described by Lewis and Clark as “never out of season,” and as being
“gathered chiefly by the women, who employ for the purpose canoes from
ten to fifteen feet long, about two feet wide, nine inches deep, and
tapering from the middle. They are sufficient to contain a single person
and several bushels of roots, yet so very light that a woman can carry
them with ease. She takes it into a pond where the water is sometimes as
high as the breast, and by means of her toes separates this bulb from
the root, which, on being freed from the mud, immediately rises to the
surface of the water and is thrown into the canoe. In this manner these
patient females will remain in the water for several hours, even in the
dead of winter.”[7]
This first party of the white race, thirty-six in number, were thus
detained eight days gathering a sufficiency of food to make it prudent
to risk a journey of ten days through the heart of the great and fertile
Columbia Valley, then so devoid of large game as to make it reasonable
to assume that at some period not very remote from the time of their
visit the population had slaughtered the elk, deer, and antelope, and
driven the buffalo to the east side of the Rockies. The practice of
large parties of the strongest tribes passing that backbone of the
continent every summer to hunt this noblest of North American game is
good presumptive evidence that it had at no remote period ranged in the
valley of the Columbia. In 1806, then, we have the fact of a population,
roughly estimated at forty thousand, ekeing out a hand-to-mouth living,
from salmon chiefly, with the additions of wokas kouse (wapato and
camas),—the latter much the more generally distributed from the Pacific
Ocean to the summit flats of the Rocky Mountains—by going across those
mountains annually for game. They had, of course, to go in parties
sufficiently strong for defense against the hated, dreaded and
destructive Blackfeet. The taking of such journeys proves their
necessity. The tribes unable through weakness or situation to make such
expeditions, as were all those of Western and Southwestern Oregon, had
to gather their precarious living from the plants mentioned, grass
seeds, the small native fruits, of crab apple, haw, huckleberries,
cranberries, etc. Looking over a recent report of the Division of
Botany, United States Department of Agriculture—a contribution from the
United States Herbarium, Vol. V, No. 2, by Frederick V. Coville—I find
one hundred plants described as used by the Klamath Indians, forty-six
of which—as seeds, fruits or roots—were used as food by that tribe. No
effort has yet been made to enumerate all the kinds of flesh, fish, and
insect life used by the native race for sustenance. Lewis and Clark
found evidence that the coast native sometimes resorted to searching the
beach for fish cast up by the tide. The tribes on the south bank of the
Snake River, and southward, used to fire the high, arid plains, where
possible, and collect the crickets and grasshoppers thus killed. As late
as 1844 these insects were dried and made into a kind of pemmican by
pestle and mortar. The Rogue River natives used the grasshopper meal as
a delectable food as late as 1848, and as late as 1878 the writer saw
the chief medicine man of the Calipooyas collecting in a large mining
pan the tent caterpillars from the ash trees within four miles of Salem.
He asserted most emphatically that they were “close muckamuck” (good
food).
For years before and after the last mentioned date the writer knew
Joseph Hudson (Pa-pe-a, his native name), the lineal chief of the
Calipooyas, who signed the treaty of cession of the east side of the
Willamette Valley to the United States. He was the only native of
Western Oregon the writer ever talked with who seemed to comprehend, or
care for, the consequences to the natives of the appropriation of
ownership of the soil by the white race. He had judgment to perceive
that the latter had agencies of power and of progress with which his
people could not have coped, even at their best estate—which family
tradition had handed down to him. This pointed to a time when his people
had numbered eight thousand, as he estimated, at which time and later,
to the time of his grandfather, Chief San-de-am, _his people used the
circle hunt_, driving the deer to a center agreed upon, by young men as
runners, the point to drive to being selected as good cover to enable
the bowmen to get close to the quarry. From him the information was
gained as a family tradition that about 1818 eight men, carrying packs
on their backs and coming from the north, reached his grandfather’s
village, near where the town of Jefferson now is. They were set across,
and, going southward, they conveyed to other natives that they had
crossed San-de-am’s river. The whites shortened the name to Santiam, as
they did Yam-il to Yamhill. These eight men returned after several
months and brought the first horses the Calipooyas ever saw. They sold a
mare and colt for forty-five beaver skins. Joe, as he was familiarly
called, a man of truth and honor, could not but mourn the fate of his
people. Being in a small way his banker for small loans (he working for
me) I know he was kept poor by the general worthlessness of his tribe,
as it was one of the functions of a Calipooya chief to help the weak and
good for nothing members of his tribe. This man honestly performed any
rough and common contract labor (he would never work for day wages),
carrying his burden of sorrow for his people’s condition to where the
wicked and low can no longer trouble. The writer received from him many
hints and plain statements as to the mental capacity or mode of
reasoning of the native race. Custom led them to appeal to him in
troubles resulting from drunken rows. A young dandy of the tribe,
getting into the power of the law for knifing a woman in a camp fray,
would appeal to Joe, as chief, for financial help, with no more sense of
shame than an Irish landlord who had wasted his property in riotous
living would have in spunging off his former tenants to a green old age.
