Departure of the Tonquin.--Indian Messengers.--Project of an
Expedition to the Interior.--Arrival of Mr. Daniel
Thompson.--Departure of the Expedition.--Designs upon us by the
Natives.--Rumors of the Destruction of the Tonquin.--Scarcity of
Provisions.--Narrative of a strange Indian.--Duplicity and Cunning
of Comcomly.
Having built a warehouse (62 feet by 20) to put under cover the articles
we were to receive from the ship, we were busily occupied, from the 16th
to the 30th, in stowing away the goods and other effects intended for
the establishment.
The ship, which had been detained by circumstances, much longer than had
been anticipated, left her anchorage at last, on the 1st of June, and
dropped down to Baker's bay, there to wait for a favorable wind to get
out of the river. As she was to coast along the north, and enter all the
harbors, in order to procure as many furs as possible, and to touch at
the Columbia river before she finally left these seas for the United
States, it was unanimously resolved among the partners, that Mr. M'Kay
should join the cruise, as well to aid the captain, as to obtain correct
information in regard to the commerce with the natives on that coast.
Mr. M'Kay selected Messrs. J. Lewis and O. de Montigny to accompany him;
but the latter having represented that the sea made him sick, was
excused; and Mr. M'Kay shipped in his place a young man named Louis
Bruslé, to serve him in the capacity of domestic, being one of the young
Canadian sailors. I had the good fortune not to be chosen for this
disastrous voyage, thanks to my having made myself useful at the
establishment. Mr. Mumford (the second mate) owed the same happiness to
the incompatibility of his disposition with that of the captain; he had
permission to remain, and engaged with the company in place of Mr. Aikin
as coaster, and in command of the schooner.[I]
[Footnote I: This schooner was found too small for the purpose. Mr.
Astor had no idea of the dangers to be met at the mouth of the Colombia,
or he would have ordered the frame of a vessel of at least one hundred
tons. The frames shipped in New York were used in the construction of
this one only, which was employed solely in the river trade.]
On the 5th of June, the ship got out to sea, with a good wind. We
continued in the meantime to labor without intermission at the
completion of the storehouse, and in the erection of a dwelling for
ourselves, and a powder magazine. These buildings were constructed of
hewn logs, and, in the absence of boards, tightly covered and roofed
with cedar bark. The natives, of both sexes, visited us more frequently,
and formed a pretty considerable camp near the establishment.
On the 15th, some natives from up the river, brought us two strange
Indians, a man and a woman. They were not attired like the savages on
the river Columbia, but wore long robes of dressed deer-skin, with
leggings and moccasins in the fashion of the tribes to the east of the
Rocky Mountains. We put questions to them in various Indian dialects;
but they did not understand us. They showed us a letter addressed to
"_Mr. John Stuart, Fort Estekatadene, New Caledonia_." Mr. Pillet then
addressing them in the _Knisteneaux_ language, they answered, although
they appeared not to understand it perfectly. Notwithstanding, we
learned from them that they had been sent by a Mr. Finnan M'Donald, a
clerk in the service of the Northwest Company, and who had a post on a
river which they called _Spokan_; that having lost their way, they had
followed the course of the _Tacousah-Tesseh_ (the Indian name of the
Columbia), that when they arrived at the Falls, the natives made them
understand that there were white men at the mouth of the river; and not
doubting that the person to whom the letter was addressed would be found
there, they had come to deliver it.
We kept these messengers for some days, and having drawn from them
important information respecting the country in the interior, west of
the Mountains, we decided to send an expedition thither, under the
command of Mr. David Stuart; and the 15th July was fixed for its
departure.
All was in fact ready on the appointed day, and we were about to load
the canoes, when toward midday, we saw a large canoe, with a flag
displayed at her stern, rounding the point which we called _Tongue
Point_. We knew not who it could be; for we did not so soon expect our
own party, who (as the reader will remember) were to cross the
continent, by the route which Captains Lewis and Clarke had followed, in
1805, and to winter for that purpose somewhere on the Missouri. We were
soon relieved of our uncertainty by the arrival of the canoe, which
touched shore at a little wharf that we had built to facilitate the
landing of goods from the vessel. The flag she bore was the British, and
her crew was composed of eight Canadian boatmen or _voyageurs_. A
well-dressed man, who appeared to be the commander, was the first to
leap ashore, and addressing us without ceremony, said that his name was
David Thompson, and that he was one of the partners of the Northwest
Company. We invited him to our quarters, which were at one end of the
warehouse, the dwelling-house not being yet completed. After the usual
civilities had been extended to our visitor, Mr. Thompson said that he
had crossed the continent during the preceding season; but that the
desertion of a portion of his men had compelled him to winter at the
base of the Rocky mountains, at the head waters of the Columbia. In the
spring he had built a canoe, the materials for which he had brought with
him across the mountains, and had come down the river to our
establishment. He added that the wintering partners had resolved to
abandon all their trading posts west of the mountains, not to enter into
competition with us, provided our company would engage not to encroach
upon their commerce on the east side: and to support what he said,
produced a letter to that effect, addressed by the wintering partners to
the chief of their house in Canada, the Hon. William M'Gillivray.
