soon as she looked at him, she knew he was her "tum tum man," and she
must go with him. He had a small sloop, and Lucy became its mate. They
two alone ran it for several years up and down the river. He
established a little trading-post, and Lucy always took charge of that
when he went to buy goods. When gold was discovered at Ringgold Bar,
Lucy went there, worked with a rocker like a man, and washed out
hundreds of dollars' worth of gold, all which she gave to Pomeroy.
With it he built a fine schooner and enlarged his business, the
faithful Lucy working always at his side and bidding. At last, after
eight or ten years, he grew weary of her and of the country, and made
up his mind to go to California. But he had not the heart to tell Lucy
he meant to leave her. The pilot who told me this story was at that
time captain of a schooner on the river. Pomeroy came to him one day,
and asked him to move Lucy and her effects down to Columbus. He said
he had told her that she must go and live there with her relatives,
while he went to California and looked about, and then he would send
for her. The poor creature, who had no idea of treachery, came on
board cheerfully and willingly, and he set her off at Columbus. This
was in the early spring. Week after week, month after month, whenever
his schooner stopped there, Lucy was on the shore, asking if he had
heard from Pomeroy. For a long time, he said, he couldn't bear to tell
her. At last he did; but she would not believe him. Winter came on.
She had got a few boards together and built herself a sort of hut,
near a house where lived an eccentric old bachelor, who finally took
compassion on her, and to save her from freezing let her come into his
shanty to sleep. He was a mysterious old man, a recluse, with a morbid
aversion to women; and at the outset it was a great struggle for him
to let even an Indian woman cross his threshold. But little by little
Lucy won her way: first she washed the dishes; then she would timidly
help at the cooking. Faithful, patient, unpresuming, at last she grew
to be really the old man's housekeeper as well as servant. He lost his
health, and became blind. Lucy took care of him till he died, and
followed him to the grave, his only mourner,--the only human being in
the country with whom he had any tie. He left her his little house
and a few hundred dollars,--all he had; and there she is still, alone,
making out to live by doing whatever work she can find in the
neighborhood. Everybody respects her; she is known as "Lucy" up and
down the river. "I did my best to hire her to come and keep house for
my wife, last year," said the pilot. "I'd rather have her for nurse or
cook than any white woman in Oregon. But she wouldn't come. I don't
know as she's done looking for Pomeroy to come back yet, and she's
going to stay just where he left her. She never misses a time, waving
to me, when she knows what boat I'm on; and there isn't much going on
on the river she don't know."
It was dusk when the pilot finished telling Lucy's story. We were
shooting along through wild passages of water called Hell Gate, just
above the Dalles. In the dim light the basaltic columnar cliffs looked
like grooved ebony. One of the pinnacles has a strange resemblance to
the figure of an Indian. It is called the Chief, and the semblance is
startling,--a colossal figure, with a plume-crowned head, turned as if
gazing backward over the shoulder; the attitude stately, the drapery
graceful, and the whole expression one of profound and dignified
sorrow. It seemed a strangely fitting emphasis to the story of the
faithful Indian woman.
It was near midnight when we passed the Dalles. Our train was late,
and dashed on at its swiftest. Fitful light came from a wisp of a new
moon and one star; they seemed tossing in a tumultuous sea of dark
clouds. In this glimmering darkness the lava walls and ridges stood
up, inky black; the foaming water looked like molten steel, the whole
region more ghastly and terrible than before.
There is a village of three thousand inhabitants at the Dalles. The
houses are set among lava hillocks and ridges. The fields seemed
bubbled with lava, their blackened surfaces stippled in with yellow
and brown. High up above are wheat-fields in clearings, reaching to
the sky-line of the hills. Great slopes of crumbling and
disintegrating lava rock spread superb purple and slate colors between
the greens of forests and wheat-fields. It is one of the memorable
pictures on the Columbia.
To go both up and down a river is a good deal like spending a summer
and a winter in a place, so great difference does it make when right
hand and left shift sides, and everything is seen from a new
stand-point.
The Columbia River scenery is taken at its best going up, especially
the gradual crescendo of the Cascade Mountain region, which is far
tamer entered from above. But we had a compensation in the clearer sky
and lifted clouds, which gave us the more distant snow-peaks in all
their glory; and our run down from the Dalles to Portland was the best
day of our three on the river. Our steamer was steered by hydraulic
pressure; and it was a wonderful thing to sit in the pilot-house and
see the slight touch of a finger on the shining lever sway the great
boat in a second. A baby's hand is strong enough to steer the largest
steamboat by this instrument. It could turn the boat, the captain
said, in a maelstrom, where four men together could not budge the
rudder-wheel.
