alpine pastures the future will draw butter and cheese, pasturing
migratory cattle there, when summer dries the scanty grass upon the
macadamized prairies of Whulge. It is well to remind ourselves
sometimes that the world is not wholly squatted over. The plateau soon
began to ebb toward the downward slope. Descent was like ascent, a way
shaggy and abrupt. Again the Boston hooihut intruded. My friends the
woodsmen had constructed an elaborate inclined plane of very knobby
corduroy. Klale sniffed at this novel road, and turned up his nose at
it. He was competent to protect that feature against all the perils of
stumble and fall on the trails he had been educated to travel, but
dreaded grinding it on the rough bark of this unaccustomed highway.
Slow-footed oxen, leaning inward and sustaining each other, like two
roysterers unsteady after wassail, might clumsily toil up such a road
as this, hauling up stout, white-cotton-roofed wagons, filled with the
babies and Lares of emigrants; but quick-footed ponies, descending and
carrying light loads of a wild Indian and an untamed blanketeer, chose
rather to whisk along the aboriginal paths.
As we came to the irregular terraces after the first pitch, and
scampered on gayly, I by and by heard a welcome whiz, and a dusky
grouse (_Tetrao obscurus_) lifted himself out of the trail into the
lower branches of a giant fir. I had lugged my double-barrel thus far,
a futile burden, unless when it served a minatory purpose among the
drunken Klalams. Now it became an animated machine, and uttered a
sharp exclamation of relief after long patient silence. Down came
tetrao,--down he came with satisfactory thud, signifying pounds of
something not pork for supper. We bagged him joyously and dashed on.
"Kopet," whispered Loolowcan turning, with a hushing gesture, "hiu
kullakullie nika nanitch;--halt, plenty birds I see." He was so eager
that from under his low brows and unkempt hair his dusky eyes glared
like the eyes of wild beast, studying his prey from a shadowy lair.
Dismounting, I stole forward with assassin intent, and birds, grouse,
five noble ones I saw, engaged in fattening their bodies for human
solace and support. I sent a shot among them. There was a flutter
among the choir,--one fluttered not. At the sound of my right barrel
one bird fell without rising; another rose and fell at a hint from the
sinister tube. The surviving trio were distracted by mortal terror.
They flew no farther than a dwarf tree hard by. I drew my revolver,
thinking that there might not be time to load, and fired in a hurry at
the lowermost.
"Hyas tamanoüs!" whispered Loolowcan, when no bird fell or flew,--"big
magic," it seemed to the superstitious youth. Often when sportsmen
miss, they claim that their gun is bewitched, and avail themselves of
the sure silver bullet.
A second ball, passing with keener aim through the barrel, attained
its mark. Grouse third shook off his mortal remains, and sped to
heaven. The two others, contrary to rule, for I had shot the lower,
fled, cowardly carrying their heavy bodies to die of cold, starvation,
or old age. "The good die first,"--ay, Wordsworth! among birds this is
verity; for the good are the fat, who, because of their avoirdupois,
lag in flight, or alight upon lower branches and are easiest shot.
Loolowcan bagged my three trophies and added them to the first.
Henceforth the thought of a grouse supper became a fixed idea with me.
I dwelt upon it with even a morbid appetite. I rehearsed, in prophetic
mood, the scene of plucking, the scene of roasting, that happy festal
scene of eating. So immersed did I become in gastronomic revery, that
I did not mind my lookout, as I dashed after Loolowcan, fearless and
agile cavalier. A thrust awoke me to a sense of passing objects, a
very fierce, lance-like thrust, full at my life. A wrecking snag of
harsh dead wood, that projected up in the trail, struck me, and tore
me half off my horse, leaving me jerked, scratched, disjointed, and
shuddering. Pachydermatous leggins of buckskin, at cost of their own
unity, had saved me from impalement. Some such warning is always
preparing for the careless.
I soon had an opportunity to propitiate Nemesis by a humane action. A
monstrous trunk lay across the trail. Loolowcan, reckless
steeplechaser, put his horse at it, full speed. Gubbins, instead of
going over neatly, or scrambling over cat-like, reared rampant and
shied back, volte face. I rode forward to see what fresh interference
of Tamanoüs was here,--nothing tamanoüs but an unexpected sorry
object of a horse. A wretched castaway, probably abandoned by the
exploring party, or astray from them, essaying to leap the tree, had
fallen back beneath the trunk and branches, and lay there entangled
and perfectly helpless. We struggled to release him. In vain. At last
a thought struck me. We seized the poor beast by his tail, fortunately
a tenacious member, and, heaving vigorously, towed him out of prison.