There are many people of the white race who cannot help being
participants in the results of the change of racial dominion which has
taken place on the North Pacific Slope within the past century. They
feel they are participants in a gigantic act of robbery. A lady whose
writings on any subject it is a delight to read, in the June number of
the Quarterly of the Oregon Historical Society, shows the origin of land
titles so far as the English race of men have made them. It would be an
instructive addition to her able paper if some one, well read on the
effects of guarded land titles in sufficient area to support family life
on each allotment, would describe their influences upon a community so
blessed.
Already enough has been said to indicate that prior to the visit of
Lewis and Clark, the native race was in a condition of decline; that in
a normal or average season a body of forty men, or less, found it
difficult to avoid starvation while moving from place to place in a
country estimated to contain forty thousand.
It may be admitted, because it is true though shameful, that the
licentiousness of trade had sown the seeds accelerating the decay of the
native race in Western Oregon, from the Columbia River to the Umpqua,
and from its mouth to Fort Hall. Within these bounds, but especially
near the chief lines of commerce, the missionary even had as much need
of a medical book as he had of his bible, as far as the people he had
come to guide in the way of life was concerned.
Abundant reason had Dr. John McLoughlin (that living copy of the great
heart of Bunyan’s matchless fancy) for giving welcome to the American
missionaries. He knew the value of a clean mind or soul in keeping a
clean and healthy body; though with a wise physican’s care he kept the
hospital at Vancouver open to any white sick, whom the resident doctor
the Hudson’s Bay Company maintained there recommended to it.
Doctor McLoughlin instituted the first hospital in Oregon for white
people here prior to the overland immigration of family life from the
Missouri border in 1843. The native race then were being removed rapidly
by a disease they themselves called the “cold sick,” which had raged
among them from 1832. Some of the symptoms indicated a malarial cause,
but quinine and other ague remedies had no effect upon the Indian sick.
Like the plague now raging in India, it was confined, seemingly,
entirely to the natives; also, almost entirely to the fishing villages
on the large rivers. I have long had a theory which I confess being
unable to give an intelligent reason for; that that plague had its
origin in eating filth. The natives themselves found that to thrust
their arrow points through the putrid liver of a deer or elk would
enable them to kill their enemies by a slight wound by blood poison. Is
it not, then, possible that eating putrid flesh, or fish—the garbage
cast up by the tide,—the spent salmon from the river shore, or those
wallowing in death throes on its surface, could not be done with
impunity?
In times of famine the natives, on the sea coast and on the rivers, did
eat such food; as the inland tribes, like the Klamaths, sometimes
sustained life by eating black moss, and the bark of certain trees.
These latter foods, however, were not putrid.
To support the theory that this cold sick plague, which began on the
Lower Columbia in 1832, and which kept the wail for the dead sounding
along its banks till 1844, may have originated in poisoned food, we have
the statement of Lewis and Clark’s journal that salmon pemmican which
they purchased in quantity at The Dalles moulded, and made the men sick,
in the damp and warm winter camp, near the sea. But, whatever the cause,
the effect was to depopulate, or cause the abandonment of once populous
villages.