The history of the Columbia River navigation would make by itself an
interesting chapter. It dates back to 1792, when a Boston ship and a
Boston captain first sailed up the river. A curious bit of history in
regard to that ship is to be found in the archives of the old Spanish
government in California. Whenever a royal decree was issued in Madrid
in regard to the Indies or New Spain, a copy of it was sent to every
viceroy in the Spanish Dominions; he communicated it to his next
subordinate, who in turn sent it to all the governors, and so on, till
the decree reached every corner of the king's provinces. In 1789 there
was sent from Madrid, by ship to Mexico, and thence by courier to
California, and by Fages, the California governor, to every port in
California, the following order:--
"Whenever there may arrive at the port of San Francisco a ship
named the 'Columbia,' said to belong to General Washington of
the American States, commanded by John Kendrick, which sailed
from Boston in 1787, bound on a voyage of discovery to the
Russian settlements on the northern coast of the peninsula, you
will cause said vessel to be examined with caution and
delicacy, using for this purpose a small boat which you have in
your possession."
Two months after this order was promulgated in the Santa Barbara
presidio, Captain Gray, of the ship "Washington," and Captain
Kendrick of the ship "Columbia," changed ships in Wickmanish harbor.
Captain Gray took the "Columbia" to China, and did not sail into San
Francisco harbor at all, whereby he escaped being "examined with
caution and delicacy" by the small boat in possession of the San
Francisco garrison. Not till the 11th of May, 1792, did he return and
sail up the Columbia River, then called the Oregon. He renamed it, for
his ship, "Columbia's River;" but the possessive was soon dropped.
When one looks at the crowded rows of steamboats at the Portland
wharves now, it is hard to realize that it is only thirty-two years
since the first one was launched there. Two were built and launched in
one year, the "Columbia" and the "Lot Whitcomb." The "Lot Whitcomb"
was launched on Christmas Day; there were three days' feasting and
dancing, and people gathered from all parts of the Territory to
celebrate the occasion.
It is also hard to realize, when standing on the Portland wharves,
that it is less than fifty years since there were angry discussions in
the United States Congress as to whether or not it were worth while to
obtain Oregon as a possession, and in the Eastern States manuals were
being freely distributed, bearing such titles as this: "A general
circular to all persons of good character wishing to emigrate to the
Oregon Territory." Even those statesmen who were most earnest in favor
of the securing of Oregon did not perceive the true nature of its
value. One of Benton's most enthusiastic predictions was that an
"emporium of Asiatic commerce" would be situated at the mouth of the
Columbia, and that "a stream of Asiatic trade would pour into the
valley of the Mississippi through the channel of Oregon." But the
future of Oregon and Washington rests not on any transmission of the
riches of other countries, however important an element in their
prosperity that may ultimately become. Their true riches are their own
and inalienable. They are to be among the great feeders of the earth.
Gold and silver values are unsteady and capricious; intrigues can
overthrow them; markets can be glutted, and mines fail. But bread the
nations of the earth must have. The bread-yielder controls the
situation always. Given a soil which can grow wheat year after year
with no apparent fatigue or exhaustion, a climate where rains never
fail and seed-time and harvest are uniformly certain, and conditions
are created under which the future success and wealth of a country may
be predicted just as surely as the movements of the planets in the
heavens.
There are three great valleys in western Oregon,--the Willamette, the
Umpqua, and the Rogue River. The Willamette is the largest, being
sixty miles long by one hundred and fifty wide. The Umpqua and Rogue
River together contain over a million of acres. These valleys are
natural gardens; fertile to luxuriance, and watered by all the
westward drainage of the great Cascade Range, the Andes of North
America, a continuation of the Sierra Nevada. The Coast Range
Mountains lie west of these valleys, breaking, but not shutting out,
the influence of the sea air and fogs. This valley region between
these two ranges contains less than a third of the area of Washington
and Oregon. The country east of the Cascade Mountains is no less
fertile, but has a drier climate, colder winters, and hotter summers.
Its elevation is from two to four thousand feet,--probably the very
best elevations for health. A comparison of statistics of yearly
death-rates cannot be made with absolute fairness between old and
thick-settled and new and sparsely settled countries. Allowance must
be made for the probably superior health and strength of the men and
women who have had the youth and energy to go forward as pioneers.