He tottered forlornly to his feet, looking about him like one risen
from the dead. "How now, Caudal?" said I, baptizing him by the name of
the part that saved his life; "canst thou follow toward fodder?" He
debated the question with himself awhile. Solitary confinement of
indefinite length, in a cramped posture, had given the poor skeleton
time to consider that safety from starvation is worth one effort more.
He found that there was still a modicum of life and its energy within
his baggy hide. My horses seemed to impart to him some of their
electricity, and he staggered on droopingly. Lucky Caudal, if life is
worth having, that on that day, of all days, I should have arrived to
rescue him. Strange deliverances for body and soul come to the dying.
Fate sends unlooked-for succor, when horses or men despair.
Luckily for Caudal, the weak-kneed and utterly dejected, Sowee's
prairie was near,--near was the prairie of Sowee, mighty hunter of
deer and elk, terror of bears. There at weird night Sowee's ghost was
often seen to stalk. Dyspeptics from feather-beds behold ghosts, and
are terrified, but nightwalkers are but bugbears to men who have
ridden from dawn to dusk of a long summer's day over an Indian trail
in the mountains. I felt no fear that any incubus in the shape of a
brassy-hued Indian chief would sit upon my breast that night, and
murder wholesome sleep.
Nightfall was tumbling down from the zenith before we reached camp.
The sweet glimmers of twilight were ousted from the forest, sternly
as mercy is thrust from a darkening heart. Night is really only
beautiful so far as it is not night,--that is, for its stars, which
are sources of resolute daylight in other spheres, and for its moon,
which is daylight's memory, realized, softened, and refined.
Night, however, had not drawn the pall of brief death over the world
so thick but that I could see enough to respect the taste of the late
Sowee. When he voted himself this farm, and became seized of it in the
days of unwritten agrarian laws, and before patents were in vogue, he
proved his intelligent right to suffrage and seizure. Here in
admirable quality were the three first requisites of a home in the
wilderness, water, wood, and grass. A musical rustle, as we galloped
through, proved the long grass. All around was the unshorn forest.
There were columnar firs making the Sowee house a hypæthral temple on
a grand scale.
There had been here a lodge. A few saplings of its framework still
stood, but Sowee had moved elsewhere not long ago. Wake siah
memloose,--not long dead was the builder, and viator might camp here
unquestioned.
Caudal had followed us in an inane, irresponsible way. Patiently now
he stood, apparently waiting for farther commands from his preservers.
We unpacked and unsaddled the other animals. They knew their business,
namely, to bolt instantly for their pasture. Then a busy uproar of
nipping and crunching was heard. Poor Caudal would not take the hint.
We were obliged to drive that bony estray with blows out to the
supper-field, where he stood aghast at the appetites of his new
comrades. Repose and good example, however, soon had their effect, and
eight equine jaws instead of six made play in the herbage.
"Alki mika mamook pire, pe nesika klatawah copa klap tsuk; now light
thou a fire, and we will go find water," said Loolowcan. I struck
fire,--fire smote tinder,--tinder sent the flame on, until a pyre from
the world's free wood-pile was kindled. This boon of fire,--what wonder
that men devised a Prometheus greatest of demigods as its discoverer?
Mortals, shrinking from the responsibility of a high destiny and
dreading to know how divine the Divine would have them, always imagine
an avatar of some one not lower than a half-god when a gift of great
price comes to the world. And fire is a very priceless and beautiful
boon,--not, as most know it, in imprisonment, barred with iron, or in
sooty chimneys, or in mad revolt of conflagration,--but as it grows in
a flashing pyramid out in camp in the free woods, with eager air
hurrying in on every side to feed its glory. In the gloom I strike
metal of steel against metallic flint. From this union a child is born.
I receive the young spark tenderly in warm "tipsoo," in a soft woolly
nest of bark or grass tinder. Swaddled in this he thrives. He smiles;
he chuckles; he laughs; he dances about, does my agile nursling. He
will soon wear out his first infantile garb, so I cover him up in
shelter. I feed him with digestible viands, according to his years. I
give him presently stouter fare, and offer exhilarating morsels of
fatness. All these the hearty youth assimilates, and grows healthily.
And now I educate him to manliness, training him on great joints,
shoulders, and marrowy portions. He becomes erelong a power and a
friend able to requite me generously for my care. He aids me in
preparing my feast, and we feast together. Afterward we talk,--Flame
and I,--we think together strong and passionate thoughts of purpose and
achievement. These emotions of manhood die away, and we share pensive
memories of happiness missed, or disdained, or feebly grasped and torn
away; regrets cover these like embers, and slowly over dead fieriness
comes a robe of ashy gray.
