the northern, the name Hancock. These also remain.

The great exploit was completed. The long sought River of the West was found, and by an American. The path of destiny for the new Republic of the West was made secure. Without Oregon we probably would not have acquired California, and without a Pacific Coast, the United States would inevitably have been but a second-class power, the prey to European intrigue. The vast importance of the issue then becomes clear. Gray’s happy voyage, that Yankee foresight and confidence in his seamanship and intuitive suiting of times and conditions to results which marks the vital turning points of history, differentiate Gray’s discovery from all others upon our north-west coast.

As we view the matter now, a century and more later, we can see that our national destiny, and especially the vast part that we now seem at the point of taking in world interests through the commerce of the Pacific, hung in the balance to a certain extent upon the stubborn adherence by Vancouver, the Briton, to the preconceived opinion that there was no important river at the point designated by his Spanish predecessor, and the contrasted readiness of the American Gray to embrace boldly the chances of some great discovery. It is true that the “Oregon Question” was not to be settled for several decades. Much diplomacy and contention, almost to the verge of war, were yet to come, but Gray’s fortunate dash, “with all sail set, in between the breakers to a large river of fresh water,” gave our nation a lead in the ultimate adjustment of the case, which we never lost.

We have said that there was one negative discovery—that of Meares—and two positive ones. Gray’s was one of the two, and that of Broughton, in command of the Chatham accompanying Vancouver, was the other.

On the 20th of May, the Columbia Rediviva—a most auspicious name—bade adieu to the scene of her glory, and with the Stars and Stripes floating in triumph at her mizzen-mast, turned northward. Again the American captain encountered Vancouver and narrated to him his discovery of the Columbia. With deep chagrin at his own failure in the two most important objects of discovery in his voyage, the British commander directed Broughton to return to latitude 46 degrees 10 minutes, enter the river, and proceed as far up as time allowed.

Accordingly, on October 21st, the companion ships parted at the mouth of the River, the Discovery proceeding to Monterey, while the Chatham crossed the bar, described by Broughton as very bad, and endeavoured to ascend the bay that stretched out beautiful and broad before them. But finding the channel intricate and soundings variable, the lieutenant deemed it advisable to leave the ship at a point which must have been about twenty miles from the ocean, and to proceed thence in the cutter.

There is one thing observable in Vancouver’s account of this expedition of Broughton, and that is extreme solicitude to establish these two propositions:—first, that the lower part of the Columbia is a bay and that its true mouth is at a point above that reached by Gray; and second, that the River is much smaller than it really is. It is hard to reconcile the language used in Broughton’s report as given by Vancouver with the supposition of candour and honesty. For while it is true that the lower part of the River is of bay-like expanse from four to nine miles in width, yet it is entirely fresh and has all river characteristics. One of the points especially made by Gray was that he filled his casks with fresh water. Moreover, the bar is entirely at the ocean limit. So completely does the River debouch into the Ocean, in fact, that in the great flood of 1894 the clams were killed on the ocean beaches for a distance of several miles on either side of the outer headlands through the freshening of the sea.

As to the size of the River, Broughton gives its width repeatedly as half a mile or a quarter of a mile, whereas it is at almost no point below the Cascades less than a mile in width, and a mile and a half is more usual. Broughton expresses the conviction that it can never be used for navigation by vessels of any size. In view of the vast commerce now constantly passing in and out, the absurdity of that idea is and has been for years sufficiently exhibited. The animus of the British explorers is obvious. By showing that the mouth of the River was really an inlet of the sea, they hoped to lay a claim to British occupancy as against Gray’s discovery, and by belittling the size of the River they hoped to save their own credit with the British Admiralty for having lost so great a chance for first occupation.

Broughton ascended the River to a point near the modern town of Washougal. He bestowed British names after the general fashion, as Mt. Hood, Cape George, Vancouver Point, Puget’s Island, Young’s Bay, Menzies’ Island, and Whidby’s River. With true British assurance, he felt that he had “every reason to believe that the subjects of no other civilised nation or state had ever entered this river before; in this opinion he was confirmed by Mr. Gray’s sketch, in which it does not appear that Mr. Gray either saw or was ever within five leagues of its entrance.” Therefore he “took possession of the river, and the country in its vicinity, in His Britannic Majesty’s name.”

In view of all the circumstances of Gray’s discovery, and his impartation of it to the British, this language of Vancouver has a coolness, as John Fiske remarks, which would be very refreshing on a hot day.

On November 10th, the Chatham crossed the bar outward bound for Monterey to join the Discovery.

Such, in rapid view, were the essential facts in the long and curiously complicated finding of our River. We see that various nations bore each a part. We see the foundation of the subsequent contention between Great Britain and the United States.

CHAPTER IV

The First Steps across the Wilderness in Search of the River

Jefferson and Ledyard—Verendrye—Montcachabe, the Indian—The Indians—The Canadians—Results of the Louisiana Purchase—Fitting out the Lewis and Clark Expedition—The Winter with the Mandans—Crossing of the Great Divide—Meeting of Sacajawea and Cameahwait—Descent from the Mountains to the Clearwater and Kimooenim—Canoe Journey Down the Snake and Columbia—First Sight of Mt. Hood—Clark in the Rôle of a Magician—The Timm or Great Falls—The Sunken Forests—First Appearances of the Tide—The Winter of 1805-06 at Fort Clatsop—The Beginning of the Return Trip—Faithfulness of the Indians—Reception of Lewis and Clark in the States—The Hunt Expedition—The Voyageurs and Trappers—Slow Progress to the Snake River—Disasters and Distress along the “Accursed Mad River”—Starvation—New Year’s Day of 1812—A Respite from Suffering in the Umatilla—First Sight of the Columbia and the Mid-winter Descent to Astoria—Melancholy Lot of Crooks and Day—Results of the Hunt Expedition.

The Pacific North-west was discovered both by land and by sea. To Thomas Jefferson, the great apostle of Democracy, is due the gathering of American interests in the far West, and the opening of the road by which American sovereignty was to reach the Pacific. His great mind outran that of the ordinary statesman of his time, and, with what seems at first sight the strangest inconsistency in our political history, he was the State-rights theorist and at the same time the creator of nationality beyond any other one of our early statesmen. Away back in 1786, Jefferson met John Ledyard, one of Cook’s associates in his great voyage to the Pacific Ocean, and grasped from the eager and energetic Yankee sailor, the idea of American destiny on the Pacific Coast. The fertile mind of Jefferson may justly be considered as the fountain of American exploration up the Missouri, across the crest of the Shining Mountains, as they then called the Rockies, and down the Columbia to the Pacific. Although Jefferson never himself took any steps beyond the Alleghanies, he was the inspiration of all the Americans who did take those steps.

Since we are speaking of first steps across the wilderness we should not forget that those of other nationalities than ours first crossed the American continent. The honour of the pioneer expedition to the crest of the Rocky Mountains belongs to the Frenchman, Verendrye. In 1773 he set forth from Montreal for the Rocky Mountains, and made many important explorations. His party is said to have reached the vicinity of the site of Helena, but never saw the sunset side of the Great Divide.

We are told by the interesting French writer, La Page, that the first man to proceed across the continent to the shores of the Pacific was a Yazoo Indian, Montcachabe or Montcacht Ape by name. According to the story, his two-year journey across the great wilderness through every species of peril and hardship, savage beasts and forbidding mountains and deserts, hostile Indians often barring his progress for many days, was one of the most remarkable explorations ever made by man. This Yazoo Indian with the long name was a veritable Columbus in the nature of his achievements. But results for the world could hardly follow his enterprise.

The first traveller to lead a party of civilised men through the Shining, or the Stony Mountains, finally known as Rocky Mountains, to the Pacific Ocean, was Alexander Mackenzie, a canny Scotchman, leading a party of Scotch and French Canadian explorers. In 1793 he reached the Pacific Coast at the point of 52 degrees 24 minutes 48 seconds north latitude. His inscription upon a rock with letters of vermilion and grease, were read many years afterwards: “Alexander Mackenzie, from Canada by land, July 22, 1793.”

But the explorations of Canadians were too far north to come within the scope of the Pacific North-west of our day. We must therefore take up the American expeditions which proceeded from the master mind of Jefferson. The first of these was the expedition of Lewis and Clark. This expedition did more to broaden the American mind and to fix our national destiny than any similar event in our whole history.

As soon as Jefferson was inaugurated president, he had urged upon Congress the fitting out of an expedition “to explore the Missouri River and such principal streams of it as, by its course of communication with the waters of the Pacific Ocean, whether the Columbia, Oregon, Colorado, or any other river, may offer the most direct and practical water communication across the continent, for the purposes of commerce.”

But before anything had actually been accomplished in the way of exploration, that vast and important event, the Louisiana Purchase, had been effected. The significance of this event was but little understood at the time, even by statesmen, but Jefferson realised that a great thing had been accomplished towards the development of the nation. His enthusiasm and hopefulness spread to Congress and to the leaders of opinion throughout the land. A like enthusiasm soon possessed the mass of population, and emigration westward began. Already the older West was teeming with that race of pioneers which has made up the life and the grandeur of the nineteenth century. The American hive began to swarm. “Out West” began to mean something more than Ohio and Kentucky. The distant sources of the Missouri and the heights of the Shining Mountains, with all the fantastic tales that had been told of them, were drawing our grandfathers farther and farther from the old colonial America of the eastern coast, and were beginning to modify the whole course of American history. The atmosphere of boundless expectation gathered over farm and town in the older States and the proposed expedition of Lewis and Clark fascinated the people as much as the voyage of Columbus fascinated the Spain of his day.