In 1805, the central seat of the Multnomahs, near the east end of Wapato
(Sauvie’s) Island, had a population of “eight hundred souls” noted, “as
the remains of a large nation,” surrounded by kindred near-by tribes,
aggregating two thousand two hundred and sixty souls. In 1845 the site
was without human habitation. “The dead were there,” in large numbers,
swathed in cedar bark, and laid tier above tier on constructions of
cedar slabs about four inches thick, and often four feet wide,—causing
the observer to wonder how the native, with such agencies as he
possessed, could fell and split such timber. At this time so many as two
hundred natives, could not be seen on the banks of the Lower Columbia,
between the mouth of the Willamette and Clatsop Point, without special
effort at counting the few living in the scattered villages, often
separated by several sites once inhabited by large numbers apparently.
This was particularly noticed on the south bank, at Coffin Rock, and the
main shore, between that and Rainier. “The dead were there,” in
abundance, but no life but the eagle, the fish hawk, the black loon, and
the glistening head of the salmon-devouring seal, then very numerous.
There was a village of the Cowlitz tribe on the south bank, below where
Rainier now stands. The people looked poor, ill fed, and worse clothed.
The chief had come to us in the stream to invite us to camp near,
exhibiting a single fresh hen’s egg as inducement. We did so, and
visiting their camp had the first sight of life in a native fishing
village. Some of the children were nearly naked. Though it was
midwinter, the adult females, with one exception, were dressed in the
native petticoat, or kilt, as second garment, the other being a chemise
of what had been white cotton; one was engaged in the manufacture of
cedar bark strings used in the formation of the kind of kilt she wore.
The exception in the camp was a young woman of extraordinary personal
beauty, a daughter of the chief family of the Cathelametts. She had
recently been purchased, or espoused, by the heir-apparent of the
Cowlitz chief. She seemed to be indifferent to the life around her, and
shortly after was, presumably, the cause of tribal war. She was
permitted a few weeks later to pay a visit to her own tribe, accompanied
by an old woman of her husband’s. They both joined a party of the women
of her tribe in a wapato gathering expedition. The old duenna did not
return,—her body was found next day near the wapato beds, horribly
mutilated by a knife murder. The natural fruit of the Chinooks’ polity
of marriage. A short tribal war resulted.
In order to show the measure of manhood this system produced in a
different phase from that of Chiefs Kalata’s and Chenowith’s, I will
relate from memory a short visit at the lodge of the Cathelamett chief:
As one of a party of the employees of Hunt’s mill, making our way from
Astoria to the mill, we were approaching Cathelamett Point, the village
of the tribe, on the south shore. We were hailed from the shore and
found ourselves near the women and girls of the tribe, having a good
time gathering the newly risen stems of the common fern and preparing it
for food in earth ovens over heated rocks. They voluntarily told us they
had no prepared food, but pressed us to go on to their village, and
“Lemiyey” (old mother) (pronounced in a tone that conveyed love and
respect) would gladly entertain us. They made no mistake in this. The
old lady seemed proud of the opportunity to act as hostess, and without
ostentation put her help to work and gave us a bountiful meal of fresh
salmon and wapatos, and afterward put on what had evidently been often
used as a robe of state, and passed back and forward in illustration of
scenes she had been part of. Her son, apparently utterly oblivious to
the spirit of his mother’s eye and movement, continued repeating the
offers to sell to us his tribal claim to the lands lying between Tongue
Point and Cathelamett, that he had begun on our arrival. He was but a
youth, not so tall as his stately old mother appeared in her robe (of
what I afterwards concluded was badger skins, but may have been
mistaken), and he seemed mentally incapable of appreciating the
influences then forming around him and his people, which appropriated
their lands, while not one of them had the spirit to assert a right or
raise the question of justice against the action of the white race. This
was, with perhaps one exception, the cleanest, most self-respecting body
of natives left on the Lower Columbia in 1845, where Lewis and Clark
had, only forty years before, enumerated, by information from the
natives, thirteen thousand eight hundred and thirty below the cascades
and between that and the ocean. I do not believe that thirteen hundred
could be found within the same limits at the latter date. There was not
in all that distance, to my knowledge, a single man of the race who had
the intelligence and public spirit combined to appear before the
authorized agents of the United States ten years later and plead for the
rights of their people in the treaties made south of the Columbia. It is
questionable whether there was one in all the country north of Rogue
River who would have done so of his own motion, had not the humane
General Palmer and J. L. Parrish, as agents, advised the Indians to act.