Mr. Thompson kept a regular journal, and travelled, I thought, more like
a geographer than a fur-trader. He was provided with a sextant,
chronometer and barometer, and during a week's sojourn which he made at
our place, had an opportunity to make several astronomical
observations. He recognised the two Indians who had brought the letter
addressed to Mr. J. Stuart, and told us that they were two women, one of
whom had dressed herself as a man, to travel with more security. The
description which he gave us of the interior of the country was not
calculated to give us a very favorable idea of it, and did not perfectly
accord with that of our two Indian guests. We persevered, however, in
the resolution we had taken, of sending an expedition thither; and, on
the 23d Mr. D. Stuart set out, accompanied by Messrs. Pillet, Boss,
M'Clellan and de Montigny, with four Canadian _voyageurs_, and the two
Indian women, and in company with Mr. Thompson and his crew. The wind
being favorable, the little flotilla hoisted sail, and was soon out of
our sight.[J]
[Footnote J: Mr. Thompson had no doubt been sent by the agents of the
Northwest Company, to take possession of an eligible spot at the mouth
of the Columbia, with a view of forestalling the plan of Mr. Astor. He
would have been there before us, no doubt, but for the desertion of his
men. The consequence of this step would have been his taking possession
of the country, and displaying the British flag, as an emblem, of that
possession and a guarantee of protection hereafter. He found himself too
late, however, and the stars and stripes floating over _Astoria_. This
note is not intended by the author as an after-thought: as the opinion
it conveys was that which we all entertained at the time of that
gentleman's visit.]
The natives, who till then had surrounded us in great numbers, began to
withdraw, and very soon we saw no more of them. At first we attributed
their absence to the want of furs to trade with; but we soon learned
that they acted in that manner from another motive. One of the secondary
chiefs who had formed a friendship for Mr. R. Stuart, informed him, that
seeing us reduced in number by the expedition lately sent off, they had
formed the design of surprising us, to take our lives and plunder the
post. We hastened, therefore, to put ourselves in the best possible
state of defence. The dwelling house was raised, parallel to the
warehouse; we cut a great quantity of pickets in the forest, and formed
a square, with palisades in front and rear, of about 90 feet by 120; the
warehouse, built on the edge of a ravine, formed one flank, the dwelling
house and shops the other; with a little bastion at each angle north
and south, on which were mounted four small cannon. The whole was
finished in six days, and had a sufficiently formidable aspect to deter
the Indians from attacking us; and for greater surety, we organized a
guard for day and night.
Toward the end of the month, a large assemblage of Indians from the
neighborhood of the straits _Juan de Fuca_, and _Gray's Harbor_, formed
a great camp on Baker's Bay, for the ostensible object of fishing for
sturgeon. It was bruited among these Indians that the Tonquin had been
destroyed on the coast, and Mr. M'Kay (or the chief trader, as they
called him) and all the crew, massacred by the natives. We did not give
credence to this rumor. Some days after, other Indians from Gray's
Harbor, called _Tchikeylis_, confirmed what the first had narrated, and
even gave us, as far as we could judge by the little we knew of their
language, a very circumstantial detail of the affair, so that without
wholly convincing us, it did not fail to make a painful impression on
our minds, and keep us in an excited state of feeling as to the truth
of the report. The Indians of the Bay looked fiercer and more warlike
than those of our neighborhood; so we redoubled our vigilance, and
performed a regular daily drill to accustom ourselves to the use of
arms.
To the necessity of securing ourselves against an attack on the part of
the natives, was joined that of obtaining a stock of provisions for the
winter: those which we had received from the vessel were very quickly
exhausted, and from the commencement of the month of July we were forced
to depend upon fish. Not having brought hunters with us, we had to rely
for venison, on the precarious hunt of one of the natives who had not
abandoned us when the rest of his countrymen retired. This man brought
us from time to time, a very lean and very dry doe-elk, for which we had
to pay, notwithstanding, very dear. The ordinary price of a stag was a
blanket, a knife, some tobacco, powder and ball, besides supplying our
hunter with a musket. This dry meat, and smoke-dried fish, constituted
our daily food, and that in very insufficient quantity for hardworking
men. "We had no bread, and vegetables, of course, were quite out of the
question. In a word our fare was not sumptuous. Those who accommodated
themselves best to our mode of living were the Sandwich-islanders:
salmon and elk were to them exquisite viands.
On the 11th of August a number of Chinooks visited us, bringing a
strange Indian, who had, they said, something interesting to
communicate. This savage told us, in fact, that he had been engaged with
ten more of his countrymen, by a Captain _Ayres_, to hunt seals on the
islands in _Sir Francis Drake's Bay_, where these animals are very
numerous, with a promise of being taken home and paid for their
services; the captain had left them on the islands, to go southwardly
and purchase provisions, he said, of the Spaniards of Monterey in
California; but he had never returned: and they, believing that he had
been wrecked, had embarked in a skiff which he had left them, and had
reached the main land, from which they were not far distant; but their
skiff was shattered to pieces in the surf, and they had saved
themselves by swimming. Believing that they were not far from the river
Columbia, they had followed the shore, living, on the way, upon
shell-fish and frogs; at last they arrived among strange Indians, who,
far from receiving them kindly, had killed eight of them and made the
rest prisoners; but the _Klemooks_, a neighboring tribe to the
_Clatsops_, hearing that they were captives, had ransomed them.
These facts must have occurred in March or April, 1811. The Indian who
gave us an account of them, appeared to have a great deal of
intelligence and knew some words of the English language. He added that
he had been at the Russian trading post at _Chitka_, that he had visited
the coast of California, the Sandwich islands, and even China.
About this time, old Comcomly sent to _Astoria_ for Mr. Stuart and me,
to come and cure him of a swelled throat, which, he said, afflicted him
sorely. As it was late in the day, we postponed till to-morrow going to
cure the chief of the Chinooks; and it was well we did; for, the same
evening, the wife of the Indian who had accompanied us in our voyage to
the Falls, sent us word that Comcomly was perfectly well, the pretended
_tonsillitis_ being only a pretext to get us in his power. This timely
advice kept us at home.