And what manner of men were in charge of this expedition, thus filled with both interest and peril? Meriwether Lewis was the leader of the party. He was a captain in the U. S. Army who was well known to Jefferson and who had been selected by him as possessed of the endurance, boldness, and energy which made him the fittest man within Jefferson’s knowledge for the duties of commander. His whole life, from his boyhood days in Virginia, had been one of bold adventure. It is related that at the tender age of eight, he was already illustrious for successful midnight forays upon the coon and possum. He had not received a scientific education, but immediately upon receiving the appointment of commander of the expedition, he entered with great energy upon the acquisition of knowledge along geographical lines which would best fit him for preserving an accurate record of his journey. William Clark, the lieutenant of the expedition, was also a United States officer, a man of very good judgment, boldness, and skill in organising his work, and readiness in meeting every kind of emergency. The party was made up of fourteen United States regular soldiers, nine Kentucky volunteers, two French voyageurs, a hunter, an interpreter and a negro servant. The soldiers were offered the munificent bounty of retirement upon full pay, with a grant of land. By Jefferson’s directions, the party were encouraged to keep complete records of all they saw and did. They carried out the instruction so fully that seven journals besides those of Lewis and Clark themselves, were carefully kept, and in them a record was made of every important, as well as unimportant, discovery, even down to the ingredients of their meals and their doses of medicine. It is safe to say that no expedition was ever more fully or accurately reported. Although not a single one of the party possessed literary attainments, there is nevertheless a singular charm about the combined record which has been recognised to this day by repeated editions of the work. It was well understood that the success of the expedition depended largely upon making friends with the Indians, and the explorers were therefore completely fitted out with beads, mirrors, knives, and all manner of trinkets.

The summer of 1804 was spent in an easy and uneventful journey of five months up the Missouri to the country of the Mandan Indians, in what is now Dakota. There they determined to winter. The winter was devoted to making the acquaintance of Indians and to collecting botanical and zoölogical specimens, of which they sent President Jefferson a large amount by a portion of the party which now left them and descended the River. And, while speaking of their relations to Indians, it is very interesting to note the attitude Jefferson instructed them to take in respect to the native tribes. He insisted upon a policy of peace and good-will toward all the tribes upon the route. It is observable that Jefferson refers in a most considerate and friendly manner to the Indians, and instructs the explorers to arrange, if possible, to have some of the more important chiefs induced to come back with the explorers to the city of Washington. He also points out the desirability of urging any bright young Indians to receive such arts as might be useful to them when in contact with the white men. Jefferson even goes so far as to advise the explorers to take along vaccine matter that the Indians might be instructed in the advantages of vaccination. A number of medallion medals were made that were intended to be given as presents to Indian chiefs, the inscription of which was “Peace and Friendship,” with the design of clasped hands. These medals, it may be remarked, seem to have been prized by the Indians as among their greatest treasures. Several of them have been found in Indian graves; one even in a grave of the Nez Percé Indians in Idaho.

While among the Mandans, the expedition was joined by the most attractive personage in it, that is to say, Sacajawea. This young Indian woman, the only woman in the expedition, seems to have furnished the picturesque element in the composition of the party, and she has in later days become the subject of great interest on the part of students of Pacific Coast history.

Mt. Adams from the South.
Photo. by W. D. Lyman.

On April 7th, everything was in readiness for resuming their journey up the River. The explorers embarked again in a squadron of six canoes and two pirogues.

On the twelfth day of August, an advance party of the explorers crossed the Great Divide of the Rocky Mountains, the birthplace of mighty rivers. Descending the western slope, they found themselves in the country of the Shoshone Indians. Captain Lewis was leading this advance expedition, and, as he neared the highest point of the pass, he realised the significance of the transition from the waters of the Missouri to those of the Columbia. A quotation from his narrative at this most interesting point of the journey gives the reader a better conception than any description could, of the feelings of the explorers:

The road was still plain, and as it led directly toward the mountains, the stream gradually became smaller, till after their advancing two miles further, it had so greatly diminished in width that one of the men in a fit of enthusiasm, with one foot on each side of the rivulet, thanked God that he had lived to bestride the Missouri. As they proceeded, their hope of seeing the waters of the Columbia rose to almost painful anxiety; when at the distance of four miles from the last abrupt turn of the stream, they reached a small gap formed by the high mountains which recede on either side, leaving room for the Indian road. From the foot of one of the lowest of these mountains, which arises with a gentle ascent of about half a mile, issued the remotest water of the Missouri. They had now reached the hidden sources of that river, which had never before been seen by civilised man; and as they quenched their thirst at the chaste and icy fountain,—as they sat down by the brink of that little rivulet, which yielded its distant and modest tribute to the parent ocean,—they felt themselves rewarded for all their labours and difficulties. They left reluctantly this interesting spot, and pursuing the Indian road through the interval of the hills, arrived at the top of a ridge from which they saw high mountains, partially covered with snow, still to the west of them. The ridge on which they stood formed the dividing line between the waters of the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans. They found the descent much steeper than on the eastern side, and at the distance of three-quarters of a mile, reached a handsome, bold creek of cold, clear water running to the westward. They stopped to taste for the first time the waters of the Columbia.

The party was now upon the western slope of the Great Divide, in the vicinity of the present Fort Lemhi in Eastern Idaho. They supposed that they were almost to the Pacific, not realising that a thousand miles of difficult and dangerous travel and more than two months of time still separated them from their wished-for goal. The journey, in fact, from the springs of the Missouri to the navigable waters of the Columbia, proved to be the most critical of the whole series.

Soon after passing the crest of the mountains, the party encountered a band of sixty Indians of the Shoshone tribe, coming to meet them at full speed, upon fine horses, and armed for battle. Captain Lewis, who always showed great discretion with Indians, took the Stars and Stripes in his hand, and advanced alone to meet the party. As soon as the Indians perceived that he was a white man, they showed signs of great rejoicing, and the three leaders of the war-party, dismounting, embraced the American captain with great exuberance, shouting words which he afterwards discovered meant, “We are rejoiced! We are rejoiced!” The valiant captain, however, was much more pleased with the hearty good-will of their intentions than in the manner of its expression, inasmuch as they had transferred a good portion of the war paint from their own faces to his. Lewis now brought up his companions and entered upon a long and friendly conference with the chief of the party, whose name was Cameahwait. Captain Lewis, as the representative of the great American nation, set forth to the eager listeners about him, a glowing report as to the benevolence of the Great Father at Washington, and his desire that his brothers of the West should come into friendly relations with him and trade their furs for the beads and blankets and knives which the Indians so highly prize. He also explained to them that they would receive from his government guns and ammunition which would enable them to cope with the dreaded Sioux or the pitiless Blackfeet. Captain Lewis also greatly aroused the curiosity of these Indians by indicating to them that he had with him a woman of their tribe, and also a man who was perfectly black and yet not painted. He now made a proposition to Cameahwait to go back with him and his companions to the forks of the Missouri where they had left the main party with their goods and boats. Cameahwait very gladly agreed to do this and also to provide them with horses for the journey westward to the navigable waters of the Columbia.

Capt. Robert Gray.

The Columbia Rediviva.

After a journey of several days upon the back trail, the party found themselves again at the forks of the Missouri, but, somewhat to their surprise and consternation, the main party was not there. The Indians at first were very much excited, and, believing that they had been deceived and that the white men were enticing them to destruction, they were at the point of wreaking vengeance upon them. But with great tact and boldness, Lewis gave the chief his gun and ammunition, telling him that if it proved that he had been a deceiver, they might instantly kill him. Reassured, the Indians proceeded onward and in a short time they could descry the boats, making their way slowly up the impetuous stream toward a bold promontory where the Indians were stationed. In the bow of the foremost boat was seated Sacajawea, clad in her bright red blanket, and gazing eagerly at the group of Indians, thinking it possible that they might be of her own tribe. As the boat approached the band, the keen-sighted little Indian woman soon perceived that these people were indeed of her own Shoshone tribe. Quickly disembarking, she made her way to them, when suddenly her eyes fell upon the chief, Cameahwait. Then to the astonishment of the white men who were with her, she broke forth suddenly into a torrent of tears which were soon changed into joyful smiles as the chief, with almost as much emotion as herself, rushed forward to embrace her. She then explained to Captain Lewis that Cameahwait was her own brother, whom she had not seen since, as a little girl, she had been seized by the Mandans and carried into captivity.