But, making all due allowance for these, there still remains
difference enough to startle one between the death-rates in some of
the Atlantic States and in these infant empires of the New Northwest.
The yearly death-rate in Massachusetts is one out of fifty-seven; in
Vermont one out of ninety-seven; in Oregon one out of one hundred and
seventy-two; and in Washington Territory one out of two hundred and
twenty-eight.
As we glided slowly to anchorage in Portland harbor, five dazzling
snow-white peaks were in sight on the horizon,--Mount Hood, of
peerless shape, strong as if it were a bulwark of the very heavens
themselves, yet graceful and sharp-cut as Egypt's pyramids; St.
Helen's, a little lower, yet looking higher, with the marvellous
curves of its slender shining cone, bent on and seemingly into the
sky, like an intaglio of ice cut in the blue; miles away in the
farthest north and east horizons, Mounts Tacoma and Adams and Baker,
all gleaming white, and all seeming to uphold the skies.
These eternal, unalterable snow-peaks will be as eternal and
unalterable factors in the history of the country as in its beauty to
the eye. Their value will not come under any head of things reckonable
by census, statistics, or computation, but it will be none the less
real for that: it will be an element in the nature and character of
every man and woman born within sight of the radiant splendor; and it
will be strange if it does not ultimately develop, in the empire of
this New Northwest, a local patriotism and passionate loyalty to soil
as strong and lasting as that which has made generations of Swiss
mountaineers ready to brave death for a sight of their mountains.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] John G. Hittell's Commerce and Industries of the Pacific Coast.
[3] "The term 'pueblo' answers to that of the English word 'town,' in
all its vagueness and all its precision. As the word 'town' in English
generally embraces every kind of population from the village to the
city, and also, used specifically, signifies a town corporate and
politic, so the word 'pueblo' in Spanish ranges from the hamlet to the
city, but, used emphatically, signifies a town corporate and
politic."--DWINELLE'S _Colonial History of San Francisco_.
[4] In the decade between 1801 and 1810 the missions furnished to the
presidios about eighteen thousand dollars' worth of supplies each
year.
[5] Special Report of the Hon. B. D. Wilson, of Los Angeles, Cal., to
the Interior Department in 1852.
[6] The missions of San Rafael and San Francisco de Solano were the
last founded; the first in 1819, and the latter in 1823,--too late to
attain any great success or importance.
[7] John W. Dwinelle's Colonial History of San Francisco, pp. 44-87.
II.
SCOTLAND AND ENGLAND.
II.
SCOTLAND AND ENGLAND.
A BURNS PILGRIMAGE.
A shining-beached crescent of country facing to the sunset, and rising
higher and higher to the east till it becomes mountain, is the county
of Ayrshire, fair and famous among the southern Scotch highlands. To a
sixty-mile measure by air, between its north and south promontories,
it stretches a curving coast of ninety; and when Robert Burns strolled
over its breezy uplands, he saw always beautiful and mysterious silver
lines of land thrusting themselves out into the mists of the sea,
pointing to far-off island peaks, seeming sometimes to bridge and
sometimes to wall vistas ending only in sky. These lines are as
beautiful, elusive, and luring now as then, and in the inalienable
loyalty of nature bear testimony to-day to their lover.
This is the greatest crown of the hero and the poet. Other great men
hold fame by failing records which moth and fire destroy. The places
that knew them know them no more when they are dead. Marble and canvas
and parchment league in vain to keep green the memory of him who did
not love and consecrate by his life-blood, in fight or in song, the
soil where he trod. But for him who has done this,--who fought well,
sang well,--the morning cloud, and the wild rose, and broken blades of
grass under men's feet, become immortal witnesses; so imperishable,
after all, are what we are in the habit of calling the "perishable
things of this earth."
More than two hundred years ago, when the followers and holders of the
different baronies of Ayrshire compared respective dignities and
values, they made a proverb which ran:--
"Carrick for a man; Kyle for a coo;
Cunningham for butter and cheese; Galloway for woo."
Before the nineteenth century set in, the proverb should have been
changed; for Kyle is the land through which "Bonnie Doon" and Irvine
Water run, and there has been never a man in all Carrick of whom
Carrick can be proud as is Kyle of Robert Burns. It has been said that
a copy of his poems lies on every Scotch cottager's shelf, by the side
of the Bible. This is probably not very far from the truth. Certain it
is, that in the villages where he dwelt there seems to be no man, no
child, who does not apparently know every detail of the life he lived
there, nearly a hundred years ago.
