CONTENTdm
British Columbia Historical Books Collection
Laut, Agnes C., 1871-1936
"A popular history of early western exploration written in eight chapters: Robert Gray on the Columbia.- Vancouver.- Alexander Mackenzie.- John Jewitt.- Lewis and Clark.- The Tonquin.- Astoria.- Portland, Oregon. Repreinted in 1932 in "McBride's dollar travel series". -- Strathern, G. M., & Edwards, M. H. (1970). Navigations, traffiques & discoveries, 1774-1848: A guide to publications relating to the area now British Columbia. Victoria, BC: University of Victoria, p. 167.
363 pages : frontispiece (photograph) ; illustrations, maps, photographs ; 22 cm
application/pdf
THE LIBRARY THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA The F. W. Howay and R. L. Reid Collection of Canadiana OJ mimmmm THE CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE THE CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE By AGNES C. LAUT author OF "Through Our Unknown Southwest" "The Enchanted Trails of Glacier Park" etc., etc. ROBERT M. McBRIDE & COMPANY NEW YORK 1927 COPYRIGHT, I927i BY ROBERT M. MCBRIDE & COMPANY First Published, October, 1927 THE CONQUEST OP OUR WESTERN EMPIRE PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OP AMERICA CONTENTS PAGH FOREWORD ii PART I THE LODESTAR OF THE WESTERN SEA, THE FIRST SHIP TO CARRY THE STARS AND STRIPES AROUND THE WORLD, 1787-1792 . 21 II VANCOUVER'S RACE ROUND THE SEVEN SEAS TO THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST, 1789-1794 . 56 III THE RACE OVERLAND TO THE PACIFIC, ALEX ANDER MACKENZIE, 1789-1793 . . |j . 78 IV JEWITT AND THE SHIP BOSTON ON THE PACIFIC COAST, 1803-1806 123 V LAST RACE OVERLAND FOR THE PACIFIC, LEWIS AND CLARK, 1803-1806 . . . .182 VI ASTOR TAKES UP THE PROCESSION TO THE WESTERN EMPIRE. THE TONQUIN TO THE PACIFIC, 1810-1811 253 VII THE HIGHLAND CHIEFS OF ASTORIA FOUND THE INLAND EMPIRE, 1811-1818 . . . . 278 VIII WHERE OLD AND NEW MEET IN MODERN PORTLAND, 1821-1846 327 ILLUSTRATIONS The Lodestar of the Western Sea, Captain Robert Gray ....... Frontispiece FACING PAGE Callicum and Maquinna, Chiefs of the Principal Nootka Sound Tribes ., . . .. . . 14 Maquinna ,.,...,. 15 Tatooch, the Killer . . . . . . . 15 The Only Remaining Indian Sepulcher on Mennaloose Island 15 The Theatre of Exploration and Discovery Along the West Coast of America 23 Captain Robert Gray, Discoverer of the Columbia River 30 The Cascades of the Columbia 31 The Lower Reaches of the Columbia River from Longview to Astoria . . . . .62 The Celebration in Honor of the Coming of Age of the Daughter of Chief Maquinna .... 63 The Northwest America, the First Vessel Built on the Pacific, Launched in Nootka Sound . . ... . 63 The Columbia River Highway 94 The Hudson's Bay Post at Colville, Washington . . 95 Fort Walla Walla WTiere the WTiitman Massacre Took Place HO After the Early Explorers Had Blazed the Trail to the Western Sea 110 [ vii ] ILLUSTRATIONS FACING PAGE Heavy Timber Forests of This Type Supplied the Early Explorers and Settlers with Lumber in Captain John Meares, the Famous Buccaneer . . 158 The Astor Monument at the Mouth of the Columbia River 159 The Western Goal of the Lewis and Clark Expedition 183 Chief George Mennenick ...... 206 The Conflux of the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers . 207 A Winter View of Fort Clatsop, Lewis' and Clark's Outpost on the Columbia . . . . .222 The Valley of the Wenatchee River . . . .223 John Jacob Astor 254 Astoria, the Oldest American Settlement in the Columbia Valley 255 The Modern City of Astoria 270 A Modern Timber Topper Beheading One of the Great Trees of the Northwest 271 The Great Inland Empire of the Northwest 286 Fort Okanogan, the First Settlement of the Inland Empire 287 Dr. John McLoughlin, "The White Eagle" . . 302 The Home of Dr. John McLoughlin at Oregon City . 303 Early Outposts of the Inland Empire . 313 Fort Vancouver, the Trading Post Founded by John McLoughlin 318 A Mission Outpost in the Wilderness . .318 Spokane, Capital of a Great Agricultural Empire 319 The White Summit of Mount Hood Towering Above Portland 334 The Beautiful San Juan Islands of Puget Sound . . 335 A Birdseye View of Seattle ...... 350 Mount Rainier Dominates the Puget Sound Area 351 [viii] THE CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE THE CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE FOREWORD THE next time you are passing through the Grand Central Terminal of New York City, pause and look up at the Dome! What do you see? Mystic figures of stars and mythical prehistoric legendary monsters. What do they portray? The Sun-dial of the Universe—the ancient Zodiac: only where our modern watches have twelve numbers marking the hours, the Zodiac has scrolled pictures of Cancer the Crab and Capricorn the Goat and Aquarius the Water Bearer round in its circuit of twelve, marking, not hours of the day and night, but the processional of the years and the centuries from the time "the Morning Stars sang together" and "the Sons of Gods married the Daughters of Men." What did architect and artist mean by placing that design above one of the greatest transportation centers in the world? Did they mean to imply that we, too, are part of the Grand Processional of the human race, that the clock of time may strike for us also, to enter new wonder lands of endeavor and realization? Certainly that magnificent mural was not accidental. CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE Some day when your train is late or you are early, instead of watching the ant-hill of millions of travelers racing back and forward through the gates, try to figure out what that drawing means. Whence came the Zodiac, the Sun-dial of the Universe? From the Far East— the Cradle of the Race—legend says from Enoch or Noah, when they buried certain tablets of revelation before the Flood—pre-Atlantean, if you like to put it that way, or pre-Glacial, if you prefer another way. At any rate, there is not a race in the known world without some symbol of the Zodiac, giving hints of racial pasts lost to history, giving still more potent hints of what may be before us far down the future corridors of time. The Zodiac sends the mind harking back to strange racial memories, and those memories come in two streams—from the East west and from the West east. We all know of the great trek westward that began with Abraham at Ur on the Persian Gulf and ended with the steel rail spanning the New World from Atlantic to Pacific. But long before Abraham began his great migration from the Persian Gulf northwestward to the Mediterranean, another stranger, wilder migration had taken place from Asia across the Pacific to the west coast of America. When? That question cannot be answered. The date is unknown. How? Perhaps by scudding in little boats from land point to land point, with the Aleutian Islands for stepping stones. Perhaps by the wreckage of Mongolian sailor folk drifting across the Pacific to the west coast of America. Perhaps by the link of an ancient continent called Lemuria between the South Sea Islands and the tropical zones of what is now known as Spanish America. These are shadowy facts but they seem to prove each guess has the substance of some truth. [12] FOREWORD The physical similarity between the Mongolian and the Indian is strong, though not convincing. Copper color, stringy hair, high cheek-bones—yes. Stature, profile, figure, hands and feet—no. We do know there are rock inscriptions of an ancient civilization in the South Sea Islands; and there are rock inscriptions of an ancient civilization in Western Mexico, Chile and Peru. Perhaps all three explanations—Aleutian Islands as a causeway between Asia and America, chance wreckage among sailor folk of Asia, an ancient continent linking the South Sea Islands to the American tropics—may give the key to the secret of whence came the first Indian peoples of the Pacific Northwest. Certainly the tribes of the Pacific varied almost as greatly among themselves as did the inhabitants of the two continents. The Aleuts were wild hunters of the tempestuous Northern Sea but never, as far as we know, were they cannibals; nor, before antagonized and wronged, were they man-hunters. Of civilization as we know it, they had not a trace. They were stone-age men. But come south a zone to the Indians from Sitka to Northern California. Here we encounter an entirely different and inferior type—fish eaters but cannibals, man- hunters and man-killers and raiders for slaves, corpulent, squat, indolent, treacherous, without a trace of civilization. Come south to the zone of tropical Latin America— here is the highest type of Indian known, a worker in metals, a race with pictographs and sign language on stones, leaving relics of civilizations that are the enigma of history to-day; and then as if to confute these differences comes the testimony of scholars in the Vatican that in spite of the Aleuts being stone-age savages and the [13] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE ancient Peruvians and Chileans being metal workers—the roots of both languages are the same. It was when the Mongolian or Indian migration worked eastward across the American plains to the Atlantic seaboard, and the European migration worked westward across the Atlantic and up the river system of the Atlantic to the river system of the Pacific, that stone age and modern age clashed in the "Bloody Ground" of the Frontier. And yet there were strange, almost fantastic resemblances or parallels between these two types of races in clash for final ascendancy. Abraham trekked from Persian Gulf to Mediterranean Sea between 1800 and 2000 b.c. Balboa and Drake and Bering and Cook trekked from Atlantic to Pacific—Bering and Cook reaching their objective between 1741 and 1800 Aj). Both ancient migration and modern sea adventure realized their supreme goals in their search for facts behind obviously faulty but universally accepted myths. Both movements demanded and exacted sacrifice of life in the quest of truth. "Yes, worship the Sun and the Moon," Abraham says in old Jewish legends. "My father made his living sculpturing old idols of such gods; but I want to know who silvered the stars? Who incarnadined the sun? That God do I worship"; and, driven out by persecution, he began the long trek that ended only on our own Pacific shores. What were Balboa and Drake and Bering and Cook, seeking? A short passageway between East and West that did not exist. We are apt to regard the sons of Jacob as Divine Torch-bearers in their ruthless raids on the lawless bandits of Palestine or Canaan. Compared to the people [14] CALLICUM AND MAQUINNA, CHIEFS OF THE PRINCIPAL NOOTKA SOUND TRIBES TATOOCH, THE KILLER THE ONLY REMAINING INDIAN SEPULCHER ON MENNALOOSE ISLAND FOREWORD they conquered, they were enlightened; but in method of war, not far different from our North American Indian raiders. What the Jews were really seeking in their foraging across from the Euphrates to Egypt was free pasturage for their wealth of flocks. Our own early fur traders who blazed the trail to the Pacific we call lawless adventurers—heroes some of them, arrant scoundrels others; but what lured the trail makers was profit from the little beaver of inland waters for the canoe men, and from the sea otter for keels that plowed a silver chart around the world. For utterly unselfish leadership, Moses and Aaron stand first in Old World annals, guiding a rabble for forty years through a wilderness, and near as we can trace their wanderings covered 2,000 miles; and Moses died of his task, broken-hearted, on Nebo—mountain of wisdom. For utterly unselfish leadership, Lewis and Clark, inspired by Jefferson, stand first in modern records; but their traverse covered almost 8,000 miles; and Lewis we now know also died, if not of a broken heart, of a mind broken in his tremendous task; and in his wanderings he encountered Indians whose god of wisdom was also Nebo or Nepo. What do the King David Wars stand for in ancient history? Efforts to weld lawless raiding clans into a nation. And for what do our Indian Wars stand in modern history? The same. In the history of the ancient racial movement we have the prophets and martyrs—Isaiah sawn asunder, Jeremiah stoned to death, Ezekiel exiled. Have we their counterparts in our racial movements in America? Have we? Have you read the history of the first missionaries and the first pioneers to the Pacific? It is acknowledged [IS] 1 CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE in the missionary board reports that in spite of baptisms and professions, of sincere converts among the Indians not one was made in twenty years. The mission boards were about to suppress the Pacific missions when the terrible massacres began; but these massacres were the torch that wakened the country to flame and brought the pioneers to lay the foundations for a new Pacific Empire. Do you wonder that the Pacific Empire to-day regards its past as a sacred epic and derides the cowboy-miner rough-stuff era as the travesty of a deeper racial movement that is part of the great processional portrayed in the Zodiac of the centuries—a transportation that now spans the world? The architect and the artist who designed these murals knew what they were doing, though few of us, hurrying daily beneath that dome, pause to look up, or looking up, realize what our eyes see. Still more remarkable, though neither startling nor fantastic, is the parallel between the wild races subdued by an Abraham or a Jacob or a Moses or a David, and the wild races subdued by our own trail blazers to the Pacific. You may believe with Plato that an Atlantis once spanned the sea between Europe and America, or you may disbelieve it, though hydrographic surveys have found a submerged marine continent in the Atlantic; and the pictographs in the South Sea Islands suggest a Le- muria in the Pacific—but the parallels between the wild Arabs of the sandy Asiatic deserts and the native North American Indians from Mexico to the Athabasca, or from the Lakes to the Pacific, are too marked to be ignored. When Catlin first noted these similarities in the i83o's, and Schoolcraft began to narrate their legends, and Gen- [16] «* FOREWORD eral Miles in his recollections suggested the same inferences^—a modern world smiled. Catlin, they said, was a wild enthusiast; Schoolcraft, wed to an Indian chief's daughter, was more poetic than true. The modern world no longer scoffs nor smiles. Our North American Indians may be descendants of pre-Atlanteans, or they may not; but no one now denies they are of Asiatic origin and divided from their Nordic successors by an impassable gulf that has never been spanned and can only be crossed by gradual absorption. They believed in one Supreme God symbolized by the Sun, ruling by the Moon and the Stars. They worshiped Sun, Moon and Stars. They sacrificed slaves to their deities; and if slaves were unavailing to propitiate these deities, then their own dearest possessions—sons and daughters. These were all characteristics of early Hebrew culture. They believed winds, streams, woods, peopled by a multitude of spirits, who could help or hurt mankind. They were inclined to make offerings to the evil spirits on the principle that the good spirits would not harm them in any case, and the evil demons might be appeased. They regarded blood as the principle of life and drank the blood of brave foes to acquire the best qualities of those foes, as the Canaanites in Palestine did. They regarded the Great God as invisible behind the Sun and held the belief that He became manifest to men in a Star Son born of a flawless mother, and told of how that Son came to earth to teach men the path to Heaven. They believed in immortality. To them, the Thunder God was the War God with the lightning for his arrows, as David sings in the Psalms. The serpent was a sacred emblem—sinister as an enemy but a wise guide to water pools if one drew his fangs and made him servant, not [17] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE master. They had legends of the Fall of Man from the greed of a woman snatching at forbidden fruit; but where the Asiatics called the fruit a Tree of Life, the Indians called it a Grape Vine reaching from the heavens to the earth. The Indians had similar legends of a great Flood from which the Asiatics escaped in an ark, the Indians ii> a canoe—which science may interpret as an era of rain following the recession of the Glacial Ages. The North American Indian had pictographs of prehistoric monsters, which we now dimly recognize as the giant life of the marine ages. They believed in cycles of seven, and do to this day. The Asiatic's week of seven days, year of seven jubilees and seven times seven have their counterparts in the Indians' account of drought in periods of seven years, and animal life—such as the rabbit—being swept off by pestilence every seven years; which, by the way, is a fact in the animal life of the North. North American Indian and Arab were by vocation man- hunters, man-killers, animal-hunters, animal-killers. To this there are only two exceptions in North America— the Mandans on the Missouri and the Aztecs of the Southwest—sedentary tribes who had to become man- killers to defend themselves from extinction; and Indian and Arab present the inexplicable problem of sparse races kept down in population by war living in lands of plenty, where they could have existed in prosperity and peace, but preferring to live by the hazards of perpetual war and raid. Indian and Arab used the same types of boats: the dugout for rough water, the canoe for inland stream, or the coracle—the skin boat round as a tub, fastened to willow frame and propelled by hand or pole. Indian and Arab expressed their emotions in music, song, [18] -» FOREWORD the symbolic dance, pictographs, personal decorations. Both practiced polygamy and slavery for the selfsame reason—to increase the tribes' fighters and to take care of the superfluous women when raid killed off the warriors. In both, the aged man was counselor and priest, but never leader; and in both, the leader was the greatest killer. Of government and law, Arab and Indian knew nothing. Each was a law to himself and did what he pleased so long as his right arm could defend himself. Arab and Indian regarded hospitality as sacred to the guest under tent roof and both held the blood feud of vengeance as equally sacred unless wiped out by gift; and few in either race ever rose above the dead level of a purely animal existence of perpetual prey by the strong on the weak. We may deplore the passing of such a free and picturesque era in human history; but pass it had to because that era was doomed in the evolution to a higher humanity. We have a foolish way of saying human history goes round in endless cycles. It does; but the cycles are circles that spiral, and the race that will not or cannot go up that spiral goes down and out in the Progress of Time, or the Grand Processional pictured in the Zodiac. The fact that transportation has hastened the Grand Processional—accomplishing in America during a century what took four thousand years in Asia—was probably the motive that inspired architect and artist to reproduce the Zodiac in the dome of the Grand Central Terminal. Into this era, then, of the stone age came the pathfinders. Gain, trade, sea otter, beaver, were the lure; but gain was not the end. What is the end? [19] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE Who can tell? Perhaps the Persian Prophet's Dream of God as sung by Watson, the Canadian poet— "Thus spake El Bab: There cometh one in might And splendor of the Universal Light, Shall show the beauty of a brighter day To every soul that has the inner sight.' "Then strange new light comes flaming up the sea— A sense of being strong and greatly free; And through the clear apocalyptic air, We hear new songs of ages yet to be. "A heavenly presence o'er the silence broods; And sweeps away our soul-depressing moods; Then all reality to sight appears, And earth the sense of earth and time eludes. "A shout breaks o'er the mountains And up the sun's bright way; The dream of God is rising To fullness in our day. "Behold His herald cometh; Let not our voices cease To tell the gentle story Of universal peace." [20] PART I: The Lodestar of the Western Sea. The First Ship to Carry the Stars and Stripes Around the World. 