Of course there was now the kindliest feeling between the party of explorers and the Indians. They found everything that they needed, horses, provisions, and guides, placed at their disposal. They were at that time, as would be seen by an inspection of the map, at the head waters of Salmon River. They hoped that they might find a route down that powerful stream to navigable water. But the Indians assured them that the river was white with foam for many miles and disappeared in a chain of terrific snowy mountains. It became necessary, therefore, to find a more northerly route, and on the last day of August, with twenty-nine horses, having bidden a hearty good-bye to the hospitable Shoshones, they turned north-westward and soon became entangled in the savage ridges and defiles, already spotted with snow, of the Bitter Root Mountains.

They were at this time among some of the upper branches of the second largest tributary of the Columbia, named by them Clark’s Fork, though at the present time more commonly known by the more rhythmic title of Pend Oreille. After several days of the most difficult, and indeed dangerous, journeying of their entire trip, they abandoned the northern route, turned southward, and soon reached the wild and beautiful stream which they called the Kooskooskie, commonly known to modern times as the Clearwater, one of the finest of all the fine rivers of Idaho, the “Gem of the Mountains.”

But they were not yet by any means clear of danger. The country still frowned on them with the same forbidding crags, and the same blinding snow storms as before. They were approaching the starvation point. The craggy precipices were marked with almost daily accidents to men and beasts. Their only food was the flesh of their precious horses. Under these harassing circumstances, it was decided that the wisest thing was for Captain Clark to take six of his best men and press rapidly forward in search of game and a more favourable country. After a hard journey of twenty miles, he found himself upon the crest of a towering cliff, from which stretched in front a vast open plain. This was the great plain, now covered with wheat-fields and orchards, lying east and north of the present city of Lewiston, Idaho. Having made their way down the declivities of the Bitter Root Mountains to the prairie, where they found a climate that seemed almost tropical after the bitter cold of the high mountains, the advance guard camped and waited for the main party to come up.

Rejoicing at their release from the distressing conditions of their passage of the Bitter Root Mountains, they passed onward to a beautiful mountain-enclosed valley, which must have been in the near vicinity of what is known as the Kamiah Valley of the present time. Here they found themselves with a large body of Indians who became known subsequently as the Nez Percés. These Indians appeared to be the most honest, intelligent, and attractive they had yet met,—eager to assist them, kind and helpful, although shrewd and business-like in their trading.

The Nez Percés imparted to them the joyful news that the Great River was not far distant. Seeing the Clearwater to be a fine, navigable stream, the explorers determined to abandon the weary land journey and once more commit their fortunes to the waters. They left their horses with the Nez Percés, asking that they should meet them at that point in the following spring when they expected to be on their return trip. The scrupulous fidelity with which the Nez Percés carried out their trust is some evidence of the oft-made assertion that the treachery characteristic of the Indians was learned afterwards from the whites.

With five large and well-filled canoes, and with a good supply of eatables and all the other necessaries of life, the explorers now cast themselves upon the clear, swift current of the Kooskooskie, and on the 10th of October reached that striking and interesting place where the beautiful modern town of Lewiston is located, at the junction of the Clearwater and the Snake. The turbid, angry, sullen Snake, so striking a contrast with the lesser stream, received from the explorers the name of Kimooenim, its Indian name. Subsequently they christened it Lewis’s Fork, but the still less attractive name of Snake is the one by which it is universally known.

The journey of a hundred and twenty miles from the junction of the Clearwater and the Snake to the junction of the latter stream with the mighty Columbia, seems to have been a calm and uneventful journey, though the explorers record every manner of event, whether important or unimportant. Knowledge of their approach seems to have reached the Indian world, and when on October 16th they reached the point where the modern city of Pasco is located, they were met by a regular procession of two hundred Indians. The two great rivers were then at their lowest point in the year, and they found by measurement that the Columbia was 960 yards in width and the Snake, 575 yards. In the glimmering haze of the pleasant October day they noted how the vast, bare prairie stretched southward until it was broken by the rounded summits of the Blue Mountains. To their astonishment, they found that the Sohulks, who lived at the junction of the rivers, so differed from other Indians that the men were content with one wife and that they would actually assist her in the drudgery of the family life. After several days spent in rest and getting fish, which seemed to throng the river in almost countless numbers, they resumed their journey upon the magnificent flood of the Columbia. Soon after passing what we now call the Umatilla Highland, they caught their first glimpse, clear-cut against the horizon of the south-west, of the bold cone of Mt. Hood, glistening with its eternal snows. Landing upon the broad prairie near where Umatilla is now located, Captain Clark shot a crane and a duck. He then perceived a group of Indians who were almost paralysed with terror and yet able to make their way with considerable expedition to a little group of tepees. Having entered one of these, Captain Clark discovered thirty-two Indians, men, women, and children, all of whom seemed to be in the greatest terror, wailing and wringing their hands. Endeavouring by kind looks and gestures to soothe their perturbation, Captain Clark held up a burning glass to catch a stray sunbeam with which to light his pipe. Whereupon the consternation of the Indians was redoubled, to be soothed only by the arrival of the two Indian guides who were accompanying the party. The terrified Indians explained to the guides that they knew that Captain Clark must have some bad medicine about him, for he had dropped out of the sky with a dead crane and a duck, accompanied by a terrible noise.

Mt. Hood from Lost Lake.
Photo. by E. H. Moorehouse.

The Indians being now convinced that he was a mortal man, and, moreover, having heard the sound of the violin which the negro servant carried with him, became so enamoured with the strangers that they stayed up with them all night, and in the morning collected by hundreds to bid them good-bye.

The Indians had now given them to understand that in a short time they would reach the place which they knew as “Timm.” This seems to have been an Indian word for falls. It still appears in the name Tumwater Falls applied to the falls at Celilo on the Columbia. A weird, savage place this proved to be; crags of basalt, thrust through the soil, like clenched hands, seemed almost to grasp the rushing river. Making several portages, the voyagers reached that extraordinary place now called The Dalles, or the “big chute,” where all the waters of the Columbia are squeezed into a crack only a hundred and fifty feet in width. The River, in fact, is “turned on edge.” The explorers, finding the shore so rough that it was difficult to carry their boats over, steered boldly through that witch’s caldron. Though they must have been carried with frightful rapidity through the boiling stream, they reached the end of the cataract without accident. At this point they began to be aware of the fact that they were reaching the sphere of the white traders from the ocean, for they began to see blankets, axes, brass kettles, and other articles of civilised manufacture. The Indians, too, were more saucy, suspicious, and treacherous than those of the upper country.

Being launched upon the calm, deep flood of the River below The Dalles, they observed the phenomenon of the submerged forest, which at a low state of water is still conspicuous. They correctly inferred that this indicated a damming up of the River at some recent time. They thought indeed that it could not have been more than twenty years previous. We know, however, that submerged trees or piles, as indicated by remains of old Roman wharves in Britain, may remain intact for hundreds of years. This place on the Columbia is, however, one of the most interesting of its many interesting phenomena. It is evident that within very recent times, geologically speaking, there was a prodigious rock-slide from the mountains which closed the River, producing the cataract of the Cascades and raising the River above, some forty feet.

Here the explorers had their last portage. On the second day of November they reached the foot of the Cascades and perceived the movement of the tide, which made it plain to them that the ocean was near at hand. Yet, in reality, it was much farther than they thought, for the majestic lower River extends one hundred and sixty miles from the foot of the last cataract to the Pacific. It is interesting to notice comments made by the explorers upon the green and fertile islands at the lower end of the Cascades, and that spired and turreted volcanic cliff which they called Beacon Rock, but which we know now as Castle Rock.

The rest of the journey of Lewis and Clark was a calm floating down the tranquil flood of the lower Columbia in the midst of the fog and clouds which at that season of the year generally embrace all objects. On November 7th the mist suddenly broke away before them, the bold mountainous shores vanished in front, and, through the parted headlands, they looked forth into the expanse of the ocean.

Eliot Glacier, Mt. Hood.
Photo. by E. H. Moorehouse.

Their journey was now ended. They had demonstrated the possibility of crossing the continent and of linking together the waters of the Missouri and the Columbia.

The winter of 1805-06 was spent in log buildings at a point named by the explorers, Fort Clatsop, situated on the Lewis and Clark River at the south side of the Columbia a few miles from the present site of Astoria. The location of this fort has been identified in modern times, as has also the location of the salt cairn, upon what is now known as the Seaside Beach, commemorated by an inscription.

One of the interesting little human touches in the narrative of Captain Lewis describes the casting of a whale upon Clatsop Beach and the journey of the party to see the great marine curiosity, as well as to secure some of its fat and blubber. The Indian woman, Sacajawea, was to be left behind to keep camp while they were all at the beach, but she put up the earnest plea that inasmuch as she had never seen any such curiosity as the “big fish,” and as she had journeyed all those weary miles from the country of the Mandans, it seemed hard that she should be denied the privilege of satisfying her eyes with a view of the whale. Lewis remarks that the request of the poor woman seemed so reasonable that they at once fixed up camp in such manner that it could be left, and took her with them, to her intense satisfaction.

After four months spent in the fogs and mists of the coast, and without seeing any of the ships which the Indians said were accustomed to come in considerable numbers during the spring and summer, the party turned their faces homeward on the 23d of March, 1806. The commander posted upon the fort a notice which read as follows:

The object of this last is that through the medium of some civilised person who may see the same, it may be made known to the world that the party consisting of the persons whose names are hereunto annexed and who were sent out by the Government of the United States to explore the interior of the continent of North America, did penetrate the same by way of the Missouri and Columbia Rivers, to the discharge of the latter into the Pacific Ocean, at which they arrived on the 14th day of November, 1805, and departed on their return to the United States by the same route by which they had come.