It is not to be understood from this that all good and all beauty had
departed from the native life. When J. L. Parrish was in charge of
Methodist mission property, in 1845, a white man from Oregon City
appeared temporarily at Solomon S. Smith’s to solicit the hand of a
young woman named Oneiclam in marriage. The young woman civilly and
modestly declined the honor, saying such a marriage could not secure the
respect of either the man’s people or the woman’s, and would fail in
conferring happiness. She was clean enough and good enough to secure the
personal friendship and advice of Mrs. J. L. Parrish, which proved her a
rare exception to her class. Such marriages soon ceased after the
American home-builder assumed dominion over Oregon, the white mother
thus arriving being strongly against inter-racial contracts. Doubtless
the hopelessness of the struggle against race prejudice has borne
heavily on the heart of many a man and woman on both sides of the race
question, but the fight is over now and many a heart broken in the
struggle (as I think was that of my friend Joseph Hudson, last Chief of
the Calipooyas) is at rest. The responsibility for the red race is now
the white man’s burden. He carries it well, while already the light of a
brighter day than the red man of fifty years ago could forecast is
piercing the prejudices and hates of that time. The white man brought
the surveying compass, the book in which to record titles to land,
another for the record of marriages, still another to record the rights
of property to the results of wedlock. Schools are open to the native
race and every generous mind wishes it well. But, while our sympathies
may go out toward the ignorant or incompetent race in a conflict of
power, we should not fail to note the services to all races rendered by
the victor.
A glance at the changed conditions of life within the bounds of old
Oregon: Instead of forty thousand persons ill-fed, ill-clad, living from
hand to mouth, often bordering on famine, unable to support forty
interesting visitors passing through their country, we have now,
perhaps, fully one million, and the surplus of foodstuffs and clothing
material they send out to the markets of the world, would feed well four
millions. And, it is not extravagant to say that the territory to which
the Oregon trail was made fifty-eight years ago will some day be made to
support forty millions in comfort.
This paper, it will be observed, has dealt entirely with the native race
in Northwestern Oregon, because this was the field of the race contest.
The point to which the guiding minds of the white race looked as most
desirable. Jefferson said, and Benton repeated: “Plant thirty thousand
rifles at the mouth of the Columbia.” The first exploring party sent out
by the former selected as the most interesting region in which to make
excursions, the district now containing the first and second chosen
commercial centers,—Vancouver and Portland.
The native race amid whom these were planted were described in their
average manhood as mean, cowardly and thievish. Forty years later,
to this description might be added ignorant, superstitious, and
utterly without public spirit. The tribes east and south from this
district were, excepting those located at the great fishing centers
on the Columbia, less thievish, and much more bold and spirited in
self-defense.
To the recent and valuable historical description of those tribes,
including the natives in what is now Western Washington, I am indebted
to the life of Isaac Ingalls Stevens, by his son, Hazard Stevens, for
the number of natives west, as well as east, of the Cascades treated
with by Governor Stevens in 1855, just before the natural leaders of the
native race made their only united effort to stem the tide of inflow of
the white race.
{Total number found west of the Cascades 9,712
{Total number with whom treaties were made 8,597
{Total number east of the Cascade Mountains 12,000
{Total number treated with 8,900
{Total number found in Washington Territory 21,000
{Total number treated with 17,497
For Governor Stevens’ success in getting the eastern section of the
native race into treaty relations he was indebted solely to the
steadiness and good faith of the Nez Perces, the tribe which was always
conspicuous for its care of its womanhood.
JOHN MINTO.