1787-1792. ROMANCE, adventure, that sense of wonder which imparted the rosy light seen on neither land nor sea but gleaming in men's souls, leading on to engulfing ruin or new vistas—all these have passed in our modern world. So sighs the cynic, cooped up in his own imprisoned soul. So regrets the business drudge, making a marker of time to pawn his happiness for crust of bread or fortune won too late for zest of life. So say all the prisoners of the walled towns and the pens dipped in the gall of unrealized hopes. Come to the shores of the Pacific, on that high point called Coxcomb Hill above the outlet of the Columbia. Magellan may have thought the Pacific a peaceful sea when he emerged from waves smoking with spray and frost, which had furred the sails and ropes, and then raced the roaring winds that tossed the chopped-off crest like sea demon's flying hair, and staggered drunkenly with spars splintered to matches out on the painted hyaline of glassy waters; but no peaceful sea greeted the sea rovers in this world of waters, from Drake's keel, which first plowed round the world for England, to Gray's ship, first belting the chartless main for the United States. Whether Coxcomb Hill be named from the blood-red flower that decks Alpine meadows, or from some vain [21] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE Indian gallant, is not known. The great Astor monolith points to the sky toward that lodestar which had guided the rovers over chartless seas. On the spiral panels is told in fresco of imperishable stone the story of the finding of that Western Sea. As in tracing the peopling of the New World by the Indians you must follow the two great treks—white men from the East westward, Asiatic wandering savages from the West eastward, so now to understand the final clash between savagery and civilization that created a Pacific Empire on the northwest coast of America, you must again follow two converging tides of Destiny. One is European diplomacy, playing a game of cunning on a great international checkerboard. The other is the game of sea adventure pure and simple, lured by the hope of personal gain through trade in furs. When Balboa strode pot-valiantly through the malarial, sweating thickets of Panama tropics and, reaching a height of land, glimpsed the Pacific or South Sea—and in resounding language claimed everything in sight to the zenith of Heaven for Spain—began the European game of diplomacy for exclusive possession of the Pacific Coast. The Pope confirmed the claim. That trod on England's toes. Spain was Catholic. England was Protestant. England and Spain were about to grapple in the war for supremacy on the seas. It was a war inspired by religious prejudice, international hate, plot and counter-plot to displace Queen Elizabeth from the English throne. Devon Coast was the great school for the daring English seamen, who scoured the ocean main "to singe the beard" of the King of Spain. England called these seamen patriots. Spain called them pirates. Among them was one, the greatest navigator of the fifteenth and sixteenth [22] MT HOOD 6 0 N The theatre of exploration and discovery along the west coast of America was comparatively concentrated. Further than this, discovery by sea and exploration by land came at the same time. L J THE LODESTAR OF THE WESTERN SEA centuries—Drake. Drake had invaded Balboa's old stamping ground of Panama and carried off such loot of gold and silver bullion as pirate never dreamed; and when he set out again "to singe the Don's beard," it was with the blessing of the valiant Queen Bess, with a pomp that put to the blush the pirate's wild crew with flag of skull and cross-bones. England's ensign flew from his masthead. Gold and silver plate decked his private table. "Viols and harps" plied their strain of national songs while the great commander dined. Young noblemen waited on tables. Wines were of the oldest and best. Plumed hats, satin breeches, tinsel decked coats, swords with pearl handles and gold and silver scabbards, pistols aplenty in every man's sash-belt, gauntlets to elbow, high boots almost to thigh—gave these sea adventurers a pride and an arrogance almost akin to knights jousting in a tournament. Yet the sole object of the expedition was to sail right into the Spanish Main of the Pacific, prove no sea could be locked against English prowess in all the world, pay the costs and win a fortune by loot of every Spanish ship and Spanish port found on the west coast of America. Every schoolboy knows the rest of Drake's story. It is one of the glories of English sea annals. His ships were so heavily laden with Spanish gold and silver that he could not go back the way he came—across the Atlantic exposed to attack by corsairs of Spain, but had to flee up the Pacific Coast and home around the world—"plowing a silver chart" for England's ships to belt the globe. Why England did not follow up Drake's discoveries is no part of Pacific Coast history. If she had, his Nova Albion—New England—might have been on the Pacific Coast instead of the Atlantic. How far did Drake go [25] m CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE north? That is in dispute; for the old charts and compasses were faulty; but certainly to the southern bounds of Oregon. Then, as far as England was concerned, discovery on the Pacific Coast slept for two hundred years. Not so with Spain. Her high-hulled caravels and little sloops kept poking north along the Pacific Coast, for two centuries; but Spain had not yet discovered that profit in furs could exceed profit in gold. It was gold and silver she coveted—such temples as she had looted in Mexico and Peru; and finding nought up the Pacific Coast but wild cannibal tribes with only fish and furs to barter, Spain, too, lapsed in zest for Pacific Coast discovery north of California. It was Russia that revived the race to the Western Sea, which never again lagged to the winning of the Pacific Empire in our own day. Peter the Great had learned shipbuilding in English shipyards. He was a man to carve his own course and follow no precedent. His reign was marked by such a revival of learning and outburst of scientific endeavor as rendered Queen Elizabeth's reign or Charles IPs restoration illustrious. The libertine ran rampant in Peter the Russian, as in Charles the Englishman; but liberty to pursue scientific aims was freed of mental and governmental tyranny. Peter's court was the rendezvous of the scientific men of Europe; and the geographers of the period had a mythical Gamaland lying between Asiatic Siberia and Europe with a mythical channel right through the breadth of the American continent giving a passage by water from Pacific to Atlantic; so Peter the Great sent Vitus Bering, a Dane, coursing across the two Siberias to build ships on the Pacific, find that water channel and claim Gamaland for Russia. Again, every schoolboy knows the story. Vitus Bering [26] THE LODESTAR OF THE WESTERN SEA found no Northeast Passage from Pacific to Atlantic, and he perished miserably in a sand hole of the famous Seal Islands. Russian Alaska was the Gamaland added to the empire of the Czar; but the Russians did find the sea otter and the Alaskan seal; and these pelts promised quicker fortune than Spanish gold. It was Russian activity that stabbed into alertness England's lethargy regarding the Pacific Northwest; stabbed, too, Spain's fear that her hermetically sealed South Sea might be invaded by a horde of fur hunters from what is now Alaska. Spain's high-hulled men-of- war and little schooners again came creeping north from Mexico—Bruno Heceta in the 1770's, Martinez and Don Quadra and Perez in Gray's day of 1789 to 1792. Though the Spanish went as far north as Alaska and sighted Vancouver Island off modern British Columbia, and charted inland passageways from Vancouver Island up to Sitka; wild seas, Indian attack, scurvy, kept them off the shores of what is now known as the American Pacific Northwest. England went about her explorations in more thorough fashion. She sent Cook, one of her greatest naval commanders, to find out once and for all if any Straits of Juan de Fuca did cross from Pacific to Atlantic, as the pilot—Juan de Fuca—had related mistily in his old age to Michael Lok. Wild seas and the deep draught of his clumsy naval vessels kept Cook too far off shore to sight either Columbia River or Juan de Fuca Straits; but he did make anchor off Nootka, Vancouver Island. Here his crew picked up sea otter in barter for old nails—sea otter which some of the crew sold in China for $10,000 in modern money. In that crew were Portlock and Dixon and a middy, Vancouver, and an American youth named Ledyard, all of whom [27] f CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE are met with in the race for the Western Sea. Though Cook perished miserably in Hawaii, as Bering had perished on the Seal Islands, when Cook's voyages were published after his murder the effect was as electrical as the modern discovery of a new gold area or diamond field. Here was quick fortune easy as the cast of gamblers' dice—$10,000 worth of precious furs for a penny's worth of old nails. Men's ears buzzed. Portlock and Dixon resigned from the English navy and came out in ships of their own. So came Barclay, aged twenty-six, with bride of seventeen. So came Meares in English vessels, flying the Portuguese flag to avoid monopoly of the East Indian Company in Bengal and Bombay. To these privateers— whether we regard them as buccaneers or traders—England paid slight heed till Spain revived her claims and seized the forts and ships of Meares at Nootka. That was a serious matter for the diplomats. Though Spanish explorers may have sighted Vancouver Island, Cook, the Englishman, under official flag had landed and claimed all territory from Vancouver Island to Russian Alaska. Spain's move on the checkerboard of European diplomacy looked like an effort to oust England's prior right between Juan de Fuca Straits and Russian Alaska. Once more a great naval expedition to the Pacific Northwest was officially planned by England; and it was entrusted to that George Vancouver who had been one of Cook's middies. Now let us return to that Coxcomb Hill behind modern Astoria. Look at the spiral panels on the aerial Astor monolith and then out to the Pacific across the great river that eluded all search for three hundred years after Columbus discovered America. On hazy days you can just see to the north that Cape Disappointment, which [28] THE LODESTAR OF THE WESTERN SEA Meares named late in the seventeen-hundreds because he could find "no such river as Saint Roc," which the old Spanish navigator, Bruno Heceta, said must exist from "the efflux of muddy waters" against smashing tides. It is a high point but from this distance resembles a ridge of rock or sand extending swordlike across the Eldorado of mariners' hopes. Anyway, said Meares—freebooter of two flags—"there is not a single river of any magnitude here." So had Cook said ten years before Meares. So did Vancouver say ten years after Meares—"being persuaded that no such river even existed." But Meares was in a rickety ship manned by mutinous whites and treacherous Lascars and dared not essay running too near that knife ridge against which a wind might smash him, or the tide rip his keels; and Cook and Vancouver had clumsy naval vessels, seaworthy in storms of the open sea, but too cumbersome in the shift and twist of whirling tide to risk a close-up of that rocky shore, where the white ghost fingers of the waves snatched with the mournful siren cries of baffled souls at rocks sharp- pinnacled as bayonets—snatched and climbed and crashed in storm higher than the highest sail. Look to the south. The low-lying sands and swampy reaches and quicksand beaches of Point Adams, named by Gray; for he did find that lost river of old Spanish charts and Indian traditions—the River of the Shining Mountains, the lodestar of every explorer from Cham- plain to Lewis and Clark. The river here is an arm of the sea itself, a great bay. Just below your feet is the little Lewis and Clark River, where the two young American explorers wintered amid drenching rains and used as dining table the great stump of an old fir tree which marks their camp to this day. [29] r CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE And between Coxcomb Hill and the great river stands the city named after Astor, whose ships missed not a whit of all the adventures of Magellan and Cook and Vancouver and came to such a terrible end as no Greek tragedy has portrayed. On calm days the scene is of a painted hyaline peace. The great ferns of the surrounding forest lift their fronds to meet the dense greenery of the giant trees. The forest is an impenetrable thicket of densest growth, which has defied all fires. Where clearing has been made grow flowers of such gorgeous sun-tints you can hardly believe these huge waxen-white and blood-red blooms are the same species—roses, or fire-flowers, or painter's brush, or rhododendrons, or dahlias—that grow in your own home gardens. How did the little Boston ship—the Columbia, scarcely ninety feet in length—gain entrance across the seething broil of tide and river and wind and bar, when all the big English naval ships failed, and even one little Spanish brig of ninety tons had to run for life to open seas? Come down from Coxcomb Hill and see. It is part of the story of American sea annals on the Pacific Coast. When the tide is out, you can motor over the hard- packed sands for miles south of Columbia River between the water line of the Pacific and the shore rocks; but woe to you if the tide comes in before you have reached one of the cuts in the rocks to escape to the high line of the rocky coast. What wonder Spanish pilot and English buccaneer and sea rover of every flag under heaven lost their heads and sailed away in realms of fancy and fable when they emerged from the roaring billows of the Horn to these entrancing shores? Great snowy peaks hung in the clouds, opalescent and translucent as dwelling of [30] Ill CAPTAIN ROBERT GRAY, DISCOVERER OF THE COLUMBIA RIVER I THE LODESTAR OF THE WESTERN SEA Olympic gods—which by the same token was the reason Meares, the freebooter, gave the name Olympics to that outer guard of the Rockies up at Puget Sound. Whether Meares stole his charts from Portlock and Dixon—as they insinuated—or trumped up preposterous damages against the Spanish for seizing his fort under English flag, after sailing from India under Portuguese colors to escape the jealousy of the East India Company as well as the port charges levied on all but their own ships, the fact remains that his charts and descriptions of the Northwest Coast are, next to Vancouver's, the most accurate. Over the shore line hang ferns higher than a man's shoulders. Great Douglas firs torn in the wrench and assault of a thousand years by wind and tide come churning out to sea, tossed by the inrush and backwash, floating corpse trees. Cypress roots polished by sand and water, gnarled and twisted in snaky coils, glisten cinnamon-brown as roped braid against the mossed rocks; and the drooping cedars tremble to the tremor of tide and wind in rhythmic sigh to the moan and rush of waters. As for the flowers, what with drenching rains for three months of the year and almost unbroken sunlight for nine, their tints are not excelled in all the world except the tropics. They are all fire-flowers dyed with the mystic blood of the sun. At dawn the turquoise sea is bathed in rosy glow, at sunset incarnadined in fire and blood; but as you motor mile after mile—for forty miles you can run between shore and tide south of the Columbia—you begin to realize why the seamen heard siren voices in the moan of the tide. Here the tide has undermined the beach and left a wet sinkhole of quicksand, which sucks under rash wheel or foot like a ship smashed by billows. In fact, as we swerved up the black rocks from one such [31] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE hole south of Seaside near Haystack Rock, men were pushing their car out of the quicksand, and you could see their own feet sinking as they got the rear wheel out. Look far out to sea. The white wave-fret, the crest of foam chopped off backwards before waters have time to curl, the spray that reflects rainbows in the sun or blooms in water roses that vanish as you look, the fleecy herds of the tide shepherded by the crooning wind, tell you where lie submerged rocks or sucking quicksand; and you understand why the mildest breezes in America were called "frozen nymphs" in Drake's old annals. Compared to the genial air above, these waters are deadly cold. With wind and tide driving sailing ship ahead at race-horse speed, if men in rowboats were caught athwart in the billows and swamped, there was not one chance in ten they could be picked up by the mother ship or get ashore against the backwash of the fierce tide. This explains the amazing loss of life among the old navigators before this coast was charted. Gray, Vancouver and Cook, Meares, and Portlock and Dixon were all naval men; but whereas the British ships were manned with Lascars, Sandwich Islanders and impressed riffraff, who would not risk their own hides for pay of a hundred dollars a year, the little Boston ship was manned by sons of New Bedford whalers, willing apprentices, sons of the proprietors or men promised a share in trade profits, or lads keen to get ships of their own for the next voyage if they succeeded on this. Such men were Ingraham and Haswell and Coolidge, and Boit, the seventeen-year-old boy of Gray's crew. The leader could depend on their courage as he could on his own. They were comrades, not mutinous underlings; and it [32] Wfc THE LODESTAR OF THE WESTERN SEA was their courage and their loyalty that nailed down title to Oregon for the United States. A word as to the character of the American ships. The clipper type did not come into vogue until later; but whether these early ships are called schooners or sloops, they were forerunners of the clipper. They had the long slim streamer-line of the clipper, the same great cloud of sail, the same low dead-line and yet not too deep draught for gull-like flight over shallow waters. The English and Spanish ships carried even greater clouds of sail but they stood high hulled and squarish of prow and stern and ran too deep draught to risk rock or sand-bar. Gray's discovery of the Columbia River has been told many times but never can be told adequately. Only scraps of the ship's log and of his assistant's log exist today. The venture was a private one; but it was in no sense secret, as were Spain's voyages, for fear of attracting other discoverers to the coast. Whereas, the British voyages, with instructions in secret, were given to the world for the purpose of affixing British title to the country between Russian domain in Alaska and Spanish domain in San Francisco Bay. Cook's voyage had just become known and set the adventurers of the world all agog over the quick fortunes to be won in the sea-otter trade. Men's ears tingled and men's palms itched at the tales told by Cook's crew of the great black "sea beaver" whose silken pelts were bartered from natives of the Pacific Coast for handfuls of old nails and then resold for $10,000—yes, $20,000—though half had spoiled with rain-rot before reaching the markets of China. Cook had established British title from Vancouver Island to Russian Alaska; but there was still the [33] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE No-Man's Land from California to Nootka—and no one knew how far that domain extended eastward before it met Louisiana. Hearne had all but proved there was no Northwest Passage from Hudson Bay westward. Alexander Mackenzie was just about to make his dash down from Athabasca to Arctic Seas arfd over the mountains to the Pacific, to reaffirm that proof. Sea otter were plentiful as fish in shoals; but would they remain plentiful with East India vessels and buccaneers of every flag planning to hie them to that golden harvest of far Eldorado seas? Besides, tea was just coming in as a fashionable beverage. Boston's "tea party" emphasized that, though the facile freebooter Meares from India, who did not scruple to carry fifteen tons of opium for trade, expressed the grave fears of the medicos that tea might demoralize the manners and morals and derange the nerves and minds of its votaries. If Boston, good Puritan Boston with conscience on a hair trigger, demanded tea and Chinese mandarins demanded sea otter at from $200 to $1,000 a pelt, and sixty otter could be bartered for a handful of old spikes, or musket shot, or glass beads—why not make everybody happy by outfitting a Boston ship with such cheap trash to be traded for sea otter in the Pacific Northwest, to be traded for tea in China, to be reconverted into good coin back in Boston, morals and manners and nerves and sanity all to the risk or the discard? Not very high motive for a great endeavor—true; but hitched to the lodestar of that lure to the Western Sea—a perfectly workable and highly profitable arrangement to finance the adventure. Such pawns for her dice does Destiny use for her inscrutable ends. [34] THE LODESTAR OF THE WESTERN SEA One can see the good merchants of Boston up in the Coolidge Building, or in Dr. Bulfinch's library on Bow- doin Square with legs sprawling under the table and hands turning the pages of Cook's Voyages, discussing the pros and cons of such a frisky and risky venture all the winter of 1787. Young Bulfinch was just back from Europe full of the popular tales of Cook's voyage. Why, a dozen men of