They also gave to the chiefs of the Clatsops and Chinooks certificates, to which they attached great importance and which were afterwards exhibited to other explorers, setting forth the just and hospitable treatment which these Indians had accorded the party.

The return from Fort Clatsop to the Missouri was in the main a pleasant and successful journey without extraordinary event, except the fact that upon their return they discovered the Willamette River, which, strange to say, had eluded their observation on their journey down the River in November. The journal contains the somewhat quaint statement that the chief cultivable region which they discovered in Oregon was Wapatoo Island, now known as Sauvie’s Island, at the mouth of the Willamette. They express the conviction that that fertile tract of country and the region adjoining might sometime support a population of fifty thousand people. They seem to regard this as an extraordinary prophecy of prosperity. Inasmuch as there are already over four times that number of people in the city of Portland, it would seem that Lewis and Clark were hardly “boomers” in the modern sense of the word.

One interesting thing in connection with the Lewis and Clark expedition receives special emphasis from them in the account of their return journey, and that is, the faithfulness, honesty, and devotion of the Indians when entrusted with any charge, as the care of horses or canoes. This character of the Indians was so marked that one can hardly avoid the conclusion that the subsequent troubles with the Indians were due very largely to abuse by the whites.

No better summary can be given of the scope of this historic journey than that by Captain Lewis himself in his journal. He says:

The road by which we went out by way of the Missouri to its head is three thousand ninety-six miles; thence by land by way of Lewis River over to Clark’s River and down that to the entrance of Traveller’s Rest Creek, where all the roads from different routes meet; thence across the rugged part of the Rocky Mountains to the navigable waters of the Columbia, three hundred and ninety-eight miles, thence down the river six hundred and forty miles to the Pacific Ocean, making a total distance of four thousand one hundred and thirty-four miles. On our return in 1806 we reduced the distance from the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean to three thousand five hundred and fifty-five miles.

The safe return of the explorers to their homes created a sensation throughout the United States and the world. Leaders and men were suitably rewarded. Though the expedition was not marked by many remarkable adventures or dramatic events, and though the narration given by the explorers is of a plain and simple kind with no attempt at literary ornamentation, yet occurring, as the expedition did, at such a peculiar juncture in our history, and having such an effect to bridge the chasm between the old time and the new, this Lewis and Clark expedition has continued to receive, and justly, more attention than any other journey in our history. President Jefferson, paying a tribute to Captain Lewis in 1813, expressed himself thus:

Never did a similar event excite more joy throughout the United States; the humblest of its citizens have taken a lively interest in the issue of this journey and looked with impatience for the information it would furnish. Nothing short of the official journals of this extraordinary and interesting journey will exhibit the importance of the service, the courage, devotion, zeal, and perseverance, under circumstances calculated to discourage, which animated this little band of heroes, throughout the long dangerous, and tedious travel.

The expedition of Lewis and Clark may justly be considered as constituting the first steps across the wilderness. The breadth of the American continent was now known. The general relations of its rivers and mountain systems and prairies were understood. Something of its prodigality of resources became set forth to the world. A dim consciousness of the connection of this vast Pacific domain with the progress of American destiny appeared to our grandfathers. And although the wilderness traversed by this complete expedition did not come into possession of the United States for many years, yet it might well be said that our subsequent acquirement of it was due to the Lewis and Clark expedition.

Of the many remarkable explorations which followed, with all of their adventure and tragedy, we cannot here speak. For several years all the expeditions to the far West were the outgrowth of the fur-trade. Most remarkable of these early journeys was that of the Hunt party which was the land division of the great Astor movement to establish the Pacific Fur Company. That company was established by John Jacob Astor of New York for the purpose of making a bold and far-reaching attempt to control the fur-trade of the Pacific Coast in the interests of the United States. While the sea division was upon its journey around Cape Horn, the land division was in process of organisation at St. Louis. Wilson Price Hunt, the commander of this division, was the second partner in the Astor company. He had been merchandising for some years at St. Louis, and had become impressed with the financial profits of the fur-trade as well as with the vast possibilities of American development on the continent. Hunt was a fine type of the pioneer promoter of that age. Brave, humane, cheerful, and resolute, he appears to us as the very flower of the adventurous Argonauts who were searching for the seal and beaver fleeces of the far West.

With Hunt were associated four other partners of the expedition, Crooks, McKenzie, Miller, and McCellan. Accompanying the party were two English naturalists, Bradbury and Nuttall, who did the first scientific study of the Rocky Mountain region. There were forty Canadian voyageurs whose duties consisted of rowing, transporting, cooking, and general drudgery. The remaining twelve of the party consisted of a group of American hunters and trappers, the leader of whom was a Virginian named John Day. The company was in all respects fitted out most bountifully.

There were at that time two great classes of trappers. The first and most numerous were the Canadian voyageurs. These were mainly of French descent, many of them being half-breeds. Almost amphibious by nature and training, gay and amiable in disposition, with true French vivacity and ingenuity, gliding over every harsh experience with laugh and song, possessed of quick sympathies and humane instincts which enabled them to readily find the best side of the Indians,—these French voyageurs constituted a most interesting as well as indispensable class in the trapper’s business.

The free trappers were an entirely different class of men. They were usually American by birth, Virginia and Kentucky being the homes of most of them. Patient and indefatigable in their work of trapping, yet, when on their annual trip to the towns, given to wild dissipation and savage revellings, indifferent to sympathy or company, harsh and cruel to the Indians, bold and overbearing, with blood always in their eyes, thunder in their voices, and guns in their hands, yet underneath all of their harsh exterior having noble hearts, could they but be reached, these now vanished trappers have gone to a place in history alongside of the old Spartans and the followers of Pizarro and Cortez in Spanish conquest.

Of the many adventures of the Hunt party on the journey up the Missouri, we cannot speak. For some reason, although taking a more direct route than did Lewis and Clark, and having, to all appearance, a better equipped party, they did not make so good time. Guided by Indians, they crossed chain after chain of mountains, supposing each to be the summit, only to find another yet to succeed. At last on the 15th of September, they stood upon a lofty eminence over which they could gaze both eastward and westward. Scanning attentively the western horizon, the guide pointed out three shining peaks, whose bases, he told them, were touched by a tributary of the Columbia River. These peaks are now known as the Three Tetons.

And now the party set forth upon the long descent of the western slope, passing mountain after mountain and stream after stream, some of the way in boats which the voyageurs made from the green timber of the forests, and much of the way being obliged to carry their effects around cataracts and rapids, and thus losing much time. Nevertheless, they found one long stretch of over a hundred miles upon the upper Snake which they navigated with comparative ease. But having reached what is now known as the Seven Devils country in South-western Idaho, they found themselves in a chain of rapids and precipitous bluffs where neither boats nor horses, apparently nothing but wings, could be of service. This was in fact the beginning of over a hundred miles of the most ragged and inaccessible region upon the whole course of the Snake River, a region which even to this day contains neither road nor steamboat route, and by which the great State of Idaho is separated into two divisions, neither directly accessible to the other by any ordinary modes of travel.

After a forty-mile tramp up and down the river, Hunt decided that the only way to escape the difficulties with which they were surrounded, was to divide the party into four divisions, hoping that one of them might find game and a way out of the forbidding volcanic wastes in which they were beleaguered. Two of the parties soon returned. One, being in charge of McKenzie, continued upon its course northward and reached the mouth of the Columbia, without ever again seeing the main party.

During the weeks that followed, the main party, lost amid the great mountains which lie eastward from the present vicinity of Baker City and Wallowa Lake, suffered all the torments of famine and cold. In places the river ran through volcanic sluiceways, roaring and raging; in some cases, although within hearing, yet entirely inaccessible, so that although within sound of its angry raving, the travellers were often obliged to lie down with tongues parched and swollen for lack of water. The party applied to this long volcanic “chute” the name of the Devil’s Scuttle-hole, and to the river they applied the name La Rivière Maudite Enragée, or “Accursed Mad River.”

The lives of the party were evidently at stake. In the emergency Hunt determined to divide his force into two divisions, one on the north and one on the south side of the river. From the 9th of November until the first part of December they urged on this dismal and heart-sickening march. They passed a few wretched Indian camps where they managed to secure dogs for food, and once they got a few horses. The frightened and half-starved Indians could give them no clear information as to the location of the Great River, but they signified that they supposed it to be yet a long way off. The party was evidently approaching something, for gigantic snowy mountains now loomed dimly through the winter mists. Finding it impossible to make headway against blinding snowstorms and up the icy crags, they turned their course down to the river itself and made a cheerless camp. In the morning they were startled by seeing upon the opposite side of the river, a group of men more wretched and desolate than themselves. It soon appeared that this was the other party, which had entirely failed in finding either food or guidance from the Indians. Finding it necessary that some provision should be made for these dying men, Hunt constructed a rude canoe from the limbs of trees and the skin of one of the horses. In this crazy craft one of the daring Canadian voyageurs made his way with some of the horse meat, which, poor as it was, was sufficient to save life for the time.