"Will ye be drivin' over to Tarbolton in the morning?" said the pretty
young vice-landlady of the King's Arms at Ayr, when I wrote my name in
her visitors' book late one Saturday night.
"What made you think of that?" I asked, amused.
"And did ye not come on account o' Burns?" she replied. "There's been
a many from your country here by reason of him this summer. I think
you love him in America a'most as well as we do oursel's. It's vary
seldom the English come to see anythin' aboot him. They've so many
poets o' their own, I suppose, is the reason o' their not thinkin'
more o' Burns."
All that there was unflattering in this speech I forgave by reason of
the girl's sweet low voice, pretty gray eyes, and gentle, refined
hospitality. She might have been the daughter of some country
gentleman, welcoming a guest to the house; and she took as much
interest in making all the arrangements for my drive to Tarbolton the
next morning as if it had been a pleasure excursion for herself. It is
but a dull life she leads, helping her widowed mother keep the King's
Arms,--dull, and unprofitable too, I fear; for it takes four
men-servants and seven women to keep up the house, and I saw no
symptom of any coming or going of customers in it. A stillness as of a
church on weekdays reigned throughout the establishment. "At the races
and when the yeomanry come," she said, there was something to do; but
"in the winter nothing, except at the times of the county balls. You
know, ma'am, we've many county families here," she remarked with
gentle pride, "and they all stop with us."
There is a compensation to the lower orders of a society where rank
and castes are fixed, which does not readily occur at first sight to
the democratic mind naturally rebelling against such defined
distinctions. It is very much to be questioned whether, in a republic,
the people who find themselves temporarily lower down in the social
scale than they like to be or expect to stay, feel, in their
consciousness of the possibility of rising, half so much pride or
satisfying pleasure as do the lower classes in England, for instance,
in their relations with those whom they serve, whose dignity they seem
to share by ministering to it.
The way from Ayr to Tarbolton must be greatly changed since the day
when the sorrowful Burns family trod it, going from the Mount Oliphant
farm to that of Lochlea. Now it is for miles a smooth road, on which
horses' hoofs ring merrily, and neat little stone houses, with pretty
yards, line it on both sides for some distance. The ground rises
almost immediately, so that the dwellers in these little suburban
houses get fine off-looks seaward and a wholesome breeze in at their
windows. The houses are built joined by twos, with a yard in common.
They have three rooms besides the kitchen, and they rent for
twenty-five pounds a year; so no industrious man of Ayr need be badly
lodged. Where the houses leave off, hedges begin,--thorn and beech,
untrimmed and luxuriant, with great outbursts of white honeysuckle and
sweet-brier at intervals. As far as the eye could see were waving
fields of wheat, oats, and "rye-grass," which last being just ripe was
of a glorious red color. The wheat-fields were rich and full, sixty
bushels to the acre. Oats, which do not take so kindly to the soil and
air, produce sometimes only forty-eight.
Burns was but sixteen when his father moved from Mount Oliphant to the
Lochlea farm, in the parish of Tarbolton. It was in Tarbolton that he
first went to dancing-school, joined the Freemasons, and organized the
club which, no doubt, cost him dear, "The Bachelors of Tarbolton." In
the beginning this club consisted of only five members besides Burns
and his brother; afterward it was enlarged to sixteen. Burns drew up
the rules; and the last one--the tenth--is worth remembering, as an
unconscious defining on his part of his ideal of human life:--
"Every man proper for a member of this society must have a
friendly, honest, open heart, above everything dirty or mean,
and must be a professed lover of one or more of the sex. The
proper person for this society is a cheerful, honest-hearted
lad, who, if he has a friend that is true, and a mistress that
is kind, and as much wealth as genteelly to make both ends
meet, is just as happy as this world can make him."
Walking to-day through the narrow streets of Tarbolton, it is wellnigh
impossible to conceive of such rollicking good cheer having made
abiding-place there. It is a close, packed town, the houses of stone
or white plaster,--many of them low, squalid, with thatched roofs and
walls awry; those that are not squalid are grim. The streets are
winding and tangled; the people look poor and dull. As I drove up to
the "Crown Inn," the place where the Tarbolton Freemasons meet now,
and where some of the relics of Burns's Freemason days are kept, the
"first bells" were ringing in the belfry of the old church opposite,
and the landlord of the inn replied with a look of great embarrassment
to my request to see the Burns relics,--
"It's the Sabbath, mem."
Then he stood still, scratching his head for a few moments, and then
set off, at full run, down the street without another word.