Fire in the forest is light, heat, and cheer. When ours was nurtured
to the self-sustaining point, we searched to find where the sage Sowee
kept his potables. Carefully covered up in sedges was a slender supply
of water, worth concealing from vulgar dabblers. Its diamond drops
were hidden away so thoroughly that we must mine for them by
torchlight. I held a flaring torch, while Loolowcan lay in wait for
the trickle, and captured it in a tin pot. How wild he looked, that
youth so frowzy by daylight, as, stooping under the tall sedges, he
clutched those priceless sparkles.
Upon the _carte du jour_ at Restaurant Sowee was written Grouse. "How
shall we have them?" said I, cook and convive, to Loolowcan, marmiton
and convive. "One of these cocks of the mountain shall be fried, since
gridiron is not," said I to myself, after meditation. "Two shall be
spitted, and roasted; and, as Azrael may not want us before breakfast
to-morrow, the fourth shall go on the _carte de dejeuner_."
"O Pork! what a creature thou art!" continued I, in monologue, cutting
neat slices of that viand with my bowie-knife, and laying them
fraternally, three in a bed, in the frying-pan. "Blessed be Moses! who
forbade thee to the Jews, whereby we, of freer dispensations, heirs of
all the ages, inherit also pigs more numerous and bacon cheaper. O
Pork! what could campaigners do without thy fatness, thy leanness, thy
saltness, thy portableness?"
Here Loolowcan presented me the three birds plucked featherless as
Plato's man. The two roasters we planted carefully on spits before a
sultry spot of the fire. From a horizontal stick, supported on forked
stakes, we suspended by a twig over each roaster an automatic baster,
an inverted cone of pork, ordained to yield its spicy juices to the
wooing flame, and drip bedewing on each bosom beneath. The roasters
ripened deliberately, while keen and quick fire told upon the fryer,
the first course of our feast. Meanwhile I brewed a pot of tea,
blessing Confucius for that restorative weed, as I had blessed Moses
for his abstinence from porkers.
Need I say that the grouse was admirable, that everything was
delicious, and the Confucian weed first chop? Even a scouse of mouldy
biscuit met the approval of Loolowcan. Feasts cooked under the
greenwood tree, and eaten by their cooks after a triumphant day of
progress, are sweeter than the conventional banquets of languid
Christendom. After we had paid our duty to the brisk fryer and the
rotund roaster grouse, nothing remained but bones to propitiate Sowee,
should he find short commons in Elysium, and wander back to his lodge,
seeking what he might devour.
All along the journey I had been quietly probing the nature of
Loolowcan, my most intimate associate thus far among the unalloyed
copper-skins. Chinook jargon was indeed but a blunt probe, yet perhaps
delicate enough to follow up such rough bits of conglomerate as served
him for ideas. An inductive philosopher, tracing the laws of
developing human thought _in corpore viti_ of a frowzy savage, finds
his work simple,--the nuggets are on the surface. Those tough pebbles
known to some metaphysicians as innate ideas, can be studied in
Loolowcan in their process of formation out of instincts.
Number one is the prize number in Loolowcan's lottery of life. He
thinks of that number; he dreams of it alone. When he lies down to
sleep, he plots what he will do in the morning with his prize and his
possession; when he wakes, he at once proceeds to execute his plots.
Loolowcan knows that there are powers out of himself; rights out of
himself he does not comprehend, or even conceive. I have thus far been
very indulgent to him, and treated him republicanly, mindful of the
heavy mesne profits for the occupation of a continent, and the
uncounted arrears of blood-money owed by my race to his; yet I find
no trace of gratitude in my analysis of his character. He seems to be
composed, selfishness, five hundred parts;--_nil admirari_ coolness,
five hundred parts;--a well-balanced character, and perhaps one not
likely to excite enthusiasm in others. I am a steward to him; I purvey
him also a horse; when we reach the Dalles, I am to pay him for his
services;--but he is bound to me by no tie of comradery. He has
caution more highly developed than any quadruped I have met, and will
not offend me lest I should resign my stewardship, retract Gubbins,
refuse payment, discharge my guide, and fight through the woods, where
he sees I am no stranger, alone. He certainly merits a "teapot" for
his ability in guidance. He has memory and observation unerring; not
once in all our intricate journey have I found him at fault in any
fact of space or time. He knows "each lane and every ally green" here,
accurately as Comus knew his "wild wood."