With their little remaining strength, they pressed on down the river until they reached another small village of the wretched Snake Indians. Urging these Indians to provide for them a guide, and at last securing one by the most bounteous offers of rewards, Hunt succeeded in gathering all of his party together, with the exception of six sick men whom they were obliged to leave to the tender mercies of the Indians.

For another fortnight, the cold and hungry party floundered painfully through the snow across the rugged mountains which lie between what we now know as the Powder River Valley and the Grande Ronde. Reaching a lofty mountain height on the last day of December, they looked far down into a fair and snowless prairie, bathed in sunshine and appearing to the winter-worn travellers like a gleam of summer. Moreover, they soon discerned a group of Indian lodges which they judged were well supplied with dogs and horses. Thither hastening eagerly, they soon found themselves in a beautiful valley, which from their description must have been the Grande Ronde Valley. Beautiful at all times, it must have seemed trebly so to these ragged and famished wanderers.

The next morning the new year of 1812 shone in upon them bright and cheerful, as if to make amends for the stern severity of the outgoing year. And now the Canadians insisted upon having their New Year’s holiday. Not even death and famine could rob the light-hearted voyageurs of their festivals. So with dance and song and with dog meat, roasted, boiled, fried, and fricasseed, they met the newly-crowned year with their Gallic happiness and abandon.

The Indians assured them that they could reach the Great River within three days. But they found it twice that, and their way led across another lofty chain of snowy mountains, before the canopy of clouds which hung above them parted. There, looking far down from their snowy eyre, they beheld the boundless and sunny plains of the Great River. Swiftly descending the slopes of the mountains, they emerged upon that finest land of all Eastern Oregon, the plains of the Umatilla. Here they found the tribe of the Tushepaw Indians with thirty-four lodges and two hundred horses. More significant than these to Hunt were axes, kettles, and other implements of white construction, indicating that these Indians had already come into communication with the traders upon the lower River. In answer to his eager questions, the Tushepaws informed him that the Great River was but two days distant and that a small party of white men had just descended it. Being now certain that this was the advance guard which had left him at the Devil’s Scuttle-hole, Hunt felt sure that they were safe and was therefore relieved of one great anxiety.

After a few days’ rest upon the pleasant prairies and in the comparatively genial climate of the Umatilla, the party set forth upon horses obtained from the Tushepaws, and after a pleasant ride of two days across the rolling prairie, they beheld flowing at their feet, a majestic stream, deep and blue, a mile in width, sweeping toward the sunset, evidently the Columbia. At the great falls of the River, known to the Indians as the Timm or the Tumwater, just above what we now call Dalles City, Hunt exchanged his horses for canoes. This last stage of two hundred and twenty miles by boat down the River, was calm and peaceful and a refreshing rest after the distress and disaster of their winter journey through the mountains. Not till the 15th of February, however, did they reach the newly christened town of Astoria. Rounding the bluffs of Tongue Point, they beheld with full hearts the Stars and Stripes floating over the only civilised abode west of St. Louis. Westward they saw the parted headlands between which the River pours its floods into the ocean. As the boats drew near the shore, the whole population, trappers, sailors, and Indians, came down to meet them. Foremost in the crowd they saw the members of the party which had gone on ahead through the Snake River Mountains. Having had no hope that Hunt and his men could survive the famine and the cold, these members of the advance guard were the more rejoiced to see them. The Canadians, with their French vivacity, rushed into each other’s arms, sobbing and hugging like so many schoolgirls. Even the nonchalant Americans and the stiff-jawed Scotchmen smiled and gave themselves up to the gladness of the hour. The next two or three days were mainly devoted to eating and telling stories.

As we have seen, they had lost several of their number from starvation and drowning along the banks of the Snake River. They had also left six sick men with the Indians in the heart of the mountains. They had little hope of ever seeing these again, but the next summer the party on their way up the Columbia River, saw two wretched looking beings, naked and haggard, wandering on the river bank near the mouth of the Umatilla. Stopping to investigate, they discovered that these were Day and Crooks, the leaders of the party which they had left behind. Their forlorn plight was relieved with food and clothes, and, having been taken into the boat, they related their dismal tale. It appeared that they had been provided sufficiently by the Indians to sustain their lives through the winter. In the spring they had left the Canadians among the Indians, and had set forth in the hope of reaching the Great River. But having reached The Dalles, they had been robbed of rifles and ammunition, stripped of their clothing, and driven forth into the wilderness. They were almost at the point of a final surrender to ill-fortune when they beheld the rescuing boat. So, with joyful hearts, they turned their boat’s prow to Astoria, which they reached in safety. But poor Day never regained his health. His mind was shattered by the hardships of his journey, and he soon pined away and died. The barren and rugged shores of the John Day River in Eastern Oregon take on an added interest in view of the sad story of the brave hunter who discovered them, and who wandered in destitution for so many days beside them. Strange to say, the four Canadians who remained among the Indians were afterwards found alive, though utterly destitute of all things. Hence it appears that the loss of life in this difficult journey was not great.

The journeys here narrated may be considered as covering what we have designated as the first steps across the wilderness. Within a few years, many parties of trappers, explorers, and adventurers, with some scientists, and a little later, parties of missionaries, made their way over the great plains, through the defiles of the mountains, and down the barren shores of the Snake River to the Columbia and the sea. Each party had its special experiences, and made its special contribution to geographical or commercial advancement. But to the parties led by Lewis and Clark and by Hunt, we must accord the greatest meed of praise for having broken the first pathways across the continent and for having linked the two oceans by the footsteps of civilised men.

CHAPTER V

The Fur-Traders, their Bateaux, and their Stations

Importance of the Fur-trade as Connected with all Other Parts of the History—Fur-hunters Compared with Gold-hunters—Sea-otter—Ledyard’s Exploration—The European Inaugurators of the Trade—Beginnings of the American Trade—The Great British Companies and their Struggles with the French—Mackenzie’s Journey across the Continent—Thompson’s Descent of the Columbia—Union of the Two Great Canadian Companies—The American Fur Companies—Henry’s Fort—The Winship Enterprise on the River—John Jacob Astor and the Pacific Fur Company—Rivalry with the North-westers—Arrangements for Expeditions by Land and Sea, and the Personnel of these—Voyage of the Tonquin and her Disastrous Approach of the River—Founding of Astoria—Appearance of Thompson and the North-westers—Interior Expedition and Founding of Fort Okonogan—McDougall, the Smallpox Chief and Bridegroom of the Indian Princess—Evil Tidings in Regard to the Tonquin—Other Disasters—War of 1812 and Sale of Astoria to the North-westers—Restoration of Astoria to the Americans—Monopolisation of the River by the Hudson’s Bay Company—Their Expeditions—Hard Lot of Madame Dorion and her Children—Adventures of Alexander Ross—The Forts and General Plan of Work—Fort Vancouver and its Remarkable Advantages—Dr. McLoughlin, or the “White Eagle”—Profits of the Fur-trade—The Canoes and Bateaux and the Voyageurs—The Routes of the Brigades—Later Americans.

As the reader will doubtless already have discovered, we are presenting the history of the River topically rather than chronologically. The various great stages of progress, discovery by sea, discovery by land, fur-trade, Indian wars, missionary undertakings, international contests, beginnings of steamboat navigation, and settlement, overlap each other, and each topic compels us in a measure to anticipate its successors. This is especially true of the topic treated of in this chapter.

The fur-trade was an important factor in the eras of discovery both by land and by sea, in the Indian wars and in the era of settlement, while the strife of nations for the possession of the land of Oregon is almost a history of the fur companies and their international policies. Remembering this synthetic nature of these features of our history, we shall endeavour, with as little repetition as possible, to present a coherent picture of that great era of the fur-traders.

Without doubt one of the earliest uses to which man has put the lower animals is that of clothing his body in their captured skins. The acquisition of furs has been a special feature of the colder climes. It is obviously also a feature of discovery and conquest, for it is the wilderness only which yields any considerable number of fur-producing animals. Thus navigation, commerce, discovery, invention, economics, finally international wars and policies, have been rooted to a large degree in this primal business. The fur-hunters have held the hunters of gold and precious stones and spicery a close race in the rank of world movers. Indeed it may well be questioned whether results of greater moment to humanity have not proceeded from the quest for furs than from that for gold.

The Spaniards expended their energies in the gold and silver hunt in Mexico and Peru and annihilated the races of those lands in their pitiless rapacity. The other great exploring nations of the sixteenth century, especially the French, while not indifferent to the possibility of encountering the precious metals, found more certain and permanent results in the less feverish and dazzling pursuit of the wild animals of the wilderness. Neither the hunters for gold nor those for peltries were the state-builders and home-builders without whom our American Union would not exist. But they were the avant-couriers of both. Our land of Oregon has had the peculiar fortune of being opened by both for both.

China furnished the most active and convenient market for furs to those who secured their supplies on the Pacific Coast of North America. The Russians were the first Europeans to enter the Chinese market, and they began their voyages as early as 1741.