Bristol and Hull were preparing to outfit ships for the Pacific Northwest 1 Barrell, the merchant, could supply the goods. So could Samuel Brown; or Pintard, another outfitter of New York. Derby of Salem and Hatch of Cambridge could supervise the purchase or building of ships with dry timber to defy splitting in the heat of crossing the Equator, or storms that tore hulls to skeleton ribs round the Horn. Their ships—with the great crowd of sail, and narrow prows to ride the waves, and sealine like a whale's side to throw off the impeding waters— could show heel to any craft on the ocean. Because England and Spain were in strained relations, ship's-letters could be obtained from the Spanish minister in Philadelphia to ensure fresh provisioning off Chile and Peru and Juan Fernandez, though how sincere those documents were may be inferred from the Santa Barbara governor's letters to the Presidio of San Francisco stating that "when the ship named Columbia said to belong to Heneral Wanghington of the American States, which sailed from Boston in September 1787 [arrives] you will cause the said vessel to be secured with her officers and crew." Spain still labored under the delusion of the Papal Bull preceding the days of Drake that, in partitioning off the New World, made the South and Western Seas her closed preserves. [35] r CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE Medals were struck by Joseph Barrell, the Boston merchant, showing the vessels and the outfitters. Such pitifully little craft they were, too: the Columbia under Kendrick, 212 tons, over 80 feet long, 10 guns; the Lady Washington under Robert Gray, 90 tons, a small sloop with 12 men; both captains still in their early forties. Spite of twinges of conscience as to that wicked tea and the day being a Puritan Sabbath, visitors thronged the docks. Healths were drained in stronger than tea and all was "hilarity" as one log narrates, with the sailors running round the capstan bars singing their chanteys. Monday, October 1, the great adventure had begun. The course planned was to Cape Verde Islands, thence the Falklands east of the Horn, round the Horn, then the Selkirk Island of Juan Fernandez, then without stop up to Cook's landfall on the west of Vancouver Island at Nootka, or Noot-wee-ka, "where the deer people" dwelt. If the ships showed swift heel to the sea, it was judged these stops would afford enough fresh water, provisions, hay and fodder for the hogs and cows on board, and replacement of torn sails and shattered spars to reach the Northwest of America. At Cape Verde, Gray picked up as valet a colored boy named Marcus Lopez. His courage almost cost Coolidge, the first mate, his life. Kendrick proved a commander cautious almost to a fault; but the two chiefs never disagreed, though Gray was quicker and more daring to act. Kendrick frankly didn't care to tackle the passage round the Horn in January. Yet the ships were only at the Falklands by January. Haswell got himself transferred over to Gray. They had only headed for the Horn by April of 1788, and enough storms were encountered in all conscience; for Kendrick had to put into Juan [36] THE LODESTAR OF THE WESTERN SEA Fernandez on the west to rest his scurvy-stricken crew, replace masts, repair sails and get fresh provisions, the governor of the Island being afterwards removed from office for helping these sea rovers who invaded Spain's closed sea. Again and again, in the hurricanes encountered, the little Lady Washington came off best; for Gray sped on north, when Kendrick had delayed for repairs; but when Gray on a later voyage transferred to the Columbia, again his ship led. Yet no ship passed the Horn unscathed. Billows crashed over rails, washing hogs and poultry out of deck pens. Bilge water poured from lee scuppers in torrents. Everything loose on deck rolled from side to side in the drench of crashing waves so that in a later voyage even a small cannon ran amuck and thrashed about before sailors asprawl could rope and anchor the rolling peril. When the ships came up from such plunges, reefed sails had been torn by the wind and were aflutter in rags. Though hatches had been closed, water poured through the heat-scorched seams of the deck and drenched sailors' berths below until the kitchen tins were awash and the blankets a sodden mass, and there were six inches of water below decks. As for the masts, they might have been the crucified arms of ghost ships; and the men clinging to the ratlines came down stiffened with ice in their oilskins with eyes red-rimmed and half-blind by the flaw of salt spray; but New Bedford and Salem men knew such gales on their own northeast coast; and the fact remains, Gray's little Lady Washington came through in such shape that she could spread her wings to the welcome warm winds of the Pacific and drive up the west coast of South America like a gull. Why did men take such risks for chancy fortune, at [37] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE best? I do not know, except that we are all pawns of a Divine Decree that drives on to Destiny with an urge neither man nor race can resist without extinction. If there is one lesson more than another, the exploration of the Pacific Coast teaches that. It is met with again and again. Then came a wonder world—medusa-slime lighting the foam trail in phosphorescent gleam; sulphur whales gamboling about the ship in a way to make these New England seamen reckon of other fortune; sea lions roaring hoarsely from the black rock reefs; dreamy summer days on a silver sea; dreamy summer nights under a golden harvest moon; a haze of unreality and rest, such rest as only men whose muscles had been stretched taut to pain by sleepless nights and ceaseless labor could appreciate as an earthly heaven. By August—nine months out from Boston—some one from the crow's-nest shouted "Land." It was Drake's New Albion of two hundred years before. One can almost hear their shouts of "inexpressible joy" the ship's log records. Latitude 41 °, and next day above "black sand" by the plumb-line, only eighteen miles off coast, with Indians paddling out from what would be the modern border between California and Oregon if the latitude were correct. The Indians were in dugouts of "vast bulk" with paddles of "ashwood" and tossed "feathers" the signal for peace; but as the wind began to hum, Captain Gray could only throw out presents and press sail and speed on; and these boys of New Bedford and Salem—the majority of them, as you can gather from their subsequent service, a very few years past twenty- one—how did they feel in this wonder world? How would you have felt at seventeen to twenty-one? [38] THE LODESTAR OF THE WESTERN SEA Was the river seen between August 5 and 9, Rogue River or the Umpqua? I do not know; but I do know it was close to Drake's farthest north of two centuries earlier. Says Haswell's Log: "Columns of smoke we could see" and "many fires"—signals from the Indians to come in and trade. "Aug. 6—within quarter of a mile of a bold sandy shore." Aug. 7—"within a mile of a small island, we hove to the jolly-boat and sent her to sound the channel—birds so numerous, could be compared to nothing else but a hive of bees swarming, most of them pelicans; long and very dangerous reef, lat. 43 ° 20'." (A pretty safe bet they were now abreast what is known as the Bend Country.) "Sailed in the ship within a mile of the coast. Aug. 9, entrance of a very large river—lat. 44 ° 20'—vast numbers natives hostile and warlike shaking spears with air of defiance with hideous shouting." One native in a dugout creeps up and by sign language explains the ship can find fish and fresh water here. It was probably to lure them to wreck. Aug. 10— the little boat searches a landing place and two dugouts full of Indians flourish sea otter skins for trade, though they kept their knives in hand ready "to strike"—faces "pitted with smallpox"—lat. 45 ° 2'. Aug. 14—a harbor with "waves breaking high"—"anchored half a mile from shore in 3 fathoms," about (?) 45° 27', "canoe brought berries and crabs," which were a godsend to the sailor boys sick of scurvy "so advanced one month longer at sea would have been fatal" (so we have not all the hardships of the voyage recorded in the Log—no wonder Gray had scampered, leaving Kendrick far behind); "they would hand their [otter] skins on board and take what ever was given in return" (Meares corroborates this style of trade); "took off several boat loads of wood." [39] 1 CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE "Aug. 16, boiled and roasted crabs for sale purchaser! for buttons." Aug. 16, an old chief comes on board and Haswell goes ashore with Coolidge, while the crew cuts grass for the live stock. The seven scurvy-weakened men were rowed ashore. The Indians seemed so friendly, the crew of seven had gone ashore poorly armed—only two or three muskets but each sailor had a pistol and sword. The Indians entertain the whites by tossing arrows and spears in a war dance with "frightful howls" which "chilled my blood," says Haswell. The men were digging clams, the most delicious sea food on the coast, and the colored boy Lopez, carrying the grass to the jolly-boat, had stuck his cutlass in the sand. An Indian snatched it. The black boy gave chase—the crew shouted an alarm, but the big ship could not fire for fear of hitting her own men. Coolidge proffered the chief a reward for return of the stolen article. The Indian signaled "go get it yourself" and the white men fell into the cunning trap by pursuing and putting greater distance between themselves and the ship. Behind a clump of trees was the black boy hanging on to the thief, when a dozen stabs and a flight of arrows felled him and before the sailors could prevent, the Indians were chopping the body to pieces. The crew then backed hastily for their own boat keeping face to the wolfish pursuit of their foes. Haswell shot one ring leader with his pistol, and Coolidge threw himself between the hostiles and bade his men race it for the jolly-boat. Coolidge himself was already bleeding, and one man had fainted from a barbed arrow and was gushing blood. Gray had but three people left on board, which proves the whole crew of the Lady Washington could not have exceeded a dozen, with seven of them almost dead of scurvy. "We jumped into the boat, [40] THE LODESTAR OF THE WESTERN SEA put off, and were soon out of arrow-shot. Then they launched their canoes intending to cut us off, we keeping constant [pistol] fire from the [jolly] boat. As soon as we got on board, we discharged 2 or 3 swivel shot and in a few moments, not a canoe was to be seen. During the whole night, it was dismal to hear the whoops and howlings—fires on the beach where the lad was killed." (No doubt the boy's body was being devoured; for from Cook to Gray all navigators narrate these Indians were cannibals. So much for the halcyon condition of the Indian in his primitive innocence.) Such was Gray's introduction to quick and easy fortune on the Pacific Northwest Coast. Haswell calls this point Murderers' Harbor, evidently thinking of that Martyrs Island where a Spanish crew were torn to pieces, or another Murderer's Island where Meares' and Barclay's men suffered a like fate; but the point has now been pretty well identified with Tillamook. You can see the hunched headland as you motor south of the Columbia along the sands when the tide is out, where thousands of pleasure seekers to-day from Seaside and Cannon Beach dig for the selfsame delicate clam food. No more loitering. Gray speeds on for a safe harbor, where he can get his half-ill men back on sea legs and his sloop repaired for sea-otter trade farther north. The ship scudded before a fine breeze. Haswell reports, "I am of opinion the Straits of Juan de Fuca exist though Captain Cook positively asserts they do not; for in the very latitude where they are said to lie, the coast takes a bend." One can easily identify the famous Tatoosh Island glimpsed as they sped on, which Meares had visited in June of the very same year and where he had been hospitably received by one of the greatest scoundrels [41] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE and assassins in Northwest history. Note the namel On the Island to-day stands the United States lighthouse, a guide to one of the greatest harbors and island-dotted bays in the world—Puget Sound. It was then Meares had named the Olympics. Indians here could utter a few words of English; but Gray hurried on for Cook's Nootka on the west shore of Vancouver Island. There were both fogs and rocks with a wild surf, but behind the rocks lay a bay calm as glass. "We manned our sweeps, a light breeze sprang up. At the entrance [to Clayoquot] we hoisted out the long boat to tow and assisted by the natives late in the afternoon came to anchor over a bottom of sand in sheltered road stead." The chief here— Wicanish—made it clear that though allied by marriage with Maquinna of Nootka, this was not Nootka. As Nootka was the rendezvous for Kendrick to join him, Gray was off on September 2, and though floundering off shore in heavy gales for two weeks, finally in a sudden calm neared Cook's Nootka. A sail was seen. Was it Kendrick's Columbia? The vessel proved to be one of two under Meares and Douglas from Macao, China, under Portuguese colors, where they had loaded on the opium while still squeamish as to tea. In Nootka, Meares had established himself with a garrison in a sort of fort flying the British flag and was just prepared to launch a schooner of thirty tons built by Chinese carpenters under direction of Mr. Funter. All the romance woven round a Captain Kidd, or Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, pales beside the ridiculous events that shifted in moving-picture scene at Nootka for the next six years. Picture the dinner of the merry captains together that night! Ham and eggs and wine, Meares plied. All had been navy men and all [42] j THE LODESTAR OF THE WESTERN SEA were easy-give and easy-take except on one subject— furs; and "upon his sacred word and honor" Meares vowed there were not fifty skins to be got on the Pacific Coast. Gray and Haswell and Coolidge and all the other Americans smiled: for Meares' own vessel was loaded to the water-line—if not with furs—what? Meares sent his blacksmiths to assist in repairing the rudder of Gray's ship and offered to carry letters to China with him for the Americans, which he afterwards sent back with an apology. He was not sure these Americans were not more friendly to the Spanish than to himself. Sept. 23, in rode the Columbia with Kendrick. On October 1, in anniversary of the departure from Boston, guns enough were fired by the Meares and Boston ships to set the mountains round the fort rumbling in thunderous rip-rock echoes and the waves splashing. There was a hilarious dinner on the Columbia. The Northwest America—the first vessel built on the Pacific—was launched with more salvos of cannon; but the little schooner slid so precipitately from her skids, she almost got away in the backwash of the tides; and the Indians, who had shouted "wacush-wacush," "good friends, good friends," had to get out their whaling boats and race to the rescue. Meares had forty Europeans in his crews besides Chinese and Lascars. How he cursed Portlock and Dixon for their treatment of him up in Alaska, and laughed over the experience of his surgeon up there walking right over the top of an Aleut underground house and falling through the roof almost into the boiling fish kettle of the astounded natives. He was a good talker, was Meares, and kept referring to Sir Joseph Banks, one of Cook's patrons, as a friend, though he himself was under what were practically pirate flags—that is, flags unauthorized [43] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE by either England or Spain. Nor did he think there was any Great River of the West. That was why he had called the big headland Cape Disappointment; but he had got sixty sea otter for a handful of old nails and the site of his fort for a pair of old pistols. And then the Americans heard of Barclay the Englishman, aged about twenty-six, up Juan de Fuca Straits with his bride aged seventeen. As for a Northwest Passage, Meares scouted the fable. Hudson Bay was 2,000 miles away if it was an inch—not a bad guess considering the geographers on paper were still chasing that Northwest Passage. He may have been a scamp, but Meares was second to none as a navigator and romancer. This was his second voyage out and he called the natives "filthy brutes," "murderers," though he failed to add he got many of his own furs by shooting the end off their dugouts, and sinking the swimmers. He failed also to add that he had kidnaped Comekela, the brother of Maquinna, Chief of the Nootkas, to use him as interpreter; but he raised shouts of laughter over the return of Comekela to his family in scarlet coat with a cockade hat and brass buttons and bells on his feet and enough rings on his toes to dance the whole tribe into the Indian's Paradise; but Comekela proved "a surly brute." He wanted all the glory from the moment of his triumphant return. He had plaited his hair in long greasy braids down his back. The bells and buttons were all right, but some of those shining little copper saucepans with handles hanging in the ship's kitchen would add to the resounding ding dong from the ends of his long braids; so began a battle royal in hide and seek between the ship's cook and Comekela. Comekela would dive and snatch one pan. The cook would [44] THE LODESTAR OF THE WESTERN SEA pursue up the hatchway with rolling pin or poker, and the rest of the crew scampered out of the way. Suffice it to say the Nootka Indian won. He had all the little saucepans that could clang from his braids to his heels. All the same, the Americans, or Bostonais as the Indians dubbed them, noticed when the big canoes circled round the foreign vessels, there was a certain fierce melancholy in the chants of welcome; and the beating of the paddles on the gunwales had a hideous resemblance to the war-drum. Maquinna at this time was about thirty years old; Callicum, another brother who was shot in June by Don Martinez, the Spaniard, about forty. Trade was potlatch-feast fashion—a gorging with (no doubt, drugged) rum and then each side made reciprocal presents, if sixty otter skins for old nails could be called fair exchange. Human skulls with fresh flesh bore only too terrible proof of cannibalism. "I, myself, have seen them eat human flesh," says Haswell. To their amazement, the Americans learned of a degenerate white surgeon, McKay, left by a Bombay vessel, living among the fierce tribe of the Tatoosh warriors to act as an interpreter. Both Maquinna and Wicanish of Clayoquot warned the Americans that Tatoosh was a dangerous, treacherous man. He had 400 of a bodyguard and not less than 7,000 people and 3,000 warriors, and he ranged from the modern Fraser River to Cook's Cape Flattery. Though married into Maquinna's family, his people did not speak the same language as the Nootka people. Yes, Meares knew all about those Three Brothers Islands, and the Quicksands of Tillamook, and Tatoosh had murdered some of his men—which the Indians denied. One mistake the Boston men thought Meares [45] % CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE had made. He had put half a dozen mutineers ashore as slaves for the winter to be taken back on promise of good behavior. The men were finally given full pay in China; but the example was a bad one for Maquinna—"white men as slaves." Vancouver has been accused of using the lash too often on his subordinates, but it was wiser than putting mutineers ashore to stir up treachery among the Indians. Meares drew smiles when he related how he had been made "King of the Indians by a tiara being placed on his head." The tiara was a war-bonnet and the ceremony nothing more or less than complimentary adoption in the tribe. It was significant when Gray's men towed Meares' ships out of Nootka on October 26, that the Indians who had been shy of the English buccaneers came in flocks to the Boston men. The boasted English fort had been torn down for firewood and the slabs turned over to Kendrick. The winter of 1788-89 proved cold. Though Indians professed friendship, they were always inveterate thieves and trundled off five small cannon given by the English to Kendrick. A house was rushed up for wintering quarters. The Indians had retired upstream for the cold weather, and the Columbia narrowly escaped a terrible explosion in January when an accidental fire almost reached the powder magazine. Wicanish of Clayoquot paid them a visit, and in March Gray set out to scout trade. April saw him at Tatoosh's Island, coasting Cape Flattery, then back to Nootka, where Kendrick was still dallying. May, again to sea; then just as the Americans prepared to leave the Sound, in glided a Spanish brig with twenty guns under Don Jose Martinez, with two consorts and the avowed purpose of