Moral conceptions exist only in a very limited degree for this type of
his race. Of God he knows somewhat less than the theologians; that is,
he is in the primary condition of uninquisitive ignorance, not in the
secondary, of inquisitive muddle. He has the advantage of no elaborate
system of human inventions to unlearn. He has no distinct fetichism.
None of the North American Indians have, in the accurate sense of the
term; their nomad life and tough struggle with instructive Nature in
her roughness save them from such elaborate fetichism as may exist in
more indolent climes and countries.
Loolowcan has his tamanoüs. It is Talipus, the Wolf, a "hyas skookoom
tamanoüs, a very mighty demon," he informs me. He does not worship it;
that would interfere with his devotions to his real deity, Number One.
It, in return, does him little service. If he met Talipus, object of
his superstition, on a fair morning, he would think it a good omen;
if on a sulky morning, he might be somewhat depressed, but would not
on that account turn back, as a Roman brave would have done on meeting
the matinal wolf. In fact, he keeps Talipus, his tamanoüs, as a kind
of ideal hobby, very much as a savage civilized man entertains a pet
bulldog or a tame bear, a link between himself and the rude, dangerous
forces of nature. Loolowcan has either chosen his protector according
to the law of likeness, or, choosing it by chance, has become
assimilated to its characteristics. A wolfish youth is the _protégé_
of Talipus,--an unfaithful, sinister, cannibal-looking son of a
horse-thief. Wolfish likewise is his appetite; when he asks me for
more dinner, and this without stint or decorum he does, he glares as
if, grouse failing, pork and hard-tack gone, he could call to Talipus
to send in a pack of wolves incarnate, and pounce with them upon me. A
pleasant companion this for lamb-like me to lie down beside in the den
of the late Sowee. Yet I do presently, after supper and a pipe, and a
little jargoning in Chinook with my Wolf, roll into my blankets, and
sleep vigorously, lulled by the gratifying noise of my graminivorous
horses cramming themselves with material for leagues of lope
to-morrow.
No shade of Sowee came to my slumbers with warning against the wolf in
guise of a Klickatat brave. I had no ghostly incubus to shake off, but
sprang up recreate in body and soul. Life is vivid when it thus
awakes. To be is to do.
And to-day much is to be done. Long leagues away, beyond a gorge of
difficulty, is the open rolling hill country, and again far beyond are
the lodges of the people of Owhhigh. "To-day," said Loolowcan, "we
must go copa nika ilihee, to my home, to Weenas."
Forlorn Caudal is hardly yet a frisky quadruped. Yet he is of better
cheer, perhaps up to the family-nag degree of vivacity. As to the
others, they have waxed fat, and kick. Klale, the Humorous, kicks
playfully, elongating in preparatory gymnastics. Gubbins, the average
horse, kicks calmly at his saddler, merely as a protest. Antipodes,
the spiteful Blunderer, kicks in a revolutionary manner, rolls under
his pack-saddle, and will not budge without maltreatment. Ill-educated
Antipodes views mankind only as excoriators of his back, and general
flagellants. Klickitats kept him raw in flesh and temper; under me his
physical condition improves; his character is not yet affected.
Before sunrise we quitted the house of Sowee.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Captain William Henry McNeill and Alexander Caulfield Anderson,
Hudson's Bay Company men, then at Nisqually House. Captain McNeill was
master of the famous old steamer _Beaver_. Mr. Anderson was in charge
of Nisqually House. Both men were honored by having their names given
to islands in Puget Sound.
[2] Pierre Charles, French Canadian, had been an employee of the
Hudson's Bay Company.
[3] Simon Plomondon was an employee of the Hudson's Bay Company, who
retired and settled in the Cowlitz Valley.
[4] Probably the Stone Creek of present usage.
[5] Carbon River.
[6] Meaning up the Carbon River and its branch called South Prairie
Creek.
[7] Chehalis River.
[8] White River.
[9] White River.
[10] Lieutenant Richard Arnold, in Pacific Railway Reports, Volume
XII, Part I, page 191, says: "Near the junction of Whitewater and
Green rivers there is a remarkable peak called La Tête, from a large
rock on its slope resembling the head and neck of a man. This is an
important point, as it forms the gate of the mountains on the west."
Modern maps shift the "water" part of the names. They are now White
and Greenwater rivers.
[11] White and Greenwater rivers.
[12] This is an error and should read 121° 25' W. as Naches Pass is
known to be 121° 21' and Lieutenant Johnson's "Little Prairie" was a
little west of the Pass.