The sea-otter seems to have had its chief habitat on the Pacific shore from Oregon to Alaska, and, as the ships of all nations began to crowd upon the location of the fabled Strait of Anian, the trade with the natives for these precious furs became constantly augmented, until the curious and interesting creatures, so fatally attractive, were added to the long list of “lower creatures” whom the greed of the “higher creatures” has exterminated. A book by Coxe published in London in 1787 first made known to the English-speaking people the rich profits of the Russians from the transportation of the sea-otter skins to China. He instanced a case of a profit of $50,000 from a single cargo. It had, however, been known in 1785 from the report of the voyage of Captain Cook that the North-west Coast of America contained a new source of wealth from the accumulation of these furs by the Indians and their eager desire to trade them for trinkets and implements of civilised manufacture.

The first American to comprehend the greatness of the fur-trade on the North-west Coast of the Pacific, both as a means of profit to himself and as a patriotic impulse to direct his own nation into the channels of westward expansion, was John Ledyard. Thomas Jefferson and John Paul Jones became deeply interested in Ledyard’s extravagant hopes of future wealth and glory, but all his efforts came to naught, and in 1788 this brilliant adventurer, just on the eve of setting out to explore the interior of Africa, suddenly put an end to his own life at Cairo, Egypt. Ledyard should always be remembered by his countrymen, for, though his glowing visions were unfulfilled, he was an important link in the great chain which bound Oregon to our own country.

During these same years, several Englishmen, already noted in the chapter on discovery, Portlock, Dixon, Hanna, Barclay, and Meares, were actively engaged in the fur-trade, while the voyages of La Pérouse and Marchand carried the flag of France on the same quest, and Spain’s once illustrious emblem of world dominion was borne by Quadra, Valdes, Galiano, Fidalgo, Quimper, Caamano, and several others. While these explorers all were impelled in part by national pride and diplomacy, the hope of sharing the spoils of the sea-otter droves was the chief lure to the tempestuous seas of the North Pacific.

In Bullfinch’s Oregon and El Dorado is a very interesting narration of the inception of the American part in the fur-trade of Oregon. In a building known as the Coolidge Building in Boston a company were gathered together in 1787 discussing the reports, then first made public, of Cook’s voyages. Mr. Joseph Barrell, a rich merchant of Boston, was much impressed with Cook’s account of the chances of barter with the Indians for furs and the disposal of them in China for yet more profitable cargoes of teas, silks, and other characteristic commodities of that land. As a result of this conference, a company was formed in Boston to prosecute such enterprise, the members of the company, Messrs. Barrell, Brown, Bulfinch, Darby, Hatch, and Pintard, being among the foremost of the business men in Boston in that good year of the creation of the American Constitution.

The enterprising Yankees rapidly drew to the front, so that during the years from 1790 to 1818, the records show one hundred and eight American vessels regularly engaged in the business, while only twenty-two English, with a few Portuguese and French are found. It should, of course be remembered that the tremendous strife of the Napoleonic Wars was engrossing the attention of European nations during that time. So well known did the Boston navigators become in that period that the common name of Americans used by the Oregon Indians was “Bostons.” Robert Gray, the discoverer of the Columbia River, was fitted out by Bulfinch and others of the first Boston Company. During the period under consideration the profits of the traffic were usually very great, though variable, sometimes actual losses being incurred, while disaster from wreck, storm, scurvy, and murderous Indians was frequent. During the two years, 1786 and 1787, if Dixon is to be followed, there were sold in Canton five thousand eight hundred sea-otter hides for $160,700. Swan figures that with the four years ending with 1802, forty-eight thousand five hundred skins were sold. Sturgis states that he knew a capital of $50,000 to yield a gross income of $284,000. He relates that he had collected as high as six thousand fine skins in a single voyage and once secured five hundred and sixty of the best quality in one day. The Indians, however, learned to become very expert traders, and as they discovered the eagerness with which the whites sought their furs, they raised the price. They became, moreover, very capricious and unreliable, so that the phenomenal profits could no longer be obtained.

The stage of the history of the fur-trade of which we have thus far spoken may be called its first era of a free-for-all rush to the new seas, with no vast moneyed interests in any position of leadership. But commercial conditions were already in existence which were bound to reverse the situation.

Great operators, gigantic companies, foreshadowings of the great trusts of the present, with monopolistic aims, were seeking the ear of the British Government, while enterprises, larger, though not so monopolistic, were rapidly forming in the United States. The great monopolies of Europe had indeed existed long prior to the period of the Oregon fur-traders. As far back as the beginning of the sixteenth century, De Monts, Pontgrave, Champlain, and other great French explorers had secured monopolies on the fur-trade from Louis XIII. and his minister, Richelieu. Later La Salle, Hennepin, D’Iberville, and others had the same advantages. The St. Lawrence, the Great Lakes, and the upper Mississippi were the great “preserve” of these great concessionaires. The English and their American Colonists set themselves in battle array against the monopolistic Bourbon methods of handling the vast domain which the genius and enterprise of De Monts and Champlain had won for France, with the result that upon the heights of Abraham the Fleur-de-Lis was lowered before the Cross of St. George, and North America became English instead of Gallic, and one of the world’s milestones was set for good. Then by one of those beautiful ironies of history which baffle all prescience, victorious Britain violated the principles of her own conquest and adopted the methods of Bourbon tyranny and monopoly, with the result that another milestone was set on the highway of liberty and the new continent became American instead of European.

But out of the struggles of that century, French, English, and American, out of the final distribution of territory, by which England retained Canada and with it a large French and Indian population, mingled with English and Scotch,—out of these curious comminglings, economic, commercial, political, religious, and ethnic, grew the great English fur companies, whose history was largely wrought out on the shores of the Columbia, and from whose juxtaposition with the American State-builder the romance and epic grandeur of the history of the River largely comes.

Many enterprises were started by the French and English in the seventeenth century, but the Hudson’s Bay Company became the Goliath of them all. The first charter of this gigantic organisation was granted in 1670 by Charles II. to Prince Rupert and seventeen others, with a capital stock of ten thousand five hundred pounds. From this small beginning, the profits were so great that, notwithstanding the loss of two hundred thousand pounds from the French wars during the latter part of the century, the Company declared dividends of from twenty-five to fifty per cent.

The field of operations was gradually extended from the south-eastern regions contiguous to Hudson’s Bay until it embraced the vast and dreary expanses of snowy prairie traversed by the Saskatchewan, the Athabasca, the Peace, and finally the Mackenzie. Many of the greatest expeditions by land under British auspices which resulted in great geographical discoveries were primarily designed for the expansion of the fur-trade.

Just at the critical moment, both for the great Canadian Fur Company, as well as for discovery and acquisition in the region of the Columbia, a most important and remarkable champion entered the lists. This was the North-west Fur Company of Montreal. It was one of the legitimate consequences of the treaty of Paris in 1763, ceding Canada to Great Britain. The French in Canada became British subjects by that treaty, and many of them had extensive interests as well as experience in the fur business. Furthermore a number of Scotchmen of great enterprise and intelligence betook themselves to Canada, eager to partake of the boundless opportunities offered by the new shuffle of the cards. These Scotchmen and Frenchmen became natural partners in the foundation of enterprises independent of the Hudson’s Bay monopoly. In 1783 a group of the boldest and most energetic of these active spirits, of whom the leaders were McGillivray, McTavish, Benjamin and Joseph Frobisher, Rechebleve, Thain, and Frazer, united in the formation of the North-west Fur Company. Bitter rivalry soon arose between the new company and the old monopoly. Following the usual history of special privilege, the old company, which had now been in existence one hundred and thirteen years, had learned to depend more on privilege than on enterprise, and had become somewhat degenerate. The North-westers “rustled” for new business in new regions. In 1789 Alexander Mackenzie, as one of the North-westers, made his way, with incredible hardship, down the river which bears his name to the Frozen Ocean. A few years later he made the first journey to the shore of the Pacific, commemorating his course by painting on a rock on the shore of the Cascade Inlet, north-east of Vancouver Island, these words: “Alexander Mackenzie, from Canada, by land, the twenty-second of July, one thousand seven hundred and ninety-three.”

As a result of the new undertakings set on foot by the North-westers and the reawakened Hudson’s Bay Company, both companies entered the Columbia Valley. The struggle for possession of Oregon between the English and American fur companies and their government was on. In the summer of 1810 David Thompson of the North-west company crossed the continental divide by the Athabasca Pass in latitude 52° 25′. The North-westers had heard of the Astor enterprise in New York and realised that they must be up and doing if they would control the land of the Oregon. Although the character of soil, climate, and productions of the Columbia Valley was but imperfectly known, enough had been derived from Lewis and Clark, and from ocean discoveries to make it plain that the Columbia furnished the most convenient access to the interior from the sea, and that its numerous tributaries furnished a network of boatable waters unequalled on the Western slope, while there was every reason to suppose that its forests abounded in fur-bearing animals and that its climate would admit of much longer seasons of work than was possible in the biting winters of the Athabasca. It became vital to the continental magnitude of the designs of the Canadian companies that they control Oregon.