ousting Meares and making a [46] THE LODESTAR OF THE WESTERN SEA prize of his vessels. Douglas, Meares' partner, had already come in, and Martinez was an old hand on this coast, having been here as pilot in 1774 under Perez, and knew the coast as far up as Alaska. Gray's cruising round Vancouver Island and the Queen Charlotte Islands filled the early summer. Two hundred sea otter were bartered for one chisel; so Meares was not the only trader to drive hard bargains. The tribes proved even more uncouth and savage farther north. When the Spanish had erected a fort on Hog Island and seized Meares' ships under Colnett and Hudson, the little Northwest America was christened Gertrudis and Coolidge engaged as her captain. Poor Colnett, Meares' captain between rage and chagrin went violently insane. Gray was transferred to the Columbia to carry furs to China and tea to Boston. Kendrick remained on the Coast. The voyage lasted from July of 1789 to August of 1790; 50,000 miles was the snip's log record for the first American vessel around the world. The whole city of Boston welcomed Gray home. He marched up the streets abreast of Attoo, a Hawaiian lad whom he had picked up in Hawaii to take poor Lopez's place, gay in cloak of yellow plumes. If a feather will show which way the wind blows, Attoo's gay plumage was good omen; for Hawaii to-day is American territory. Owing to the glut of too many furs on a market demoralized by war, the great adventure was a loss, as nearly all great adventures into the unknown are at first a loss. Barrell and Brown bought out Derby and Pintard. It was decided to send the Columbia back, and at once. Half a dozen new men were enlisted, among whom was the boy Boit. This time with less jubilation the Columbia left Boston on September 28, 1790, and [47] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE anchored at Clayoquot, south of Nootka, June 5, 1791. In 1789, Gray had noticed how Martinez had fortified Hog Island and taken possession of the Coast in even more flamboyant, loud-sounding manner than Balboa had claimed the South Seas at Panama two and a half centuries previously, though Cook had already established England's prior title to Nootka. The Spanish may have sighted Nootka before Cook. There is no proof they had ever before claimed it by right of prior discovery; and to avoid cross-fire between England and Spain, the American privateers judged it wiser if not safer to go down to the friendly reception of Wicanish at Clayoquot, which was neutral ground for trade. Where Kendrick cruised in Gray's absence is a guess—perhaps round Vancouver Island. He, too, like Meares, had got from Maquinna a grant of land for a fort at Nootka; but Nootka was an international volcano—not good trading ground for privateers. Perhaps with memories of Meares' efforts to discourage them off the coast, they were not sorry Don Martinez had made a clean sweep of Meares' fort at Nootka and replaced it with one of his own. There were ugly conflicting tales told of the Spanish intimidating the English by leaving a hangman's rope over yard-arms; and no doubt old Maquinna smiled his sinister smile; but he did not love the Spanish any more than he did the English; for had not Meares kidnaped one brother and Martinez shot the other brother in a dugout and heaved the corpse over for the fish? These white men, whom the Indians had first mistaken for gods, were after all only men, bad men, "pishah, pishah." Other Spanish explorers had been up the coast in Gray's absence. Gray was off for Queen Charlotte Islands within two weeks, and there he traded for six weeks. Off Cape [48] THE LODESTAR OF THE WESTERN SEA Flattery, Puget Sound, he was almost shipwrecked and came in to Clayoquot to lay the keel for the second vessel built on the Pacific Coast, the first American shipyard of the Northwest. It was named the Adventure and launched in April of 1792; but in the crowded events of the next two fateful years, we are anticipating the story. Let us get back to Haswell's faithful Log: "Aug. 21, 1791—At noon, Cape Lookout N. E. 8 leagues. Advisable to make short stay. Aug. 29—-made sail for Clioquot—canoe came off to inform us Captn. Kendrick was in harbor. Fired gun, hoisted our colors. This was answered. He came along side and was saluted with three cheers. Saw two ships, which we supposed to be Spaniards pass. He had hauled his brig on the ground and the place where provisions and stores were landed was fortified and dignified by the appellation Ft. Washington. People employed, scraping and repairing and painting. Sept. 8—stood out to sea and bore southward. Sept. 9—Cape Flattery coast. Stood to and fro off Tatoosh Island—within quarter mile of a most dangerous reef—hoisted out boats to tow and most narrowly escaped. Sept. 18—Clayquot went in to see if Captain Kendrick still remained. Found him nearly ready for sea. Sept. 20—towed up to our winter quarters. Sept- 21—landed and struck first blow towards building a log house. Sept. 27—sailed the Lady Washington with Captn. Kendrick for China. Sept. 29—sails unbent; yards unrigged and stowed below, began frame our sloop.. Oct. 3—laid keel of sloop Adventure, every person employed. Oct. 7—suddenly awakened (n o'clock) by report musket and every cove was full of Indians- Sprang out of bed, armed myself and 7 persons and marched down to beach. Savages turned out to be EQcks> [49] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE which the tide ebbing low had left dry. Our work jogging on with whip saws sawing planks. Oct. 12—visited by Wickananish and brother . . . gazed with admiration at house and vessel . . . dwelling house, smith's forge and shop, carpenter's shop, lodging rooms and cabins, 2 cannon mounted, one inside house through a port, loopholes for small arms and pistols, our party 10 in all. Oct. 23, intolerably rainy, only two days our men could work out of doors. "Jan., 1792, end of month laid sloop's beams . . . end of January before we finished sloop's beams. Feb. 2 preparing to lay ship on ground . . . visited very much by chiefs and wives" (sign of peace, which ought to have put them on guard); "cordiality of warriors unusual . . . partook at our table of such as we ate and drank" (spies as later events proved), "Captn. Gray supplied them with drugs, rice, bread, molasses to gain their esteem." (Alas! for hopes to gain esteem by gentle means. The motive was mistaken by the Indians for weakness.) It was on February 18 that the notorious Totoosh or his brother had stolen the boatswain's jacket; and again Gray would not punish the thief but only recaptured the stolen jacket. Then the Indians threw off their mask of friendship. "Attoo, our Sandwich Island lad, informed Captain Gray of a plot to capture the ship. He [Tatoosh] had promised to make him [Attoo] a great chief if he would wet our firearms and a sea-otter skin for each musket ball, telling him he meant to come through the woods, board the ship from the bank and kill every person on board. Attoo asked when he would come . . . Capt. Gray ordered the swivels to be loaded. All our great guns were landed on the bank. . . . The ship was immediately removed [from the bank]. I put the fort [so] THE LODESTAR OF THE WESTERN SEA in a good position of defense ... I discharged and reloaded the cannon . . . Our people being up to the waist in water, scraped to the bottom of the keel, when Mr. Smith told us the natives were coming ... I ordered Mr. Boit and all the ship's people on board and joined the people in the house. I heard them [the Indians] whoop. One party seemed nigh the bank, the other the harbor to attack the fort. Having plans frustrated" (by finding the ships in position of defense—it was night) "they retired. The day broke . . . the tide rose, the ship hauled to her berth and moored." Henceforth four watches kept guard night and day— Boit the boy one of them. February 20, by way of putting fear in the hearts of the ambuscaded Indians, Haswell had the four cannons loaded with canister-shot to clear out the spies skulking among the trees. That day, innocent as a lamb, came Tatoosh asking the gentlemen why they no longer visit the Indian village. Gray ordered Tatoosh off the ship and told him if his father had not been along, he would have been shot on the spot. These Indians, said Haswell, now had from traders more than 200 muskets. He says Tatoosh had at least 2,000 warriors. February 23, the Adventure was launched. The boatswain of the Columbia, Mr. Ben Harding, died in March. And now events come thick and fast. The Boston men must have known that Captain Vancouver was on his way up the Coast to settle that quarrel of Meares' fort seized at Nootka. They also knew that Spain realized Don Martinez had gone too far and had now in 1792 sent one of their greatest sea commanders, who also knew this coast from apprenticeship as a pilot, Don Quadra, to restore what Martinez had seized. Haswell had gone North [so CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE on the Adventure but Gray was coasting South on the Columbia. Not fewer than thirty trading vessels were on the coast this year. When the two ships of Gray's command came together in June near Nootka there was an astounding piece of news reported. Let Haswell speak first: "We saw a ship ... I hauled for her and soon discovered it to be the Columbia . . . they had had good success ... to the South, they spoke his Britannic Majesty's ship Discovery George Vancouver and brig Chatham Wm. Brounton. . . . They [Gray's ship] discovered a harbor in lat. 46 ° 53' . . . Gray's Harbor . . . attacked by the natives and the savages had a considerable slaughter made among them. They next entered Columbia River and went up it about 30 miles and doubted not it was navigable upwards of 100 . . . the ship during the cruise had collected 700 sea-otter skins and 150,000 skins of other species." Now let us follow Gray, himself. The log of Gray's ship has been lost except from the 6th to 21st of May. In 1775 Don Bruno Heceta, the Spaniard with whom Don Quadra had gone as pilot, recorded: "These currents . . . cause me to believe that the place is the mouth of some great river ... / did not enter and anchor there because . . . if we let go the anchor, we had not enough men to get it up. [Thirty-five were down with scurvy.] . . . At the distance of three or four leagues, I lay to. I experienced heavy currents, which made it impossible to enter the bay, as I was far to leeward. . . . These currents, however, convince me that a great quantity of water rushed from this bay on the ebb of the tide." And now comes Gray in May of 1792, knowing if he would be first he must be swift; for Vancouver is on this coast and says there is no great river of the West. May [52] THE LODESTAR OF THE WESTERN SEA 7, he is in Gray's Harbor, where the Indians have become so threatening he fires into their canoes and kills seven. On the ioth, he is steering due south. On the nth, he hugs the coast, though he hears a tide-rip like thunder and sees a terrific collision of tide in and roiling river current out; but the weather is clear and he can see what he is doing. A wind was driving in shore at 8 in the morning, all sails set like the wings of the gulls, which Haswell had described as "the swarming of bees"; he rode the rolling billows in over the bar: "May nth . . . at four a.m. saw the entrance of our desired port bearing east-southeast, distance six leagues . . . at eight a.m. being a little to windward of the entrance of the harbor, bore away, and ran in east-southeast between the breakers . . . When we were over the bar we found this to be a large river of fresh water, up which we steered. Many canoes came alongside to [anchor] . . ." To this may be added the ship's log of John Boit: "The river extended to the SE. as far as eye cou'd reach, and water fit to drink as far down as the Bars at the entrance. We directed our course up this noble River in search of a village. The beach was lined with natives, who ran along the shore following the ship. Soon after, above 20 canoes came off, and brought a good lot of furs and salmon, which last they sold two for a board Nail. The furs we likewise bought cheap, for copper and Cloth. They appeared to view the Ship with the greatest astonishment and no doubt we was the first civilized people that they ever saw. We observed some of the same people we had before seen at Gray's harbour, and perhaps that was a branch of this same River. At length we arrived opposite to a large village [Chinook] situate on the North side of the River, about 5 leagues from [53] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE the entrance. Came to in 10 fm. sand, about ^ mile from shore. The River at this place was about 4 miles over. We purchas'd 4 Otter skins for a Sheet of Copper. Beaver skins, 2 spikes each, and other land furs, 1 spike each. "We lay in this place till the 20th May, during which time we put the ship in good order and fill'd up all the water casks along side, it being very good. These Natives talk'd the same language as those farther South, but we cou'd not learn it. Observ'd that the canoes that came from down river, brought no otter skins, and I believe the otter constantly keeps in salt water. They however always came well stocked with land furs, and capital salmon. The tide set down the whole time and was rapid. Whole trees sometimes come down the stream. The Indians informed us there was 50 villages on the banks of this river. "May 15, N. Latt. 46° 7'; W. Long. 122 ° 47'. On the 15th, we took up the anchor and stood up river, but soon found the water to be shoal so that the ship took the ground, after proceeding 7 or 8 miles from our first station. However, soon got off again. Sent the Cutter and found the main Channel was in the South side, and that there was a sand-bank in the middle. As we did not expect to procure Otter furs at any distance from the Sea, we contented ourselves in our present situation, which was a very pleasant one. / landed abreast the ship with Capt. Gray to view the country and take possession, leaving charge with the 2d Officer. Found much clear ground, fit for cultivation, and the woods mostly clear from underbrush. None of the Natives come near us. "May 18. Shifted the Ship's berth to her old station [54] THE LODESTAR OF THE WESTERN SEA abreast the Village Chinoak. Vast many canoes full of Indians from different parts of the River were constantly alongside. Cap't Gray named this River Columbia's . . . and the South point Adams." So is told the first great adventure in American sea annals. Poets may embellish it and romancers revitalize it and savants dispute over the day's difference in Boit's Log and Gray's; but nothing can detract from its magnificent, cool-headed, dogged courage. It was the first great sea adventure after the Colonies became a nation; and the nation was yet barely out of its swaddling clothes; but youth's hopes fly high and far. So do the hopes of nations in the first flush of their dawn; but no highest hopes ever exceeded the realization of the unknown sea- captain, Robert Gray, who had not a single monument to commemorate his achievement, till the great monolith arose above Astoria in 1926. It was the first adventure in American sea annals but it was quickly followed up by adventurers as great—as the panels on the Astor monument now narrate to the world. Note. It need hardly be told that all the scant facts bearing on Gray's discovery of the Columbia are drawn from the Massachusetts Historical Collection; H. H. Bancroft; Has- well's Log; Greenhow; Meares; Vancouver; Jewitt, and from addresses and writing of Judge Howay, Prof. Morison of Harvard and Judge Carey, to whom deep indebtedness is expressed. The various spellings of the Indian names—Maquinna, Makina, Makena, Macines,—Wicananish, Wicanish, Wickanish, Tatoosh, Tootoosh—have been made to conform as much as possible (and that is saying little) to modern pronunciation and modern map spelling. Only one name as far as I know has not yet been identified and that is Upquesta, who comes in Jewitt's Log. [55] I PART II: Vancouver's Race Round the Seven Seas to the Pacific Northwest. 1789-1794. ONCE more stand beneath the great Astor monolith towering above the entrance to the Columbia River. You realize now that it symbolizes far more than Gray's discovery of the outlet of the Great River of the West. It symbolizes the frantic race of four nations for almost three hundred years to take first possession of a Pacific Empire the area of half Europe. In order of arrival, these nations were Spain, England, Russia, and the United States; and when these nations were all but ready to force war over what cynics called "a dispute about two spoons" and "some sea-cat skins," if you keep on reading the panels of the monolith, you will still further realize it was not the diplomats' crafty subterfuge that averted war. Nor was it the many-headed leather-lunged Demos, shouting itself hoarse in London over Maquinna's poor little Nootka lands between 1789 and 1792, and later in Washington during a political campaign making the welkin ring over "54—40 or fight" in Oregon. It was the grace and courtesy of two matchless gentlemen, George Vancouver and Don Bodega Quadra, that averted war, by establishing facts as a basis for claims, not leather lungs. What particularly embarrassed England in the furor, which Meares kicked up in England over the seizure of his ships and forts at Nootka on Vancouver Island, was that she did not really want war with Spain. The great H VANCOUVER'S RACE TO THE NORTHWEST crash with France was coming. Spain might be an ally with England. Pitt did not want war with Spain, though the populace stirred up by Meares' published Voyages was now roaring itself hoarse for war over the seizure of English ships and an English fort—if Meares' clapboard shanties could be called a fort—on the unknown Pacific Northwest Coast of America. To hold possession—yes— England would not yield one jot of her claim that Cook had landed and taken possession, where the Spanish navigators had only sighted and named the same points. Spain realized Martinez had been rash and exceeded his authority. Don Quadra and Vancouver were selected by their governments to proceed to the northwest coast and either come to an understanding, or leave things as they were, until more specific instructions emanated from the diplomats as the checkerboard of European diplomacy shuffled back and forward. The diplomatic papers on this era are voluminous. Shorn of verbiage, that is what the voyage of Vancouver was to do. He was also, if possible, to try and find that vague outlet to the Great River of the West and so extend Cook's claim of territory farther south into the No-Man's Land of what is now Oregon. Spain did not care one whit for bleak northern coasts, where her seamen had rotted to death of scurvy by the score, and each of her leaders for a century had died of the hardships of the voyage north; but if there were any neck of bottle leading into her closed preserve of the South Sea, she was going to be on the ground first and cork the neck of that bottle—cork it so it would be closed to all nations but herself. The Americans—let it be frankly acknowledged—cared less than England for neck of bottle unless it were "bottle of rum" as you will find [57] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE in the story. They were out avowedly for gain; but in pursuit of that gain they were also out to ascertain definitely, practically and for all time what facts lay beneath all these myths; for myths are a reflex of facts. Why did old Juan de Fuca away back in the very early sixteen- hundreds tell a seaman's yarn to Michael Lok of a strait between 48 ° and 49 ° leading inland eastward to what we now call Hudson Bay? Had the old fellow, doddery with age when he recalled vague memories, seen such a strait, or was he only repeating an Indian camp-fire tale of that Louisiana redskin who had wandered from the head waters of the Mississippi for five years to the blue currents of the Great River of the West known as Oregon? And the still more curious thing as you study the panels is this. Remember it. It gives the lie to cynicism for all time. Look from the aerial monument and think it out for yourself. In every single case, the reality surpassed the illusion, the realization the dream, the results exceeded the aim, far as the stars outreach the wavering grasp of fumbling infant hands. Why—I do not know except that the lodestar leads where Destiny directs; and if we fail to follow it, we flicker out like the firefly in the dark, insects of Life, not instruments for those guardian angels of the stars who direct the fates of nations. But they took great odds to follow that Lodestar of the Western Sea—did those old adventurers of Russia, and buccaneers of England, and sea plunderers of Spain, and American corsairs of the Seven Seas. From Coxcomb Hill, can't you picture them cruising up and down the Pacific Coast, now tacking out to sea to avoid a smash between shore rocks and inrush of [58] VANCOUVER'S RACE TO THE NORTHWEST rumbling angry tide; now dodging in boats that tossed to the surf like corks between the suck of quicksands and the knife-edge rocks; now scrambling ashore for stove wood and fresh water, and scampering at night-fall, when the winking camp-fires of Indians blinked amid the deep greenery, where treacherous savages of Rogue River, or Clatsops and Chinooks of the Columbia, or the wreckers of Tatoosh near Murderers' Island off Flattery Cape would have lured the whites to disaster amid the labyrinthine waterways ?