"He's gone to the head Mason," explained the landlady. "It takes three
to open the chest. I think ye'll na see it the day." And she turned on
her heel with a frown and left me.
"They make much account o' the Sabbath in this country," said my
driver. "Another day ye'd do better."
Thinking of Burns's lines to the "Unco Guid," I strolled over into the
churchyard opposite, to await the landlord's return. The bell-ringer
had come down, and followed me curiously about among the graves. One
very old stone had carved upon it two high-top boots; under these,
two low shoes; below these, two kneeling figures, a man and a woman,
cut in high relief; no inscription of any sort.
"What can it mean?" I asked.
The bell-ringer could not tell; it was so old nobody knew anything
about it. His mother, now ninety years of age, remembered seeing it
when she was a child, and it looked just as old then as now.
"There's a many strange things in this graveyard," said he; and then
he led me to a corner where, enclosed by swinging chains and stone
posts, was a carefully kept square of green turf, on which lay a
granite slab. "Every year comes the money to pay for keeping that
grass green," he said, "and no name to it. It's been going on that way
for fifty years."
The stone-wall around the graveyard was dilapidated, and in parts was
falling down.
"I suppose this old wall was here in Burns's time," I said.
"Ay, yes," said the bell-ringer; and pointing to a low, thatched
cottage just outside it, "and yon shop--many's the time he's been in
it playin' his tricks."
The landlord of the inn now came running up, with profuse apologies
for the ill success of his mission. He had been to the head Mason,
hoping he would come over and assist in the opening of the chest, in
which were kept a Mason's apron worn by Burns, some jewels of his, and
a book of minutes kept by him. But "bein' 's it's the Sabbath," and
"he's sick in bed," and it was "against the rules to open the regalia
chest unless three Masons were present," the kindly landlord, piling
up reason after reason, irrespective of their consistency with each
other, went on to explain that it would be impossible; but I might see
the chair in which Burns always sat. This was a huge oaken chair,
black with age, and furrowed with names cut deep in the wood. It was
shaped and proportioned like a child's high-chair, and had precisely
such a rest for the feet as is put on children's high-chairs. To this
day the Grand Mason sits in it at their meetings, and will so long as
the St. James Lodge exists.
"They've been offered hundreds of pounds for that chair, mem, plain as
it is. You'd not think it; but there's no money'd buy it from the
lodge," said the landlord.
The old club-house where the jolly "Bachelors of Tarbolton" met in
Burns's day is a low, two-roomed, thatched cottage, half in ruins. The
room where the bachelors smoked, drank, and sang is now little more
than a cellar filled with rubbish and filth,--nothing left but the old
fireplace to show that it was ever inhabited. In the other half of the
cottage lives a laborer's family,--father, mother, and a young child:
their one room, with its bed built into the wall, and their few delf
dishes on the dresser, is probably much like the room in which Burns
first opened his wondrous eyes. The man was lying on the floor playing
with his baby. At the name of Burns, he sprang up with a hearty "Ay,
weel," and ran out in his blue-stocking feet to show me the cellar, of
which, it was plainly to be seen, he was far prouder than of his more
comfortable side of the house. The name by which the inn was called in
Burns's day he did not know. But "He's a Mason over there; he'll
know," he cried; and before I could prevent him, he had darted, still
shoeless, across the road, and asked the question of a yet poorer
laborer, who was taking his Sunday on his door-sill with two bairns
between his knees. He had heard, but had "forgotten." "Feyther'll
know," said the wife, coming forward with the third bairn, a baby, in
her arms. "I'll rin an' ask feyther." The old man tottered out, and
gazed with a vacant, feeble look at me, while he replied impatiently
to his daughter: "Manson's Inn, 't was called; ye've heard it times
eneuch."
"I dare say you always drink Burns's health at the lodge when you
meet," I said to the laborer.
"Ay, ay, his health's ay dronkit," he said, with a coarse laugh, "weel
dronkit."
A few rods to the east, and down the very road Burns was wont to come
and go between Lochlea and Tarbolton, still stands "Willie's
mill,"--cottage and mill and shed and barn, all in one low, long,
oddly joined (or jointed) building of irregular heights, like a
telescope pulled out to its full length; a little brook and a bit of
gay garden in front. In the winter the mill goes by water from a lake
near by; in the summer by steam,--a great change since the night when
Burns went
"Todlin' down on Willie's mill,"
and though he thought he
"Was na fou, but just had plenty,"
could not for the life of him make out to count the moon's horns.
"To count her horns, wi' a' my power,
I set mysel';
But whether she had three or four
I could na tell."