For greater topical clearness we will anticipate a little at this point and state that after several years of intense rivalry it became plain to the British Parliament that it was suicidal to allow a policy of division in the face of a common enemy. Hence in 1821, by act of Parliament, the two companies were reorganised and united under a charter which was to last twenty-one years (and as a matter of fact was renewed at the end of that time), and under the provisions of which the North-westers were to have equal shares in both stock and offices, though the name of the Hudson’s Bay Company, was retained. It will be remembered therefore, that up to the year 1821, the two great Canadian companies were distinct, and that during that time the North-west Company was much the more active and aggressive in the Columbia Valley, but that after that date the entire force of the Canadian Companies was combined under the name of the old monopoly. But however bitter the first enmity of the Canadian rivals, they agreed on the general proposition that the Americans must be checkmated, and during the score of years prior to their coalition they were seizing the pivotal points of the Oregon country. During the next two decades they created a vast network of forts and stations, and reduced the country contiguous to the River and its tributaries to a system so elaborate and interesting as to be worthy of extended study. We can sketch only its more general features. And the more perfectly to understand them, we must arrest here the story of the great Canadian monopoly and bring up the movement of the American fur companies.

It may be noted, first of all, that by reason of the quicker colonisation and settlement and consequent establishment of agriculture and other arts pertaining to home life, the region of the United States east of the Mississippi never became the natural habitat of the trapper and fur-trader to anything like the degree of Canada and the western part of our own land. Nevertheless extensive fur interests grew up on the Mississippi during the French régime, and in 1763-4 August and Pierre Choteau located a trading post on the present site of St. Louis, and the fascinating history of that great capital began.

Most of the American trading companies confined their operations to the east side of the Rocky Mountains. But the Missouri Fur Company of St. Louis, composed of a miscellaneous group of Americans and Hispano-Gallo-Americans, under the presidency of Manuel Lisa, a bold and enterprising Spaniard, took a step over the crest of the mountains and established the first trading post upon the waters of the Columbia. This was in 1809. Andrew Henry, one of the partners of the aforesaid company, crossed the mountains in that year and a year later built a fort on a branch of Snake River. This seems to have been on what subsequently became known as Henry’s River. It was in one of the wildest and grandest regions of all that wild grand section of Snake River. Henry’s River drains the north side of the Three Tetons, while the south branch, known afterwards as Lewis and finally as Snake River, drains the south of that group of mountains. Henry must be remembered as the first American and the first white man recorded in history who built any structure upon any tributary of our River, and the year was 1810. Both Henry and his Company had hopes of accomplishing great things in the way of the fur-trade in that very favourable region. But the next year the Indians were so threatening that the fort was forsaken and the party returned to the Missouri. When the Hunt party in the fall of 1811 sought refuge at this point they found only a group of abandoned huts, with no provisions or equipment of which they could make any use.

But though Henry’s fort was but a transient matter, his American countrymen were beginning to press through the open gateways of both mountain and sea. In the early part of 1809 the Winship brothers of Boston, together with several other keen-sighted Yankees, formed a project for a definite post on the Columbia River, proposing to reach their destination by ship. Accordingly they fitted out an old vessel known as the Albatross, with Nathan Winship as captain, William Gale as captain’s assistant, and William Smith as first mate. Captain Gale kept a journal of the entire enterprise, and it is one of the most interesting and valuable of the many ship’s records of the North-western Coast.

Setting sail with a crew of twenty-two men and an excellent supply of stores and ammunition, and abundance of tools and hardware for erecting needful buildings, the Albatross left Boston in the summer of 1809. After a slow and tedious, but very healthful and comfortable voyage, stopping at the Hawaiian Islands on the route, the Albatross reached the mouth of the Columbia River on May 26, 1810. Many American and other ships had entered the mouth of the River prior to that date, but so far as known none had ascended any considerable distance. Apparently Gray and Broughton were the only shipmasters who had ascended above the wide expanse now known as Gray’s Bay, while the Lewis and Clark expedition contained the only white men who had seen the river above tide-water. The Winship enterprise may be regarded with great interest, therefore, as the first real attempt to plant a permanent establishment on the banks of the River.

Winship and his companions spent some days in careful examination of the river banks and as a result of their search they decided on a strip of valley land formed by a narrowing of the River on the north and an indentation of the mountain on the south. This pleasant strip of fertile land is located on the south bank of the lordly stream, and its lower end is about forty-five miles from the ocean. Being partially covered with a beautiful grove of oak trees, the first to be seen on the ascent of the River, the place received the name of Oak Point. It may be noted that this name was subsequently transferred to a promontory nearly opposite on the north bank, and this circumstance has led many to locate erroneously the site of the first buildings designed for permanent use on the banks of the Columbia. And such these were, for the Lewis and Clark structures at what they called Fort Clatsop, erected four and a half years earlier, were meant only for a winter’s use. But the Winship party had glowing visions of a great emporium of the fur-trade, another Montreal or St. Louis, to inaugurate a new era for their country and themselves. They designed paying the Indians for their lands and in every way treating them justly. They seem in short to have had a very high conception of the dignity and worth of their enterprise. They were worthy of the highest success, and the student of to-day cannot but grieve that their high hopes were dashed with disaster.

Tying the Albatross to the bank on June 4th, they entered at once with great energy on the task of felling trees, rearing a large log house, clearing a garden spot, in which they at once began the planting of seeds, and getting ready to trade with the natives. But within four days the River began to rise rapidly, and the busy fort-builders perceived to their dismay that they had located on land subject to inundation. All the work thus far done went for naught, and they pulled their fort to pieces and floated the logs down stream a quarter of a mile to a higher place. There they resumed their buildings with redoubled energy. But within a week a much more dangerous situation again, and this time permanently, arrested their grand project. This time it was the very men toward whom they had entertained such just and benevolent designs, the Indians, who thwarted the plans. For, as Captain Gale narrates in a most entertaining manner, a large body of Chinooks and Cheheeles, armed with bows and arrows, and some muskets, made their appearance, announcing that they were on their way to war against the Culaworth tribe who had killed one of their chiefs a year before. But the next day the Indians massing themselves about the whites, gave such plain indications that the previous declaration was a pretence that the party hastily got into a position of defence. Their cannon on board the Albatross had already been loaded in anticipation of emergencies, and so plain was it that they could make a deadly defence that the threatened attack did not come. A long “pow-wow” ensued instead, and the Chinooks insisted that the builders must select a site lower down the river. After due consideration the party decided that any determined opposition by the Indians would so impair their enterprise, even though they might be able to defend themselves, that it would be best to seek a new location. Accordingly they reloaded their effects, dropped down the River, and finally decided to make a voyage down the California coast and return the next year. Return they did, but by that time the next year the Pacific Fur Company had already located at Astoria the first permanent American settlement, and the Winship enterprise faded away. That the design of the Winships was not at all chimerical is apparent from the fact that within twenty years the Hudson’s Bay Company had made of Vancouver, sixty miles farther up the River, the very kind of a trading entrepôt of which the Winships had dreamed. Their dream was reasonable, but the time and place were unpropitious.

A quotation from Captain Gale’s journal will give a conception of his feelings:

June 12th.—The ship dropped further down the River, and it was now determined to abandon all attempts to force a settlement. We have taken off the goats and hogs which were left on shore for the use of the settlement, and thus we have to abandon the business, after having, with great difficulty and labour, got about forty-five miles above Cape Disappointment; and with great trouble began to clear the land and build a house a second time, after cutting timber enough to finish nearly one-half, and having two of our hands disabled in the work. It is, indeed, cutting to be obliged to knuckle to those whom you have not the least fear of, but whom, from motives of prudence, you are obliged to treat with forbearance. What can be more disagreeable than to sit at the table with a number of these rascally chiefs, who while they supply their greedy mouths with your food with one hand, their bloods boil within them to cut your throat with the other, without the least provocation.

On the way out of the River Captain Winship learned that the Chinooks designed capturing his vessel, and would doubtless have done so, had not his vigilance prevented.

While the crew of the Albatross were engaged in these adventures the largest American Fur Company yet formed was getting ready to effect a lodgment on the shores of the Columbia. This was the Pacific Fur Company. John Jacob Astor was the founder of this enterprise. Though unfortunate in almost every feature of its history and its final outcome, this company had a magnificent conception, a royal grandeur of opportunity, and it possessed also the felicity, shared by no one of its predecessors, of the genius of a great literary star to illuminate its records. To Washington Irving it owes much of its fame. Yet the commercial genius of Astor could not prevent errors of judgment by the management any more than the literary genius of Irving was able to conceal their errors, or the genius of American liberty able to order events so as to prevent victory for a time by the “Britishers.” As we view the history in the large it may be that we shall conclude that the British triumph at first was the best introduction to American triumph in the end.