_ Here came the Spanish dons on the great adventure, gay as. boys on holiday, dressed in all the picturesque grace of cocked hats, silver braid and plume above velvet cape with gold buttons and pearl-hilted sword and leather- scrolled sheath for brace of great pistols. Aguilar on a little frigate in 1603 had noted the muddy willow-grown outlet of a river. Was it the Columbia? Too far south. May have been the Umpqua or the Rogue; but it gave vogue to the Indian tradition of a great River of the West, which coast tribes called Oregon. And then came Juan Perez in 1774—just four years before Cook the Englishman—on a wabbly little corvette with friars to convert the heathen and cannon to put the fear of God in their hearts. Indians he saw aplenty in their great dugouts singing as they circled round him both up near Queen Charlotte Islands and off Nootka Sound, when he may have lost "those two spoons" which Spain set up as proof of discovery prior to Cook; but Perez for very good reasons did not land, though accompanied by that Martinez as pilot who took as prizes Meares' ships in the presence of Robert Gray fifteen years later. The fog was dense, the sea boisterous, and [59] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE the eighty-eight men on his ship poor match against two or three hundred Indians circling round. Perez was demoted to position of pilot for his failure to land and take possession of all the coast from Mexico to Russian Alaska; but Spain had no desire to annex these fogbound icy coasts. Besides, his seamen had as yet no remedies for scurvy and though his sailors were athirst for fresh water, they had to content themselves with wines. And then in 1775 on the same wobbly corvette came Bruno Heceta with a little schooner to skim the coast like a gull under a young lieutenant, Juan Bodega Quadra. Perez went as pilot under Heceta, who proved a bolder commander; and both ships had in all one hundred and six men; but it was noticed that where Heceta followed the timid guidance of Perez, Don Quadra, at this time in his late twenties, with the boldness of youth either purposely or by chance again and again slipped from the surveillance of Heceta and cut his own course through the silver seas. Juan de Fuca Straits, Heceta undoubtedly found, though they did not lead to Hudson Bay, and Quadra paid dearly enough for giving the slip to the protection from his commander's big guns. He had fewer than sixteen men, who must have been packed aboard close as sardines. His schooner was not so long as Tatoosh Island dugouts—it was barely thirty-six feet and about twelve feet athwart. Six men rowed ashore off Flattery Cape for kitchen stove wood and fresh water. Three hundred Tatoosh warriors hidden ashore received them—received them with showers of barbed arrows that would go in, stick in and would not pull out. Two Spanish seamen sjprang in the se§ anrj were drowned [60] VANCOUVER'S RACE TO THE NORTHWEST in the backwash. The other four were torn to pieces by bloody hands and doubtless eaten; for the Tatoosh tribes were cannibals. Quadra's brave fellows were riotous to march ashore and avenge the massacre; but Quadra knew five men, one boy and four sick sailors could not defeat the screaming mob behind that screen of rock and brush, who were now pushing out in canoes with piercing yells to surround and wreck the schooner. He fired at the nearest dugout and saw six Indian lives pay for his six dead Spaniards. Later his men tried to punish the murderers by hurling a harpoon at a war canoe. It pierced a naked back but did not hold. Remember that, too, for it comes up later in Maquinna's complaint up at Nootka that the whites had been first to attack. Heceta later loaned six men to take the place of the massacred crew; but Heceta had had enough. With Perez, he turned south, though it was only July. The scene of attack became known as Dolores Islands, or Destruction, or Martyr Point. Remember that, too; for you will meet it again. It was on his way south that Heceta observed the mouth of "a great river" behind "San Roc," Cape Disappointment. The excuse he gave for not going in was that his crew were so ill of scurvy, if he had dropped anchor at the mouth of the Columbia, there was not a man left with strength to heave it up; and as Perez died two days before reaching Monterey, the excuse must be accepted as valid. But scurvy or no scurvy, Quadra spread his sails and hied north to Sitka waters. Quadra himself was in bed with scurvy when the little schooner turned south. Perhaps not so picturesque but equally daring were the English sea rovers like Meares, and Barclay with his [61] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE seventeen-year-old bride; and the thirty or more Boston and Salem and New York and New Bedford privateers, who came assuming all risks with no national power behind them. Lowrie and Guise, the Englishmen of the East India Company a few years before Gray's first voyage, had left the drunken surgeon McKay at Nootka to learn the language and act as interpreter and "drummer of trade." Drunk or sober, McKay could hardly be called a coward; and his adventures, if known, might fill a book. He married a native woman and sank like lead in water to Indian level, from which Barclay rescued him and carried him to China, where in the backwash of harbor front, he is a derelict lost to history. Barclay had a magnificent ship for those days, the Imperial Eagle, 400 tons with 20 great guns, though she sailed under Austrian colors from the Thames to avoid trouble with the East India Company, the same difficulty avoided by Meares. He reached Nootka about the time Gray was preparing to leave Boston on the first voyage. With the daring of youth—he was only twenty-six—Barclay went up those Juan de Fuca Straits and when his rowboat went ashore where Don Quadra met disaster in the voyage of ten years before, his mate Mr. Miller and five English seamen received the same treacherous reception from the Tatoosh warriors and perished to a man. Dyed with the blood of white traders from the first were these straits of old Juan de Fuca, and unprovoked the attack in every case; for the Tatoosh warriors were the prize murderers of this coast. Don Martinez, the ruthless, may have had good enough reason for shooting Maquinna's brother like a dog and throwing the corpse out to sink in the bloodstained waters. Also, he may have had a good motive for his demonstration of power by seizing Meares' pri- [62] SfSL w -amp. \ Sps*"-^' "-*"^'-^P-J^'*.'v;Ss^ - o ^> s* m ^^ HE LOWER REACHES OF THE COLUMBIA RIVER FROM LONGVIEW TO ASTORIA THE CELEBRATION IN HONOR OF THE COMING OF AGE OF THE DAUGHTER OF CHIEF MAQUINNA VANCOUVER'S RACE TO THE NORTHWEST vateers and erecting a fort at Nootka or Hog Island, bristling with cannon to overawe Maquinna and Wicanish and Tatoosh. And now came on the shifting kaleidoscopic screen of the Columbia, the two matchless gentlemen of all sea annals, to decide whether Spain and England were to fight over "two silver spoons" and some "sea-cat skins," as the sea otter was popularly called. Pirate, freebooter, sailor under different flags to avoid clash over claims of the East India Company to levy licenses and port charges—all these Meares was; but the fact remained he had been an English navy man. His miserable shanty of clapboards, called by courtesy a fort, at Nootka flew the English flag. His captains and seamen, seized by Martinez and treated as the Americans testified "with all imaginable kindness," had been Englishmen. Granted their ship papers were irregular enough to arouse suspicion in the Spanish don's mind that Meares and his crews might be only pirates under different flags and that Don Martinez realized he had gone too far, inasmuch as Spain wanted no war with England in Europe. Meares claimed $600,000 worth of English property had been seized by Spain. The one thing the Mistress of the Seas would never acknowledge from the days of Drake and Good Queen Bess was that any sea was a closed sea to her. The thing she would never tolerate was the seizure of her seamen on any waters in all the world. Also, if she could upset Spain's proofs of first discovery from Mexico to Russian Alaska, it gave her a vast coast the wealth of which no man guessed, and sea commerce was, as it is to-day—her life-blood. [63] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE England wanted war with Spain as little as Spain wanted war with England in the impending crash of empires in Europe; but Meares' complaints now changed what had been the backwater of an unknown coast to the Eldorado of the world's treasure hunters. Vancouver was not only to get back all Spain had seized, but he was to make a complete survey of the Pacific Coast from the Spanish territory in the south to Russian Alaskan territory in the north. Now contemplate what has happened in a little over a hundred years! On this coast are five cities, Tacoma, Seattle, Portland, Vancouver, Victoria, with a population of over a million; add to them the people of lesser cities such as Longview, Astoria, Aberdeen, Everett, Bellingham, New Westminster—one could enumerate a dozen. A million and a half people are living where only a century and a quarter ago ten thousand raiding savages ruled these waters. You can count at one time in the harbor of any one of these cities as many ships as then came to the Northwest Coast in ten years. Yet when John Vancouver wrote the introduction to his deceased brother's voyages in 1798, he gravely questioned "what beneficial consequences if any" were "likely to follow to the interests of humanity, or the increase of useful knowledge from all our boasted attempts to explore the distant recesses of the globe." Why, the record of these voyages "positively contradicted each other." To John Vancouver, the value of "the cat skins" did not weigh in the balance against his brother's life cut short in his forty-first year by the ardor of his work as an explorer. George Vancouver had been with Cook as middy. He had served in the tropic seas of Jamaica when called to go to Nootka. The Navy gave him the best [64] VANCOUVER'S RACE TO THE NORTHWEST ships on its list—the Discovery, 340 tons, 20 cannons, 100 men, the Chatham, 135 tons, 10 guns, 45 men, copper fastened, plank sheaths, copper prowed. Broughton was to command the Chatham; and later a supply ship was to follow. Little need be told of the voyage except the ships set out from England in April of 1791 and rounded Good Hope instead of the Horn, and paused as usual for fresh supplies at Hawaii, where in the course of a formal Navy dinner a Hawaiian chief drank a bottle of brandy without diluting it and at once threw such a fit it took "four strong men to hold him." One might infer that Vancouver, who was a terribly strict disciplinarian, would see no more undiluted liquor was served to visiting chiefs on his ships. A number of young noblemen had gone for the adventure of it as middies with Vancouver; and when these kicked over the traces in the wild freedom of the new life, they were given the same treatment as common sailors—the triangle, or lashed to the wheel and whipped. It didn't make Vancouver popular, but it gave his voyage the cleanest record next to Gray's of a lawless age in a lawless world. There were no outrages perpetrated on savages in Vancouver's voyaging for four years. He came through clean, to die before his voyages had been published. Mother Carey's chickens, stormy petrels, whales and "porps" floundering in a seething sea, fog and rain and sleet, a lone albatross, always omen of bad weather— welcome him to Pacific shores in April of 1792 as these harbingers of tempestuous seas had welcomed all his predecessors. His first landfall north of Spanish possessions seems to have been about Mendocino, when heavy gales drove [65] J CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE him out from what is now Oregon coasts for almost two weeks. In vain Indian canoes of Cape Orford raced the seething tides to invite him in to trade. With big ships, he could take no risks for trade, when he had been sent out to explore farther north. Vancouver did not like American private traders. His era was too close to the Revolutionary War. Also his aim was to anticipate these Boston cruisers in getting England's title to possessions nailed down first. Let us forget that. His explorations coming after an American's discoveries confirmed those discoveries. On April 27, after passing Cape Lookout in a fog and missing Tillamook owing to the haze, he sighted that Cape Disappointment of Meares' voyage and recorded that he did not consider the possibility of Heceta's river "worthy of attention." Here are his words when a day later he met Gray up off Juan de Fuca Straits and heard Gray's belief that a great river did exist behind Disappointment. "The river Mr. Gray mentioned should, from the latitude he assigned to it, have existence in the bay South of Cape Disappointment. This we passed on the forenoon of the 27th; and as I then observed, if any inlet should be found, it will be a very intricate one, and inaccessible to vessels of our burden, owing to the reefs and broken water, which appeared in its neighborhood. Mr. Gray stated that he had been several days attempting to enter it, which he at length was unable to effect in consequence of a very strong outset. ... I was thoroughly convinced, as were also most persons on board, that we could not possibly have passed any safe navigable opening, harbor or place of security for shipping on the coast, from Cape Mendocino to Classet . . . nor had we any reason to alter our opinions." [66] VANCOUVER'S RACE TO THE NORTHWEST' I give Vancouver's words because they are an example of how far prejudice can deflect a good man's judgment; but not all Vancouver's crews agreed with him. One of the underlings on the Chatham, whom Vancouver held under such strict discipline, records—"the Discovery made signal we were standing into danger and we hauled out, this situation is off Cape Disappointment from whence a very extensive shoal stretches out and there was every appearance of an opening actually seen, but it was passed without appreciating the importance of the place." Evidently the smaller Chatham could go closer in than the big Discovery; but with Europe suspended above the abyss of war over Nootka, Vancouver would take no chances among those rocks where the tide clutched in ghostly fingers up the Haystack and Tillamook, or thundered in the rumble of earthquake back from the clash with the waters of the vast Columbia. The rest of Vancouver's course up to Nootka can be followed almost to the mile by the latitude given and the names, which remain to this day. He passed Tatoosh's Islands, of course, and recognized them as the Martyr or Dolores of the Spaniards and Barclay; and he describes the features of the group—the ledges, the violent angry sea, one oblong lying northwest by southeasterly very verdant with a cove almost cutting the islet in two and an Indian village approached by an almost impassable causeway; then the enchanting landscape which any tourist to Puget Sound can see to-day—flowers ariot in April and May, berries, such berries, of every variety as have made all the coast from Everett to Bellingham famous for small fruits; the funereal pines on both the islands and the main, coast; the opalescent, translucent Olympics which Meares had named. It was here two [67] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE days later that he descried a strange sail on the offing of these painted seas and signaling sent Lieutenant Puget and Mr. Menzies to meet Robert Gray, whose report he would not credit—that there was a River of the West behind Disappointment, which Gray was going directly to reconnoiter. One point is noted of these Tatoosh warriors which explains why that sinister tribe holding from Fraser River to the Columbia were such raiders and body-snatchers—they wanted to sell a child for some copper or a musket. The Indian dugouts were full of household furniture piled helter skelter—boxes and baskets, kettles and shell spoons and skulls—for this being spring the Tatoosh folk were coming back from winter man-hunt inland to whale-hunt and man-hunt by sea. When Vancouver's men went ashore in two small boats, they noted the human skulls on high poles decorating the village houses. Mount Rainier, Port Townsend, Oak Point, Puget Sound, Whidby, Port Orchard, Vashon, Burrard Inlet, Mount Baker named after a lieutenant, half the modern names from Flattery to the modern cities of Vancouver and Seattle and Tacoma—mark Vancouver's surveying here. Should the names given by Vancouver be changed back to old Indian designations? That is a hot point over which the local historians are still at daggers drawn. When Vancouver's men landed in this danger zone, a line was drawn with a stick on the sands between Indian and whites and each party ordered to keep on their own side; so even if Vancouver's excessive caution robbed him of the discovery of the two great unknown rivers here— the Columbia and the Fraser—it also averted such tragedies as had named the Martyr Islands and later ended in such awful catastrophe as engulfed both the [68] VANCOUVER'S RACE TO THE NORTHWEST Jewitt ship and Astor's Tonquin. He remarked on the amazing sea life—the seals roaring from the rocks, the salmon, the great eagles apoise, cranes in flocks, gulls thick as snowflakes and petrels in clouds. He also noted how like the plains Indians, these warriors strengthened their bows by serpent skins wound round and round the wood when wet, then shrunken hard and tight as iron when dry; but these fellows had no sign language like the plains tribes. The Chinook jargon had not yet developed. When the Tatoosh warriors strung their bows "to hear them twang," Vancouver swung his swivels and sent one shot humming harmless overhead to let them hear "it sing." Naturally, Tatoosh did not like this sort of watchful commander nor his music. Port Grey farther in, was not named after Robert Gray, the American. It was in honor of a George Grey of the Royal Navy. Vancouver, Lieutenant Puget and Lieutenant Johnson out in three small boats kept plying what are now the waters of Puget Sound for almost nine days, and although damp powder was spread ashore on rocks and sands to dry, enough powder was kept dry on hand to convince Tatoosh father and son that these whites in three-cornered shovel hats, in tight-fitting blue coats and sky-colored knee breeches, were not altogether ornamental. Everett, Blaine, Birch Bay, Bellingham—all were seen and noted. Then up north threading the narrow passageway, where he ought to have discovered Fraser River and didn't because the fog lies thick as a curtain on the swampy reaches of that great delta, he descried a Spanish brig and a Spanish schooner of Spain's Royal Navy, whose officers told him Don Quadra was waiting at Nootka with three frigates. They told him of the Fraser; but again the obstinate Englishman could not credit that his care- [69] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE ful survey had missed a second river, though he did acknowledge "mortification." Myths, of course I Was not this mystic coast full of myths and seamen's yarns and Indian fables? Facts only for Vancouver. Vancouver was now in his thirty-sixth year. If he had been older or younger, he might have been less sure in his snap judgments. He did observe that while the Indians from Flattery north seemed to have independent chiefs like Wicanish of Clayoquot and Tatoosh of what is now New Westminster, and spoke varying dialects, they all seemed more or less in league with and under advice of Maquinna at Nootka. All were terrible thieves; and he didn't like their nasty habits of having human heads in basket boxes. Turning southwest from the north end of the Inland Passageway between Vancouver Island and the mainland, he came abreast the famous Nootka, August 28, 1792, and anchored in a drizzling, blankety fog. The Spanish boats rowed out to tow them in through the mist to Friendly Cove. Thirteen guns thundered a welcome and thirteen thundered response and the misty mountains roared in rip-rock, fog-muffled echo that must have struck a strange chord in the villainous heart of old Maquinna. A grand dinner was held on the 29th—a five-course dinner at which Maquinna sat in, stately as a bronze statue, using the foreigners' knives