-----
Footnote 1:
This custom of purchasing wives seems to have extended through many of
the interior tribes, and amongst some the privilege seems not to have
been confined to the men. It is related of a large war party of Sioux
who, near Independence Rock, in 1842, found Messrs. Hastings and
Lovejoy, and good humoredly gave them up to their fellow travelers,
taking a small present of tobacco as ransom; that, seeing a grown
daughter of one of the few white families of the Oregon immigrants,
they came repeatedly in increased numbers to look at her, until her
father was annoyed and indignant at their visits, and wrathful and
threatening when he learned that the brawny braves desired to purchase
the girl to give her as a present to their war chief. These grown up
children of nature went off like gentlemen when informed by one who
knew their customs that it was not a custom of white fathers, or the
white people, to sell their daughters. [Matthieu’s Reminiscences, Vol.
I, No. 1, Quarterly of the Ore. Hist. Soc.] In 1844, while Gilliam’s
train lay over one day at Fort Laramie, for trade purposes, in close
neighborhood to the tepees of a considerable camp of Sioux, three
female members of the tribe visited the camp of R. W. Morrison,
captain of one of the companies into which the train of eighty-four
wagons was divided. The captain had two assistants, and the Sioux
women seemed to conclude that Mrs. Morrison was blessed with three
husbands. Their proposition, made by signs by the two elder women, was
that the third, apparently a widow, though young, was willing to give
six horses for one of the younger men. It took Mrs. Morrison and the
choice of the young widow some time to convince her two friends that
they had made a mistake, and they departed with all outward signs of
sadness over the failure of their mission. These proposals to secure
connubial happiness by purchase were made, one four and the other two
years, before Francis Parkman, Jr., arrived at Laramie to join a Sioux
camp in order to get material for his Oregon and California Trail.
Footnote 2:
Late in 1844, Katata, Chief of the Clatsop Tribe, murdered his
youngest wife, then but recently espoused from a leading family of the
Chinooks. The latter made war upon him for the act. J. L. Parrish, in
charge of the Methodist mission at the time, refused Katata his hand
after learning of his deed. The brutal chief made an effort to be
revenged for what he deemed an insult, but failed in his attempt.
Footnote 3:
The kind of chivalry the system bred was illustrated by Chief
Chenowith, supposed instigator of the Cascades massacre in 1855, who
was tried and condemned for fighting with the Klickitats and Yakimas.
“He offered ten horses, two squaws, and a little something to every
tyee, of (for) his life, boasting that he was not afraid of death, but
was afraid of the grave in the ground.”—[L. W. Coe in _Native Son
Magazine_ for February, 1900. Mr. Coe acted as interpreter at the
execution].
Footnote 4:
In 1844 the Chief of the Wascopams died at The Dalles, and was
succeeded by his brother, who was somewhat under the influence of Rev.
Alvan Waller, of the Methodist Episcopal mission there. A young slave
boy was bound and secured in the dead house with the body of the dead
chief, in accordance with the customs of the tribe. Mr. Waller
continued pleading for the release of the boy for three days and got
the new chief’s consent to take the boy out of his horrible situation
on condition that it be done secretly and the boy taken away, so that
the people of the tribe would never see him. He was taken to Mr. J. L.
Parrish, at Clatsop mission, and remained a member of his family till,
in 1849, he went to the California gold mines.
Footnote 5:
The writer has observed this instinct manifested one season by wild
ducks. The oak trees in the vicinity of his residence south of Salem,
of which there were considerable areas, bore a heavy crop of acorns.
The wild ducks by some means found it out, and must have by some means
informed each other, as the flocks of them passing over my farm from a
large beaver dam pond, where they rested at night, to their feeding
grounds daily rapidly increased from day to day, and as rapidly
decreased when the supply of acorns was consumed.
Footnote 6:
The writer has had his home fifty-five years in the Willamette Valley,
and has never seen or known of a native to kill a deer. He has known
one spend a day hunting to kill five wood rats.
Footnote 7:
This extract illustrates the condition of womanhood. Lewis and Clark
write of the production of wapato in this locality as though it grew
nowhere else; but it grew—yet grows—on the margins of ponds and bayous
of most of the streams flowing into the Columbia west of the Cascades.