John Jacob Astor may, perhaps, be justly regarded as the first of the great promoters or financial magnates who have made the United States the world’s El Dorado. Coming from Germany to this land of opportunity after the close of the Revolutionary War, he soon manifested that keen intuition in money matters, as well as intense devotion to accumulation, which has led to the colossal fortunes of his own descendants and of the other multimillionaires of this age. Having made quite a fortune by transporting furs to London, Mr. Astor turned to larger fields. With his broad and keen geographical and commercial insight, he could readily grasp the same fact which the North-westers of Montreal were also considering, that the Columbia River might well become the key to an international fur-trade, as well as a strategic point for American expansion westward. He made overtures to the North-westers for a partnership, but they declined. Then he determined to be the chief manager, and to associate individual Americans and Canadians with himself. With the promptitude of the skilful general, he proceeded to form his company and make his plan of campaign in time to anticipate the apparent designs of the active Canadians. They saw, as well as Astor did, the magnitude of the stake and at once made ready to play their part. For, as already noted, David Thompson crossed the Rockies by the Athabasca Pass in 1810, spent the winter at Lake Windermere on the Columbia River, and in the summer of 1811 reached Astoria, only to find the Astor Company already established there. It should be especially noted that the Thompson party was the first to descend the River from near its source to the ocean, although of course Lewis and Clark had anticipated them on the portion below the junction of the Snake with the main River.

Mr. Astor’s plans provided for an expedition by sea and one by land. The first was to convey stores and equipment for founding and defending the proposed capital of the empire of the fur-traders. Of the expedition by land under Hunt we have already given a full account in the preceding chapter, since its events rather allied it to the era of exploration than that of the traders. The organisation of Mr. Astor’s company provided that there should be a capital stock of a hundred shares, of which he should hold half and his associates half. Mr. Astor was to furnish the money, though not to exceed four hundred thousand dollars, and was to bear all losses for five years. The term of the association was fixed at twenty years, though with the privilege of dissolving it in five years if it proved unprofitable. The general plan and the details of the expedition had been decided upon by the master mind of the founder with statesmanlike ability. It comes, therefore, as a surprise to the reader that Mr. Astor should have made a capital mistake at the very beginning of his undertaking. This mistake was in the selection of his associates and the captains of some of his ships. Of the partners, five were Americans and five were Canadians. Two only of the Americans remained with the company long enough to have any determining influence on its policies. Take the fact that the majority of the active partners and almost all the clerks, trappers, and other employees of the company were Canadians, and put it beside the other fact that war was imminent with Great Britain and did actually break out within two years, and the dangerous nature of the situation can be seen. Of the ship-captains, the first one, Captain Jonathan Thorn of the Tonquin, was a man of such overbearing and obstinate nature that disaster seemed to be fairly invited by placing him in such vitally responsible a position. The captain of the second ship, the Beaver, was Cornelius Sowles, and he seems to have been as timid and irresolute as Captain Thorn was bold and implacable. Both lacked judgment. It was probably natural that Mr. Astor, having had his main prior experience as a fur-dealer in connection with the Canadians centring at Montreal, should have looked in that direction for associates. But inasmuch as war between England and the United States seemed a practical certainty, it was a great error, in founding a vast enterprise in remote regions whose ownership was not yet definitely recognised, to share with citizens of Great Britain the determination of the important issues of the enterprise. It would have saved Mr. Astor great loss and chagrin if he had observed the maxim: “Put none but Americans on guard.” As to the captains of the two vessels, that was an error that any one might have made. Yet for a man of Astor’s exceptional ability and shrewdness to err so conspicuously in judging the character of the men appointed to such important places seems indeed strange.

Astoria in 1845.
From an Old Print.

Astoria. Looking up and across the Columbia River.
Photo. by Woodfield.

To these facts in regard to the personnel of the partners, the captains, and the force, must be added two others; i. e., war and shipwreck. The combination of all these conditions made the history of the Astoria enterprise what it was. Yet, with all of its adversity, this was one of the best conceived, and, in most of its details, the best equipped and executed of all the great enterprises which have appeared in the commercial history of our country. As an element in the development of the land of the Oregon, it must be accorded the first place after the period of discovery.

The Tonquin left New York on September 6, 1810. She carried a fine equipment of all things needed for founding the proposed emporium. She was manned by a crew of twenty-one and conveyed members of the fur-trading force to the number of thirty-three. Stopping at the Sandwich Islands, an added force of twenty-four natives was taken aboard. At various times on the journey the rigid ideas of naval discipline and the imperious temper of Captain Thorn came near producing mutiny among the partners and clerks. When the Tonquin hove to off the mouth of the Columbia on March 22, 1811, the eager voyagers saw little to attract. The wind was blowing in heavy squalls, and the sea ran high. Nevertheless the hard-hearted Captain issued orders to the first mate, Fox, with a boat’s crew of four men, to go into the foaming waves and sound the channel. The boat was insufficiently provided, and it seemed scarcely short of murder to despatch a crew under such circumstances. But the tyrannical captain would listen to no remonstrances, and the poor little boat went tossing over the billows on her forlorn hope. Such indeed it proved to be, for neither boat nor any one of the crew was ever heard of again. This was a wholly unnecessary sacrifice of life, for the Tonquin was in no danger, and time could just as well have been taken for more propitious weather.

The next day, the wind and sea having abated, the Tonquin drew near the dreaded bar, but, no entrance that satisfied the captain appearing, the ship again stood off to spend the night in deep water. On the next day, the 24th, the wind fell and a serene sky seemed to invite another attempt. The pinnace in command of Mr. Aikin, with two white men and two Kanakas, was sent out to find the channel. Following the pinnace the ship moved in so rapidly under a freshening breeze that she passed the pinnace, the unfortunate men on board finding it impossible to effect an entrance and being borne by the refluent current into the mad surge where ocean tide and outflowing river met in foamy strife. So the pinnace disappeared. But meanwhile the crew had all their energies engaged to save the Tonquin. For the wind failed at the critical moment and the ship struck the sands with violence. Night came on. Had the men been classically trained (as in fact Franchère was) they might have remembered Virgil, Ponto nox incubat atra. But they had no time for classical or other quotations. Hastily dropping the anchors they lay to in the midst of the tumult of waters, in that worst of situations, on an unknown coast in the dark and in storm. But as Franchère expresses it, Providence came to their succour, and the tide flooding and the wind rising, they weighed the anchors, and in spite of the obscurity of the night, they gained a safe harbour in a little cove inside of Cape Disappointment, apparently just about abreast of the present town of Ilwaco.

Thus the Tonquin was saved, and with the light of morning it could be seen that she was fairly within the bar. Natives soon made their appearance, desirous of trading beaver-skins. But the crew were in no mood for commerce while any hope existed for finding the lost sailors. Taking a course toward the shore by what must have been nearly the present route from Ilwaco to Long Beach, the captain and a party with him, began a search and soon found Weeks, one of the crew of the pinnace. He was stark naked and suffering intensely from the cold. As soon as sufficiently revived he narrated the loss of the pinnace in the breakers, the death of three of the crew, and the casting of himself and one of the Kanakas upon the beach. The point where they were cast would seem to have been near the present location of the life-saving station.

The two survivors of the ill-fated pinnace having been revived, the party returned to the Tonquin, which was now riding safely at anchor in the bay on the north side of the river, named Baker’s Bay by Broughton nineteen years before. Joy for their own escape from such imminent perils was mingled with melancholy at the loss of their eight companions of the two boats, and with the melancholy there was a sense of bitterness toward the captain, who was to blame, at least for the loss of the small boat.

But now the new land was all before them where to choose, and since Captain Thorn was in great haste to depart and begin his trading cruise along the coast, the partners on the Tonquin, Messrs. McKay, McDougal, David Stuart, and Robert Stuart, decided somewhat hurriedly to locate at the point which had received from Lieutenant Broughton the name of Point George. Franchère gives a pleasant picture of the beauty of the trees and sky, and the surprise of the party to find that, though it was only the 12th of April when they set to work upon the great trees which covered the site of their chosen capital, yet spring was already far advanced. They did not then understand the effect of the Japan current upon the Pacific Coast climate.

An incident of special interest soon after landing was the appearance on June 15th of two strange Indians, a man and a woman, bearing a letter addressed to Mr. John Stuart, Fort Estekatadene, New Caledonia. These two Indians wore long robes of dressed deerskins with leggings and moccasins more like the Indians of the Rocky Mountains. They could not understand the speech of the Astoria Indians nor of any of the mixture of dialects which the white men tried on them, until one of the Canadian clerks addressed them in the Knisteneaux language with which they seemed to be partially familiar. After several days of stay at the fort the two wandering Indians succeeded in making it clear to the traders that they had been sent out by a clerk named Finnan McDonald of the North-west Fur Company from a fort which that company had just established on the Spokane River. They said that they had lost their way and in consequence had descended the Tacousah-Tessah (and this Franchère understood to be the Indian name for the Columbia, though the general impression among the Indians is that Tacousah-Tessah, or Tacoutche-Tesse, signified Frazer River). From the revelation gradually drawn from these two Indians (and the surprising discovery was made that they were both women) the very important conclusion was drawn that the North-west Fur Company was already prepared to contest with the Astor Company the possession of the River. The peculiar feature of the situation was that the most of the Astorians, though American by the existing business tie, were Canadian and British by blood and sympathy, and hence were very likely to fraternise with the Montreal traders.

One of the Lagoons of the Upper Columbia River, near Golden, B. C.
Photo. by C. F. Yates, Golden.

Saddle Mt., or Swallalochost, near Astoria, Famous in Indian Myth.
Photo. by Woodfield.