and forks with a cool dexterity that amazed his hosts. Maquinna gave one of his mask dances; but both commanders had the sense to keep these masked dancers ashore. Maquinna had at this time at least two good- looking wives and one fine daughter. The dinner wound up with fireworks and rockets; and it was followed by other stately dinners at which Maquinna was always [70] VANCOUVER'S RACE TO THE NORTHWEST guest, in one case arriving in his birthday suit, when he was cuffed off by the laughing middies and came back clothed in the sea-otter cloak and the little teapot basket hat made famous in picture. It can hardly be credited the rascal did not know better; for he had been acquainted with white men's customs for fourteen years. He probably did it in crafty defiance to see what the courteous white commanders would do. He found out. No tricks with these two men. The Spanish fort was on Hog Island, Maquinna's village on a high embankment on Nootka Island overlooking the fort; but those brass snouted Spanish and English guns! They poked twelve menacing noses from ports and some sixteen from the taffrails. They pointed their shining menace from the two-story Spanish palisaded fort; and then came in some Yankee ships and I grieve to add the usual Jamaica kegs of drugged rum. At least two American vessels came before Gray returned from the Columbia, where, to Vancouver's great chagrin, the Boston captain announced the discovery and naming of the Columbia. Gray's sailors were not the rum offenders. Quadra, Vancouver and Broughton visited Maquinna's winter quarters up Tashees River fifteen miles. If it did not alarm, it certainly put the two commanders on guard to observe Maquinna's warriors had plenty of muskets and iron-headed spears. A Spanish boy was found murdered one night after a brawl, with throat slit and thighs dismembered. Why, hardly needed explanations—thirty trading vessels a year were on the coast; so were as many hogsheads of rum. Whatever Maquinna's faults, he protected his women; and whatever the Spanish sailors' virtues, they did not include respect for Indian women; so the fault may have been on both sides. Maquinna [71] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE said it was. When Gray came to Nootka in September, he lent Vancouver his own rough chart of the Columbia. It is unnecessary to follow the complicated parleys between Vancouver and Quadra over Nootka. They fill volumes of special pleading. Vancouver did not speak Spanish. Don Quadra did not speak English. One Dob- son acted as interpreter. Vancouver understood he was to receive back all the lands and seized property, which would have wiped out Spain's title for all time. Quadra understood he was only to restore the exact property seized from Meares; and Haswell of Gray's ship says frankly that, though each graceful leader agreed to refer the dispute'to the home governments, it was the tact, the hilarious good-nature and the matchless courtesy of both gentlemen that averted an armed clash. As the world knows, $210,000 settled Meares' claim of $600,000. Nootka was given up by both nations as neutral ground for all traders, with the result that with the exception of the Jewitt ship and Astor's Tonquin it became deserted as a graveyard. It remains so to this day. The farewell dinner with Vancouver late in September was more cordial than the Spanish welcome. Healths were drunk and twenty-one guns fired and two poor Sand^. wich Island girls brought in by the Jenny of Bristol were dressed in English garb by Vancouver's orders and carried back to their native land. Disciplinarian, Vancouver may have been, but gentleman in the truest sense he always proved. There was a terrible tale current on the coast at this time. I give it only because our modern sentimentalism shuts its eyes to facts on both sides of all disputes. It was that Maquinna had a habit of sacrificing two captives at each monthly feast to the new moon. This explained the skulls on poles and the heads [72] VANCOUVER'S RACE TO THE NORTHWEST in wicker baskets in each chief's house. The sailors averred the captives chosen were regaled with all delicacies as the Aztecs in Mexico regaled their human sacrifices. Then the chief would invite the tribe to his great house, blindfold himself and amid demon screams of applause start in pursuit of the captives. The two caught were sacrificed and the flesh eaten. It is not a pretty tale, but it does away with a lot of misspent regret over the passing of the Indian era. The little American sloop Adventure was sold to Quadra for seventy-five sea otters. Then in October, Vancouver set out to explore that river discovered by Gray. It is hard to be generous to Vancouver in his account of the Columbia. He was fair to neither his own high standards nor to Gray's generosity in lending rough charts; and first charts are always rough and inaccurate. The great mistake of all Pacific navigators prior to Gray was that they lay off those rock reefs watching the smash of tide and riverflow in what looked like a maelstrom that would engulf anything human. As Bun- yan would put it in homely phrase, there seemed to be a lion or dragon across the path to their Paradise. If they had come closer, they would have found the lion was chained. There was a safe passageway between the bar and the cape. Gray had found it because, like Bun- yan's Pilgrim, he went ahead. The big ship under Vancouver lay in the offing; but Broughton got inside and with a small launch rowed alongshore and noted Tongue Point, a long spit of glacial silt and soft mud, which you can see as from aeroplane as you stand below the Astor pillar of Coxcomb Hill. Broughton saw the opal peak of St. Helen's and the ' [73] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE Chinook Indian village deserted for the winter on the north shore just opposite modern Astoria. Then he passed across to the south shore among the swampy sands of Point Adams, which Gray had named after the American statesman. The Indian village on the south shore was also abandoned by the Clatsops, now in winter quarters away from coastal rains and floods. He estimated the distance between the two capes as four to five miles —not so far astray considering these sands on the south shore shift each year. Young's River was duly christened for Sir George Young of the Royal Navy. You will find almost all the Royal Navy names of that year spattered by Vancouver over the coast of the Columbia; but rather than repudiate these names does not their continuance really emphasize for all time that Gray's little vessel accomplished what all the power of the Royal Navy couldn't? Does it not add to Gray's prestige? Seven miles—said Broughton—terminated the discoveries of Mr. Gray. Later, these figures are revised by Vancouver, and Gray is credited not with the thirty miles which he claimed, up almost as far as modern Longview, but between fifteen and eighteen miles—figures varying according as you measure from the bar or inside the cape; but Vancouver's jealousy got another disconcerting jolt inside Cape Disappointment. He was not second inside the river; for the Jenny of Bristol—the kidnaper of the two Hawaiian girls—lay rocking at anchor in the great bay now named after her captain—Baker. The fact that Baker was an Englishman took the curse off the third time Vancouver was just a few days behind a quicker commander. On October 16, Broughton set up the Columbia in a rowboat; and you can follow his course to-day along the [74] VANCOUVER'S RACE TO THE NORTHWEST river to Longview and Portland. He coasted the countless islands, the high rocky south shore, the deeper water —deep enough for seagoing vessels—on the south side. Puget Island, that beautiful stretch of irrigated farms like gardens, takes the name of his brother lieutenant. Here was a new type of Indian, not speaking the language of Chinook and Clatsop and Tatoosh—a better type, as all inland hunters were higher types than the coastal fishing tribes, the latter spending all their lives in alternations of gorging idleness and wild whale hunts and wilder man hunts, then another gorge of human flesh and whale blubber. Only the whale oil saved the tribes from extinction through their own greedy vices. It purged their bodies as their horrible religion of fast and human sacrifice failed to purge their souls. As many as one hundred and fifty natives sometimes escorted Broughton in twenty-five canoes. He came to what he calls Belle Vue Point; and a beautiful view it was—just ten or eighteen miles beyond the outlet of the Willamette, where the American city of Vancouver stands to-day. Here, too, for the first time he saw Mt. Hood. At the Cowlitz, or modern Longview, he spotted that high rock where the Indians deposited the bodies of their dead and he gave it the appropriate name of Coffin Rock. Castle Rock he described as the turret of an old Gothic fort. Mount Hood, named after Admiral Hood, was seen as a great pink snow dome in the sky to the south. Beyond the Willamette, the river seemed to coil north and by signs of water falling through their hands, the Indians gave Broughton to understand that boats could ascend no farther. This is the first record we have of the famous Dalles and Celilo Falls; but, oh, regrets that a soul as big as Vancouver's could record as his final [75] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE judgment—"It does not appear that Mr. Gray either saw or was ever within five leagues of its [the Columbia's] entrance." His journal was not issued till after his death. It was edited by his brother under Royal Navy tutelage. Vancouver had, of course, taken formal possession of all these regions for England. Diplomats took strange liberties with voyager's annals in those old days as you will find if you examine the original handwritten copies in the public Records, London, and the published books. I have given an example of this in Vancouver's Voyages and another can be found in the Radisson Voyage of a century before, where intoxicated commanders are called plain drunk by Radisson but "greatly preoccupied" in the official report. Let us give Vancouver the benefit of the generous doubt; for the dead cannot defend themselves; and in national disputes, a diplomat's conscience is an elastic thing. Vancouver's farther voyaging for two more years up the Pacific Northwest to Alaskan settlements, was the most accurate survey of all the navigators; and it stands as such to this day. Just one more point—off Dean's Canal, Vancouver had gone in surveying the first week of June. If he had been just six weeks later, he would have met one of the greatest overland discoverers of the world—Alexander Mackenzie, who had inscribed on the rocks in red paint— "Alexander Mackenzie, from Canada, by land, the twenty- second of July, one thousand seven hundred and ninety- three." Irony of ironies that the greatest explorer coveting the glory of first discoverer should have been in three cases, the Columbia, the Fraser, the Inland Passageway round Vancouver Island, too late and then at the entrance to Dean's Canal—just a few weeks too early; [76] VANCOUVER'S RACE TO THE NORTHWEST but that does not detract from the fact that he was one of the greatest navigators the world knows. His body lies under a humble headstone in Petersham, Surrey, England, with the simple inscription—"Captain George Vancouver, Died in the year iyg8, aged 40"; but his name is inscribed for all time on the Pacific Northwest Coast. iii Note. The data for Vancouver's Voyage are drawn, of course, from Vancouver's ship log primarily; but to this must be added the fine identification of many points worked out in the histories of Judge Howay and Judge Carey, and by the later investigations in London sources by Professor Meany and the Portland Historical Society and Washington Historical Society. The same wild differences in the spelling of Indian names exist, but these can now be almost perfectly harmonized by the accurate latitudes and longitudes given in Vancouver; and in each case, the modern spelling is given, though it is not clear whether we are dealing with Tatoosh father or Tatoosh son; and that question is left open. i77l PART III: The Race Overland to the Pacific. Alexander Mackenzie. 1789-1793. WHEN the race around the world by water for discovery and exploration of the Pacific Northwest practically ended with Gray and Vancouver, the race overland for the Western Sea really began. Vancouver's and Meares' and Gray's charts had proved for all time how utterly astray were the old maps. Instead of a narrow strip between the headwaters of the Missouri and the Pacific, there lay a broad Empire—at the narrowest at least a thousand miles across. Now a thousand miles is just a little longer than from New York to Chicago; and Louisiana, men now know, did not extend beyond the Rocky Mountains. Here was a No- Man's Land—pronounced a No-Man's Land officially by Spain and England when Vancouver and Don Quadra parted without fighting over "a sea-cat skin" or "two silver spoons," which the diplomats tried to use to prove claim to the territory first sighted by English and Spanish cruisers. Here was prize, indeed, for first discoverer and first explorer overland; but if the rush round the world by sea almost brought war between England and Spain over the Pacific Northwest, there was already war—war to the hilt, bloody war with the scalping knife for weapon, among those pressing overland. Worse than that, it was not an official international war. It was a war of lawless privateers, freebooters of the wilderness beyond the [78] RACE OVERLAND TO THE PACIFIC reach of any law, drenching the frontiers so that advances westward both north and south of the Canadian Boundary became known as "the Bloody Ground." In the late 1600's, Pierre Esprit Radisson, by way of the St. Lawrence and Ottawa, had been first to blaze a white man's trail from the Great Lakes to the Upper Mississippi, and first to blaze another trail from the Great Lakes to Hudson Bay. The Hudson's Bay Company of Gentlemen Adventurers had obtained a monopoly of trade in furs from King Charles II for all territory inland from Hudson Bay water; but down in Quebec French companies had obtained a like monopoly from the French Government for trade in furs inland from the Great Lakes. French power fell in Quebec in 1759 when Cook had been a junior officer in transports of English men-of-war, and the ink was hardly dry on the Treaty of 1763 ceding French Canada to the British when Scotch Highlanders, who had been officers in the campaign, began gathering up the dispersed French voyageurs and coureur de bois of the old French fur companies, outfitting them with goods for trade and boldly pushing their fur scouts north and west to the Missouri and the Rocky Mountains. These Montreal groups of traders ultimately united in what was known as the Northwest Fur Company and by 1771 they were at the headwaters of the Saskatchewan, and by 1789 up the Missouri and Mississippi as far as the Yellowstone. Did the Hudson's Bay Company with the official backing of the English Government—or "the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street," as its rivals called it—lie down quietly under this invasion of its field by Scotch merchants of Montreal and Quebec? It did not. [79] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE It was all a No-Man's Land west of the Great Lakes and neither fur company was overanxious for the home government to know of the methods being used to oust its rival. The methods were not those of Vancouver and Don Quadra. They were rum, sword, musket, pistol, raid, ambuscade, guerilla attack, with the Indian tribes for tools. It is the darkest page in the fur trade of America and lasted roughly from 1771 to 1820—a half century—and covered an area from the headwaters of the Platte and Missouri to the headwaters of the Mackenzie and the Columbia, and later down the Columbia to modern Astoria's site. Over all this vast No-Man's Land tramped horse brigades of fur trappers, paddled canoe men in pairs, out fpr the big English companies of London and Montreal and the big American companies of St. Louis and Mackinac and New York. Who was to be first on the ground and chart these seas of prairies and billows of mountains? Who was going to nail down first claim to this wilderness empire vaster than Ancient Rome? Did any man ever contemplate the larger possibilities? Yes, the Master Minds did. The little tools did not. Yet both worked out the Design. Coastal traders might have souls no larger than "a cat skin" and inland fur traders souls not so large as the pelt of an industrious beaver; but each on his own little job somehow did accomplish the bigger job of creating and realizing an empire. There began the race overland in frantic haste for that Inland Empire. Though a race overland, curiously enough it was at first a race by water in canoe instead of schooner, and in point of time swifter than round the world with full-blown sails. Few coastal ships reached the Pacific from Bristol, England, or from the Atlantic States inside six months; still fewer from [80] RACE OVERLAND TO THE PACIFIC London inside a year. Then begins an era when the canoe often arrived on the Pacific both from Montreal and from Lake Superior within three months, though half the time it was working against current. Poets have chanted the myths of Argonauts. Did ever Argonauts equal these treasure seekers of the Columbia River portrayed on the Astor panels? The very year that French Canada had been turned over to the British—1763—there had been born in far away Stornoway, Scotland, a lad—Alexander Mackenzie —who came to Montreal in his early teens to work in the Scotch counting house of relatives, who were afterwards to form the great Northwest Company. These were the men now gathering up the dispersed voyageurs of the French fur traders, outfitting their canoes with goods and pushing west and northwest into and beyond the territory of the slow-going old Hudson's Bay Company. After apprenticeship in Montreal and Detroit, where he proved both physical fitness and mental power to command, Mackenzie had been despatched in 1786, his twenty-third year, to that very Back of Beyond in the fur trade—Athabasca Lake. His relatives in Montreal were that same Stuart family, later connected with the Astorians at Spokane House and on Gray's Columbia River. The gentlemen, even junior partners of the Northwest Company to which Alexander Mackenzie had risen by 1787 in spite of his youth, wore knee breeches, and tight, long-tailed, close-fitting coats with a profusion of brass buttons, shovel-shaped Napoleonic hats, and cut their hair short enough for a bob behind or in closer curl. They were meticulously garbed; for the Indian loved pomp in his "bourgeois" or boss. The night before setting out, a pompous dinner was celebrated at the fur [81] ■m CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE traders' rendezvous—the Beaver Club, Montreal—in the words of the formal invitation "to discuss the merits of a beaver tail, buffalo hump, or moose rib." From what I can learn of those last nights in both Montreal and Fort William on Lake Superior, I believe they were not particularly dry nights: the gentlemen galloped round the floor on chairs in mock buffalo hunts, charged down imaginary rapids astride benches, and sometimes in the early hours of dawn had to be rescued from beneath the banquet table; but it was their farewell to fellowship for years—in many cases for life. Outside, above Lachine Rapids on the water front of the St. Lawrence River, the voyageurs held high carnival in like though rougher fashion. They were clad in buckskin trousers and moose-skin moccasins, beaded or worked in porcupine quills, with fringe and many bells on trouser legs and ankles for the dance—the same old "Tai-ai-ai" round and round in a pounding pace that may be seen among them in the Far North to this day. The majority also had buckskin coats, but for daily use in cold weather usually donned the blanket coat, of which they could draw the capote up over the head. The proprietors had supplied both the rum and the moose for the last grand barbecue. Hair was banded back by colored handkerchief—a wise precaution when on portage, as the paddler might drop his pack to take a shot at game through the woods and the red head-band always warned the marksman this was a man, not a moose or elk or deer. Pitch- pine faggots furnished light. Tepees dotted the shores, and loaded canoes with oilcloth stretched over cargoes of articles for barter rocked gently to tide or lay beached to be shoved out at dawn; and the wild dance lasted until dawn. The cargoes consisted of woolen cloth, arms, am- [82] RACE OVERLAND TO THE PACIFIC munition, tobacco in almost unlimited quantities, threads, fishing lines, twine, knives, kettles of iron and brass and copper, handkerchiefs gay of color as poppy fields, and, to the days of McLoughlin in Oregon in 1821, strong liquors of every variety to