[13] Greenwater branch of White River.
[14] Naches River.
[15] Wenatchee River.
[16] Mount Adams. The two peaks were frequently confused in early
writings.
[Illustration: GENERAL AUGUST VALENTINE KAUTZ.
United States Army.]
V. FIRST ATTEMPTED ASCENT, 1857
BY LIEUTENANT A. V. KAUTZ, U.S.A.
August Valentine Kautz was born at Ispringen, Baden, Germany,
on January 5, 1828. In that same year his parents came to
America. On attaining manhood the son entered the army and
served as a private soldier in the Mexican War. At its
conclusion he was appointed to the Military Academy at West
Point. Graduating in 1852, he was assigned to the Fourth
Infantry and soon found himself in the Pacific Northwest.
After going through the Indian wars here he achieved a
brilliant record in the Civil War. Continuing in the army, he
reached the rank of brigadier-general and was for a time in
command of the Department of the Columbia. He died at Seattle
on September 4, 1895.
It was while, as a lieutenant, he was stationed at Fort
Steilacoom that he attempted to ascend Mount Rainier. His
account of the trip was published in the Overland Monthly,
May, 1875. It is here republished by permission of the
editor. While the ascent was claimed to be complete the
climber says there was still higher land above him, and it is
now difficult to fix the exact altitude attained.
Professor I. C. Russell declares that Professor George
Davidson made a statement before the California Academy of
Sciences, on March 6, 1871, to the effect that when
Lieutenant Kautz "attempted the ascent of Mount Rainier in
1857" he found his way barred by a great glacier. From this,
says Professor Russell, it "seems that he first reported the
existence of living glaciers in the United States." (See:
Israel C. Russell: Glaciers of North America; Boston, Ginn &
Company, 1897, p. 62). The portrait of General Kautz was
furnished by his daughter, Mrs. Navana Kautz Simpson, of
Cincinnati, Ohio.
In the summer of 1857 I was stationed at Fort Steilacoom, Washington
Territory. This post was located near the village of Steilacoom, on
the waters of Puget Sound. The post and the village took their names
from a little stream near by, which is the outlet of a number of
small lakes and ponds emptying into the sound. Quite a family of
Indians made their permanent home in the vicinity of this creek in
former years, and were known as "_Steilacoom Tillicum_." According to
the Indian pronunciation of the name it should have been spelled
"Steelacoom," dwelling long on the first syllable.
I was at that time a first-lieutenant, young, and fond of visiting
unexplored sections of the country, and possessed of a very prevailing
passion for going to the tops of high places. My quarters fronted
Mount Rainier, which is about sixty miles nearly east of Fort
Steilacoom in an air line. On a clear day it does not look more than
ten miles off, and looms up against the eastern sky white as the snow
with which it is covered, with a perfectly pyramidal outline, except
at the top, which is slightly rounded and broken. It is a grand and
inspiring view, and I had expressed so often my determination to make
the ascent, without doing it, that my fellow-officers finally became
incredulous, and gave to all improbable and doubtful events a date of
occurrence when I should ascend Mount Rainier.
My resolution, however, took shape and form about the first of July.
Nearly all the officers had been very free to volunteer to go with me
as long as they felt certain I was not going; but when I was ready to
go, I should have been compelled to go alone but for the doctor, who
was on a visit to the post from Fort Bellingham.
I made preparations after the best authorities I could find, from
reading accounts of the ascent of Mont Blanc and other snow mountains.
We made for each member of the party an _alpenstock_ of dry ash with
an iron point. We sewed upon our shoes an extra sole, through which
were first driven four-penny nails with the points broken off and the
heads inside. We took with us a rope about fifty feet long, a hatchet,
a thermometer, plenty of hard biscuit, and dried beef such as the
Indians prepare.
Information relating to the mountain was exceedingly meagre; no white
man had ever been near it, and Indians were very superstitious and
afraid of it. The southern slope seemed the least abrupt, and in that
direction I proposed to reach the mountain; but whether to keep the
high ground, or follow some stream to its source, was a question.
Leshi, the chief of the Nesquallies, was at that time in the
guard-house, awaiting his execution, and as I had greatly interested
myself to save him from his fate, he volunteered the information that
the valley of the Nesqually River was the best approach after getting
above the falls. He had some hope that I would take him as a guide;
but finding that out of the question he suggested Wah-pow-e-ty,[17] an
old Indian of the Nesqually tribe, as knowing more about the Nesqually
than any other of his people.