be diluted, with a crude medicine chest for every crew, always containing a goodly store of laudanum to deaden pain—to drug the liquor, too, if the Indians became obstreperous. In all, by 1786, over one hundred and twenty clerks at a wage from $500 upwards went to the Pay d'en Haut every spring, over a thousand canoe men and thirty-five guides earning from $200 to $500 yearly in our money. Pay included keep and clothes. Partners took pay in profits and seldom saw real money till they "came out." Those who could not await profits were credited with $500 to $1,500 yearly till they "came out," when the balance of profit was paid in cash or in shares ranking the aspirant juniors as partners. The Westerners were called North Men, the voyageurs, who went only as far as Lake Superior, Man- geurs, or Pork Eaters. The latter could take Indian wives and families beyond Fort William at the companies' expense—a fine piece of strategy; for it ensured welcome and safety among the wild Indian tribes, good interpreters, in most cases better conduct among the men, and always faithful workers with the needle; also deer thong and hides for clothing and tepees; and yet more faithful camp makers and dressers of meat and berries for food. This explains the almost unaccountable reason for white men so often marrying Indian women. One-third of all wages was paid in advance, and he who wanted better fare than pork, molasses and rum in cold wet weather, had to supply himself by his firearms. American companies advanced as much as half to their men. Imagine any one [83] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE now setting out to cross an unknown wild continent with such equipment—no tea, no salt, no flavoring, no flour, till after 1820. Yet if they shunned dissipation after the farewell spree, the majority of the rank and file came through in health that was not only, perfect but tough to eighty and ninety years. Willow bark seasoned with castoreum supplied tea. Berries supplied flavor. Powdered roots made a flour paste, and salt was boiled where it could be found; and, for the great curse of seamen's life, a pine brew prevented scurvy and also cured many of the intestinal disorders which to-day wreck civilized life. The canoes we,re the most magnificent craft ever seen on water, cedar as far as the Great Lakes—or seven- banded birch bark gummed and tarred at seams, with cedar thwarts and ribs, and ash or ironwood paddles—in size from sixteen to thirty feet with eight to ten paddles, a sail, an axe, a powerful tow-line never fastened to prow but to the first thwart; otherwise the canoe hauled upstream would have sidled to the waves; also a kettle and sponge to bail out wave wash, and gum and deer thong to repair breaks. The Northern canoe brigade left Montreal on the earliest possible day in spring, when ice coming down the northern rivers had cleared. This was usually very late in April or early in May, when nights were yet frosty cold and downpour of shower alternated with warm midday sun. A last handshake to every man, a last pistol shot from some grandee of the partners, a shout from the men, and the voyageurs' paddles dipped to the rhythm of some old French song—the white paddlers in the long steady stroke, the Indians in the quick three dips on one side, [84] RACE OVERLAND TO THE PACIFIC then three on the other, which gave the canoe at a distance the appearance of a galloping many-legged fish monster that cleft the waters at a touch. Just west of Lachine was the little church you can see to-day—Ste. Anne's, the tutelary lady of the French voyageurs, to which each paddler had already made offering; and when canoe paused in last prayer for safe voyage to the "bonne Sainte Anne," the Indian canoemen could be seen dropping some crumbs of tobacco in the water as offering to their river goddess. They do it to this day. Then up to the Lake of the Two Mountains swimming in the blue Laurentian haze; and the crystal floods of the St. Lawrence were left for the purple floods of the Ottawa. Every foot up the Ottawa was consecrated to the French voyageurs by the blood of heroes, or myth of hunt—here the Rideau Falls, a curtain of watery beauty in the modern city of Ottawa; here the boiling Chaudiere torrents, where the canoes could not be towed but had to be taken out, the cargo carried on the men's backs in packs of eighty to one hundred pounds, and the length of the portage calculated by the number of "pipes" the running cargo carrier would smoke as he trotted along in a half-amble, half-run; here the Chats Rapids where the wild cats howled. If the portage were long or the weather vile, the wintering partner going along would usually order an extra cup of rum. Some of these portages were nine miles long in low water, six in flood-tide of thaw. Always it was the shallow water bothered the canoe man, where rocks ripped holes in the bottom of his frail craft, or sand-bank caught and held him fast, heaving to a flow that would not lift him off but sucked his paddles and poles when he tried to shove off. Countless folk-tales could be told of these Ottawa por- [85] J CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE tages, such as Dollard's famous fight against the Iroquois, or where the canoes left the Ottawa and went up the Mat- tawa direct to the Great Lakes—all this can be seen from Mattawa to North Bay to-day—and was lost in Nipissing for thirty to forty miles, where Mackenzie observed huge black billowing rocks overrun by fire then as now, where precious metals are yearly mined to-day of greater value than would have paid dividends on all the fur companies of America. Great was the fishing at each night's camp-fire on Nipissing Lake, as every devotee of rod and reel knows; but Nipissing led by French River for fifty or sixty miles to Georgian Bay and Lake Huron; and Mackenzie could not imagine what caused those "pot-boilers" as the Indians called the deep round holes in the rocky stream bed, but which we know now were grooved out by the boiling stones of vast glaciers melting and dropping boulders in past ages. More to the point was the fact that ugly squalls often cut up on the long traverse across Nipissing Lake; and woe betide the canoe that kept on the deep water of mid- lake if the wash caught her broadside instead of quartering to the waves. Eleven crosses marked where ten brave fellows and the bourgeois had gone down to watery graves. Those crosses have been renewed year after year and can be seen by every camper who takes the canoe trip down French River. At such points the rough paddlers paused and crossed themselves and again made prayer to "la Bonne Sainte Anne." Tents were quickly raised ashore, canoes hauled in, and tepee flaps pegged against gales when the choppy water forewarned such dangers. "Go on if you will, by damn," the frightened paddler would yell as the twisting wind brought tepee [86] RACE OVERLAND TO THE PACIFIC and poles down round his ears, "for moi, I go not—see you not the danger, my bourgeois?" But a kettle of willow-bark tea with a spice of rum would set him singing; and by the time blankets were dried and the canoe reloaded, the gay fellow would be back at the paddle in the quick three-flip dip that sent the canoe galloping at the next rapids. Such insubordination was always ignored; for it passed quickly as the lake squall. From Lake Superior westward across Georgian Bay with its rose-pink granite rocks and Lake Huron with its clear blue waters, if the weather was calm, risk would be taken of a quick traverse south of Manitoulin Island; but ordinarily the brigade hugged the shore of the North Channel past Whitefish Point and Spanish River on to "the Soo," or Leaping Waters. From this section of the Great Lakes,. the brigade began splitting up. Some canoes ascended the sluggish, swampy streams for the forested hinterlands of James Bay. Others struck from "the Soo" south for Mackinac and so across to the headwaters of the Mississippi; but the main body of the flotilla portaged on up past "the Soo" and again hugging the north shore of Lake Superior, came at last to the great rendezvous of the Northwest Company—Grand Portage or Fort William. Grand Portage of earlier days in the fur trade had to be gradually abandoned between 1800 and 1803 because it was found to be south of what was the International Boundary. It was Roderick Mackenzie, Alexander's kin, who reopened and used the older route of Kaministiquia somewhere about 1787-89; and Fort William became the capital of the Northwest fur trade. Books could be written on the romance of this place—Thunder Bay—where slept the great Thunder Bird which lashed Lake Superior [87] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE to hurricanes and cast its forked arrows of lightning at monsters of the deep; the Sleeping Giant of the harbor mountain, who hunted mastodons but in a fit of rage clubbed his good wife to death and after wandering east to Chautauqua Lake came back inconsolable and laid him down and died of remorse; but the facts of Fort William far exceeded the myths of Indian legend. As Mackenzie passed west, he predicted that some day copper and silver and iron would come from these very Lake Superior rocks, where some of the greatest copper, for the time richest silver, and for all time exhaustless iron pits of the world have been developed. What shrewd observers those discoverers were! He notes "the decrease of the water levels of the Great Lakes." If you want an example of that just examine the site of the old Northwest fort as marked by a monument and the water front to-day in Fort William. Fill-in and Chicago's drainage canal can hardly be blamed for what Mackenzie observed a century and a half ago. Fort William was literally the capital of the western fur trade till another McKenzie at Fort Union on the Missouri, and McLoughlin, who was in Alexander Mackenzie's day on Lake Superior and then went to Oregon, wrested supremacy from the old Grand Portage of Lake Superior. The fort itself was a village palisaded fifteen feet high, with a tower overlooking the almost Venetian blue of a lake that was a sea. A council house stood in the center of the yard where on the great maps lining the walls were drawn in afresh each year each new point discovered by the fur traders and each new latitude and longitude established by such men as Cook and Vancouver and Meares. Later you will realize with what avid eyes young Alexander Mackenzie scanned those [88] RACE OVERLAND TO THE PACIFIC maps as to what lay beyond Athabasca to the west. The dining room was sixty by thirty feet and adorned with the painted portraits of the partners. Across the front were piazza and balcony from which the partners with field-glasses could scan lake and river; for it was always planned that the northbound brigade from Montreal should here meet the southbound brigade from the Missouri and the Mississippi, Athabasca and Saskatchewan and the Rockies. The brigades usually met early in July, when the Winterers went back North with cargoes for trade and the Pork Eaters went back East with cargoes of furs. Bedrooms were provided for clerks and partners; but the voyageurs and Indians preferred to camp in tepees outside the walls, where they had their last festival or spree before disappearing again in the wilderness. The prison was called "the Butter Tub." I do not know how often it was used in a land which had no law; but I do know Rod Mackenzie says frankly that from 1786 to 1789, outside the walls when northern voyageurs and southern Pork Eaters met, "the furies of hell were let loose" and "the gates closed." Mackenzie records something here worth putting down. He is explaining why the Company could not supply its men with flour but had to depend on wild rice, pounded pumpkin, roots and berries for flour. It cost at this time $4.80 to bring a bushel of wheat or corn from Montreal to the head of the Lakes. What does it cost to-day? A few cents. As the company could allow only 20$* a day per man for food, that cost put flour off the list. I give these figures solely because they are the best illustration I know of what the iron horse has done to make possible the settlement of the West. From Fort William westward the old route of La Ver- [89] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE endrye was followed through Rainy River, Rainy Lake, Winnipeg River, Lake of the Woods to Winnipeg Lake; then another split in the brigade—one going up the Red and Assiniboine past modern Winnipeg's site, which had been a fur post from La Verendrye's journey to the height of land between the Missouri and the Saskatchewan, where dwelt and roamed the Sioux; the other pushing up the Saskatchewan for the Rockies and Athabasca, where roamed Cree and Assiniboine. Jacques Cardinal of the Rockies, where "the streams were his bottle of rum and never ran dry," the Stuarts of later Astoria, McLoughlin of Oregon, Ogden of Oregon, McKay of the Tonquin, Henry of the Columbia, the Clarkes, a hundred names of partners and voyageurs, which to-day dot Oregon and Washington and British Columbia maps—were among the adventurous worthies with old heads on young shoulders, who went West in the Saskatchewan brigades. The trip up the Saskatchewan in August and September, though against the current for 1,100 miles, was one of the most delightful sections of the long canoe voyage to the Western Sea. Wild rice abounded in the swamps east of Lake Winnipeg. Fish, the best of bass, from the cold waters of that tempestuous lake, more than 300 miles long, where I have been marooned myself for a week, kept the brigade in perfect health. The lake was usually crossed by the canoes at the Narrows between those black rocks, where the surf slashed up a hundred feet and the channel is in places barely two miles wide. Tamarack lined the west and north sides of the lake and game abounded for the good shots to lay up a haunch of venison, or spare ribs of moose, or bear, fat and luscious from summer diet of berries. Then, where the waters of half a continent poured [90] L RACE OVERLAND TO THE PACIFIC down the Saskatchewan—"mighty rushing waters," the Indians called the river—into the Lake and the shores narrowed and rose in red rocks high as the ramparts of the Hudson, were the Grand Rapids for nine miles—wild enough to run in all conscience, coming downstream in an avalanche of roaring billows past rocks the size of a large house and sharp as an edged knife, round curves and sharp twists in the boiling rapids; but quite impossible to ascend even if canoes were unloaded and the voyageurs half- swimming, half-wading had jumped out and hauled a hundred strong on the tump-line. These were the very worst and longest rapids to be run on all the voyage to the Pacific. Canoes were drawn ashore, packets and boats and men trundled by horse or oxen in a sort of coal dump- cart over narrow rails (in those days of wood) up past the Grand Rapids. My own memory of running down those rapids to the last plunge, where our guides made us get out and take the dump-cart for the last three miles, is one of the most thrilling experiences of my life; and barely are you past Grand Rapids and paddling in deep amber waters between forested rocky banks, with the echoing shrill voices of the Indian children at play, when you enter Cedar Lake—one of the most beautiful bodies of crystal waters in America. Twenty miles I think we counted the traverse to that old Fort Bourbon, where La Verendrye had a fort and its Hudson's Bay Company successor has a fort to-day. Cedar Lake is the last point at which you will see true cedars until you reach the other side of the main Rockies. Wild birds rest here in the spring on their long flight north and pause here again in the late summer to moult on their long flight south. To this day even, they are fearless of man; for the railroad has again diverted travel [91] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE from this finest of bird haunts. Every inland water bird that I know can be found here, not in thousands but in incredible tens of thousands. One can hardly dip paddle without hitting them. As for shooting, it would be waste of powder; they fly so fearless and low overhead, you could knock them down with your paddle. The air quivers and echoes with cry and counter-cry. The moulting nests can be seen everywhere amid the reeds; and the young by September are able to swim with small tails for rudders; in spite of mother duck's frantic clack of warning they will not dip, while she lures the canoe off her babies' track with deception of broken wing. Poor mother duck! Where did she learn that trick? She knew it long before she had ever heard gun or hum of Indian arrow. Was it taught her by swoop of eagle and hawk for easy wounded quarry, or quick snap of weasel and mink and fox from the shore reeds; but there she is playing broken wing before every canoe and there are the babies feeling their independence and refusing to get out of canoe range as they did when they were little bobblers and dipped and dived to her cry. And here are beavers so unconscious of humans they hardly stop sawing down poplar trees for winter bark salad and sticks to build dams. If you go too close to their dams, or between them and their young out for an evening swim, the old daddy will dive with a spank of his flat tail on the water resounding like a sounding board; and every little beaver head will disappear. And here are muskrats with the curiosity of gossips out for news to take back to, their domed nests in shallow waters, swimming abreast your canoe and asking as impudently as little beady brown eyes can ask—"What in the world do you want?" They [92] RACE OVERLAND TO THE PACIFIC will follow for a mile if you will let them; and what is more they will outrace your fastest pace. Such was the scene Mackenzie witnessed following his lodestar to the Western Sea. I had only been under tent cover some four weeks canoeing leisurely down the Saskatchewan one year when we reached Cedar Lake and I realized why the Northerners seldom "came out" but went back to dwell in the wilderness for life. The wilderness claimed them. Its wild carefree life compensated for all civilization could offer. I recall we positively dreaded being invited up to feather beds in a fort. We could make our own beds of fur rugs, which lie in my room yet, so much more comfortable and draught-proof with tent pegs tight as a drum head. When we landed at the old dock, where Mackenzie must have moored, we hardly had tents up below the shifting Northern Lights, which were flames of blood-red fire that night, before our Indian pilot was off to the dance in the fur ware-house where a Mackinaw raft had come in from the North with a brigade; and we heard the "tai-ai-ai" of the drum beater till the Northern Lights faded to dawn. Also I understood why our Indian pilot had asked us to keep his little candy valentines and brass finger rings with red stones the size of a bean dry in our oilskin pockets, when he had to jump out in a rain and haul the tump line to keep us from going ashore against rocks, or hitting the waves broadside in a swamping instead of riding the backwash prow up. Downstream from the Pas—now the terminal of a railway to Hudson Bay—to Cedar Lake can easily be made in a day. Upstream it is a nasty stretch of water amid countless sand-banks, shifting each year, overgrown with [93] ||j CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE muskrat-reed sixteen feet high. The river in high water may be fifty miles wide of sheer swamp, in low water perhaps a little less; but in its course it is a winding labyrinth in which you cannot find the main current swift from side current slack. One night we camped where not a foothold could be found that was not a sucking bog. We camped as the Indian voyageurs camp—willows three feet deep cut for bed, oil cloth over this to keep the seep of waters out, rugs over this for bed, with canoes tied to the willow shrubbery lapping and washing to slack water all night. Another night in the same section, against the plea of our Indian guide, we camped on a rock; for a sudden sleet storm was brewing and the sky was wild and black with threat of gale that marooned us for two days. The Indian warned us if we camped at this place we would be marooned; for this was Devil's Point; and as he was a Mackenzie descended from one of the six different Mackenzies in the fur trade between 1780 and 1793, but three generations back, we found he knew what he was talking about. Huge trees brought down from the mountains in the floods of spring thaw, jammed in the swamp behind the rock, black and moss-covered and rotting and fungus-grown and eerie for centuries. Down came the gale. Overhead the trees rocked and groaned and moaned. Screaming like lost souls—perhaps they were wild cats—the wind went ramping through the black swamp. We kindled a huge fire—"a fool white man fire" to disperse the gloomy dark and the voyageur's depression. No fear of "fool white man fire" spreading in this watery waste with the sleet dripping from trees in plunks of snow; but the shadows of the wind-blown flames danced like demons; and the Indian crouched by the fire and in a low voice told us horrible tales of Devil's Point— [94] I THE COLUMBIA IUVER HIGHWAY, ONE OF THE MOST IMPRESSIVE SCENIC ROUTES IN AMERICA RACE OVERLAND TO THE PACIFIC of the Loup-Garou Devil who ate women and children— Wauk-e-jock, he called him; and men who got possessed by the Loup-Garou's ghost became cannibals and ate human flesh—case after case he told us; and I found afterwards some of the cases were true—a mad Cree obsessed with the idea he was possessed by the Loup Garou had run amuck that year and some of his family had disappeared mysteriously before he was put in a strait-jacket and brought to an asylum by the Mounted Police; and that, I find by my notes, was only seventeen years ago. Mackenzie calls all this stretch of waters Mud Lake, not an inappropriate name, I swear, after being marooned on it two days and lost for one; and then comes the wide Cumberland Lake above the Pas. It is a scrawling body of water almost like a crab. The French had a fort at the rocky edge. The Hudson's Bay Company countered by having Hearn of the Coppermine River build an English fort here; and the Nor'westers of Montreal out- reached their rivals in the race for the Western Sea by a fort still higher up the Saskatchewan at Newpawi, though this was only twenty-four years after Scotch traders had set out from Montreal. At Newpawi nought of the old French and old Nor'westers fort exists to-day, only the lonely "lob-sticks" where the Cree families camped "on the lookout"—the Indian name of Newpawi—for the menfolk returning from the Great Lakes and Hudson Bay. The "lob-stick" was a pine chosen on the crest of the rolling hills—those I saw on the north side—and some feet below the top stripped of all branches, leaving only a little triangle of evergreen at the top—lover's vow he would return, pr young wife's signal she was waiting for her lord, who might have been ninety days from Montreal to Fort William and sixty days from Fort William to [95] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE Newpawi, though in good weather with no delays at the forts passed, the trip from Montreal to the Mountains has been made in ninety days. Mackenzie did not go on up the Saskatchewan round the great bend between modern Prince Albert and Battle- ford, where Blackfeet from Missouri and Sioux from the Mississippi came raiding the Crees and the Assiniboines of the plains and gave the name of their bloody frays to the Battling Ford, where the buffalo crossed in such hordes they dammed the river and gave easy hunting. Mackenzie struck up that network of winding lakes and portages to Churchill River and from Churchill River on diagonally northwest to Athabasca Lake where he and Roderick built Fort Chippewyan. These Chippewyans of Athabasca were no relation to the Chippeways of Wisconsin. They were on the whole a peaceful enough tribe; and Montreal traders had been among them from 1777, before Cook had found landfall on the Pacific Coast. Again his keen eyes noticed "the burning bituminous fountains"—gas wells that have burned from his day to ours and were cased down in the last ten years by the Canadian Government. He did not, of course, recognize the petroleum signs, for petroleum was unknown; but he described the signs that took the modern oil driller there. Here Alexander Mackenzie was stationed for eight years. Can one imagine a more unpromising field for an ambitious young explorer, though he had trundled a good library along with him from Fort William to keep him from going mad in the long winter nights, when the sun set at four and was barely up at nine and the Indian hunters were all afield for game? He fished with nets through ice four feet thick and came in to rude fire- [96] RACE OVERLAND TO THE PACIFIC place and pine-faggot candles in his log house with chapped wrists and frost-bitten fingers. Wild fowl varied the fish diet in summer; and he sent out packs of furs to delight the heart of the bourgeois down at Fort William. As recreation, he wrote down the vocabulary of the Athabascans and learned to speak their language, which stood him in good stead in the next few years. These Indians, he thought, came originally from Asia; for they had legends similar to the Hebrew flood records and customs akin to those of the patriarchal Jews. What moved Mackenzie to take the trip down the great river, discovered by him and now bearing his name, I do not know except that Divine Urge in men which is bigger than self. Geographically, it was not important except to clinch what had already been proved—there was no Northwest Passage. His Northwest Company did not favor the venture. Having gone farther afield than the Hudson's Bay people, the Nor'westers thought they could force Indians from the beyond to come to them. The trip left him, as he confided to Rod Mackenzie, "head over heels in debt" for four years to get his shares as partner paid. There is a point that ought to go in about Alexander Mackenzie; and it might as well go in here. Frequently in fur trade letters subsequent to his life, are found vague references to Mackenzie's "natural son," which in fur-trade parlance meant a squaw's son. Harmon, a saint, who himself married an Indian girl, refers to the death of Mackenzie's Indian boy in his teens. Yet in Mackenzie's own letters, again and again reference is made to his handicap in not having a woman to make snow-shoes, fish, weave fish nets. If he had such a wife, she must have been a dame of leisure. Considering there were six Mackenzies in the fur trade from 1786 to 1840 [97] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE and that the Indians are always eager to claim white blood in their offspring—especially the honor of a famous man as ancestor—I think we should go slow in crediting such slurs as truth without proof against the dead, who cannot defend themselves. Again and again in his Journals, he records declining the present of a temporary partner, though his voyageurs accepted the gifts, and such offspring would doubtless claim the leader's, not the camp follower's, name. June 3, of 1789, he pushed out from Fort Chippewyan' in a birch-bark canoe accompanied by four voyageurs and a German. A guide called "English chief" with two wives accompanied in a small canoe. Rod Mackenzie came up to take charge at Chippewyan during his absence. A birch canoe did not seem safe craft for rough waters, where heavy ice ran and jumped; but as a matter of experience, it is more practicable for good voyageurs than a cedar boat or lumber scow. It is more easily repaired on the spot and lighter to carry for portages. Copper knives were found among the Indians of Slave Lake; but these might have come from the Hudson's Bay people to the east, or the Russians to the west. Rain in deluges, shoals, ice—are all mentioned as the day's experiences without complaint. How the Indians kindled fire by friction and hunted with axes of stone and sewed with bone needles and deer thong throws an interesting sidelight on the pristine case of a supposedly halcyon era. Sunset at midnight was a new experience and rising water on July 13 foretold Arctic seas. A whale hunt by birch canoe gives insight to Mackenzie's mettle. The Eskimos related tales of white men in big canoes to the west on "Stinking Water" (salt water); and Mackenzie [98] RACE OVERLAND TO THE PACIFIC again saw signs of "a petrol-ium" wax, where oil wells have been sunk in the past few years. Though in Arctic realm, the heat was almost unendurable in July. All hands were back in Chippewyan in one hundred and two days none the worse so much as by a scratch. That does not make exciting record but it is masterly management. But the real lure of Mackenzie's life was that Western Sea. Again, why did it draw? When he went down to Fort William in 1790, his "expedition North was hardly" mentioned. If not snubbed by the other grandees, he was coldly treated as a bit too ambitious, perhaps pushful; but he went on east to Montreal and London to study astronomy and surveying for a year to make that next trip overland to the Pacific. London was ringing with the Meares controversy. Vancouver was about to set out for the Pacific. Why—the partners may have asked— should Mackenzie wish to duplicate what would be an official state venture? If a young man's enthusiasm could be chilled or his ambition quenched to inaction, the Scotch fur traders were applying both treatments for effective discouragement. Perhaps the silent influence of the Hudson's Bay Company against Montreal Nor'westers had something to do with the frigid indifference of the English to Mackenzie's project; but he was back in Chippewyan by March of 1791 and the fur packs from the north were bringing up the value of his shares to get his head above the dead-line of debt. Rod Mackenzie came up again to take Alexander's place at Athabasca and Alex McKay agreed to go with him on any venture across to the Pacific. At this time, Vancouver was sailing round the world for the North Pacific. If Mackenzie would win the honor of first discoverer, there was not a day to be wasted. [99] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE Mackenzie could not at this time have known of Gray's discovery unless some whisper of it came up in the winter of '92 from Fort William, which would be unlikely when Gray only found the Columbia in May of '92 and the annual meeting at Fort William was in July. He had a terribly bad time with himself all that winter of '92 and '93. All adventurers to the unknown do. It seems to be their initial test. Mackenzie was Scotch—therefore cautious. He was just beginning to get on in the world. Why take risks? What gain? His partners were scowling at the risk—always safe policy—if failure followed, they could applaud themselves; if success, they could pooh-pooh the risk and minimize the gain. "I am vexed and disturbed," he wrote Rod. "I cannot sit down to anything steadily." "I was never so undecided in my life. It is the height of folly to reside in this country deprived of every comfort." Mackenzie was developing "nerves." Two forces were tearing his soul—shall we call them the Angel of the Divine Urge and the Adversary of What's-the-Use? He seems to have gone on all that winter arguing himself out of going and preparing every day to go. Tides of Destiny—perhaps— they carry us all. Look back on your own hardest decisions! All the same, out he pushed again from Chippewyan in October of 1792 up the Peace by "which I propose to attempt my next discovery across the mountains." Mackenzie winters on the Peace, where he builds a fort. Already the Nor'westers had forty-two hunters on this river. It was located just east of the 1200 meridian. That rules out both modern Dunvegan and St. John, in fact, all modern forts. Tradition has it that the fort was in the beautiful deep dell where the Smoky comes into the [100] RACE OVERLAND TO THE PACIFIC Peace from the south. A more ideal site could hardly have been chosen. I passed over it by aeroplane a few years ago. Very high foothills almost like the rim rocks of Montana protect it from winter winds on all sides. The pasture is to-day knee deep. Fish were in abundance. Game came here for shelter in the long hard winters that often brought snow ten feet deep; and the warm chinook winds from the Pacific brought an earlier spring than on the plains. Foundations of an old fort have been found here which the Indians say was a Mackenzie Fort. You can see the site hundreds of feet below you as you go into the North Peace by the modern Peace River Railroad. The rail station here is high on the foothills. The old foundations lie at the bottom of the deep dell below; and except for the fact that there are ranch lands now there, the surroundings are little changed. Water fowl are here in myriads. Wild geese set the air aquiver in spring and autumn; and black and grizzly and cinnamon bears are numerous, as in Mackenzie's day. Peace River still sends out packets of the best furs in America. Abundant diet keeps the fur-bearing animals in prime condition. The shade of brushwood prevents the sun fading the color of the fur; and the hard winter frosts leaves the fur taken in season soft as silk and deep with the long over-hairs that impart sheen to mink, marten, bear, otter, wolf, pekan, fox. The winter must have passed pleasantly after the frigid airs of Athabasca Lake; for warm chinook winds coming through the mountain passes give the vast country^— known as Peace River, and a second Texas in area—a mild climate. Five houses 17 by 12 were erected; and New Year's Day of 1793 came in a serenade of fire- [101] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE arms at daybreak to cheer Mackenzie, which he returned with treat of wines and cakes. Mackenzie was beloved by his men. He poulticed their bruises, sewed up cuts, and cut away proud flesh on old wounds. He was commander, father, surgeon. "The Pacific cannot be far away with these warm winds," he writes. The Indians tell him of "a great river towards the sun." He champs with impatience for winter to be gone. The urge was now becoming a drive. But the thermometer took such a dip in February, it "stopped my watch." Geese came honking north in April in such flocks, five could be shot in a few minutes—and so they can yet in this very region. In fact, when an aeroplane goes among them, as I found for myself, they mistake it for a great bird and come in flocks to examine at closer range. Curiously enough these uncontaminated Indians were madly keen for liquor, and they were much more warlike and hostile than the poor Chippewyans. Mackenzie gave them pretty free run of the fort, but he kept his powder dry and his head cool. Flowers were in profuse bloom by May and Mackenzie could rein in his steeds of impatience no longer. A big canoe 25 feet long, 26 inches deep, almost 5 foot beam, had been built for himself. That was big enough for paddlers with Alex McKay in command of six voyageurs and 2 Indians. "Imbarked at 7 in the evening of May 9, 1793." One cannot exaggerate the beauty of Peace River— the long daylight a rose-pink in the morning and evening, the opal peaks suspended in translucent light, the air a heady wine, the rolling foothills on which elks played and neezed their sentinel whistle, the myriad wild fowl, geese, ducks, prairie chickens, setting the air aquiver with hum of wings and shrill cries, the buffaloes now followed [ 102 ] RACE OVERLAND TO THE PACIFIC by frisky calves, the winding river, the numerous islands like emeralds in silver waters, the Indians' tepees along the banks, the blinking camp-fires, the soft west wind— gave Mackenzie the keenest thrills of joy he had ever known. When he camped at night, grizzly bears came grunting near; but those sand-bars played havoc with the canoe, which had to be gummed afresh at each camp. Then Mackenzie began to realize what he was approaching. Five days upstream, the waters became riffling and fearfully swift. Showers fell with plunging suddenness from the gauzy, misty mountains. Earth banks gave place to rock cliffs and the course seemed to be almost direct southwest. Poling these waters was stiff work. Mackenzie and McKay used to walk ashore to lighten loads. They followed beaten paths. Was it buffalo trail or Indian road? The tenth day out, a pad- dler came running back to say .they were at the foot of a terrible rapid. Unload in part and carry! What else was there to do? But with tump-line the voyageurs attempted to tow the half-empty canoe alongshore. She bobbled like a cork, and finally there came an awful crash amid rocky islands; Mackenzie on the high shore above felt his heart stop. If she smashed, a fine crash to his toppling ambitions! He ran along the high shore to try to get down to his struggling paddlers and when he got down, not a sign of his canoe, only lofty precipices and roaring waters in a boiling white flood. Then he looked up the path he had descended. There were his faithful fellows trotting down with packs on backs and straps across foreheads, and at length came others carrying the canoe upside down on their shoulders along the wild shore, where one slip would have sent them into a whirlpool. [103] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE "We camped," says Mackenzie. No doubt they did and had something to raise their courage. A pepper of hail added to their discomfort. That was Sunday. Peace River Pass was no lazy man's entrance to Paradise. Half past four, May 20, Monday, out again, in the canoe, with the river fog a siren's veil hiding the dangers ahead. This day Mackenzie had to cut foothold in the bank for the men on the tow-line and in places let them step on his shoulder to the next toehold. The canoe bulged a leak. They got fresh bark and patched her up. Not paddles now but poles to push off the rocks and the poor chaps on the tump-line had to hang to trees over precipices that hardly gave foothold to a goat, let alone moccasined feet now bleeding from rock cuts. Again I ask—why did they do it? Because—man can always be greater than his environment. Stripped of their very shirts, which caught on the branches and rocks, the tow-line men now; but says Mackenzie—"we had to make a traverse or portage"; for this was a cascade; and when the men rested for dinner, Mackenzie got his latitude, 56 °. Out again on the river, the canoe did not bobble. She lashed. Then the inevitable—the line, frayed by warping round trees, snapped. But it seemed as if "la Bonne Sainte Anne" came to the rescue here; instead of galloping a runaway downstream, the canoe was lifted by the next wave and pitched on the rocks, spilling the two or three naked pole men out head first. Everybody gasped and everybody went white as "the sheet of foaming waters." And then, of course, came the "by damns" in a shower. They would not go on! It was madness! Did not my bourgeois see he was sending all to certain death? Mac- [104] RACE OVERLAND TO THE PACIFIC kenzie told them to take a rest and a drink and he would spy ahead and have a look at the river. It didn't look particularly Peaceful. It was fifty yards wide. The precipices on each side went higher than he could see; but there was an Indian trail for Cree raiders from the east. If they could go through the pass, so could he. He saw the coal seams and smelled the gas and petroleum so well known to-day. McKay and three men and two Indians went up the precipice following that Cree war trail. Mackenzie stayed with his men mending the canoe and making new axe handles. (The old ones had evidently suffered.) McKay came back with word that these rapids were nine miles long and could not be ascended by canoe. Mackenzie had cooked a big kettle of wild rice and served it hot with sugar and rum, and—kept his thoughts to himself. "Ah, oui, mon bourgeois." They would go ahead and "chew" mountains up and "swallow oceans of water" if need be next day. Up the rock wall, they cut a road, felling the trees as a railing on the outside. Up the road, they carried the baggage, 80 to 100 pounds on each back. And up the road, they warped the canoe with tump-line round trees and a man to save the frail craft bumps by lifting over stones. It took ten hours to climb to the summit of what was really the Divide. They got the canoe down in the same fashion the next day in five. Mackenzie computed what with detours, they were making about three miles a day. The water was rising from thaw on mountain snows which made the rapids less dangerous, though now only thirty-five yards wide. Rain in torrents, Saturday the [105] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE 25th, but still that Indian moccasin trail leading west. Mackenzie would not turn back. If raiding Cree could go ahead, so could and would he. South and southwesterly on and up they poled, but glad were the men at night to sleep in blanket coats amid these snow-tipped peaks. For four days at the end of May, Mackenzie had little time to take latitudes, or indeed to make notes, for when he got into the canoe for an hour's rest he fell into such heavy sleep, wind or waves washed away his notebook. Signs of camps were seen on the narrow shore trail. As a rum keg had been emptied, and the rain was so violent on the 29th, all hands remained under tents. Mackenzie amused himself by writing a letter, putting it in an empty keg and closing the bung hole, and sent the letter bouncing downstream which still flowed eastward through the Pass. This letter has not yet turned up. It may be frozen in the Arctic now. Wild barking from the camp dog betrayed wolves askulk, as they are always askulk in these passes; and nightly the sharp bark-bark or crescendo doleful howl of the prowlers could be heard, It was not a cheerful sound. Cascades, more cascades, and more rapids, and then one fork from the north and another from the south. As we know now, these forks were the Finlay and the Parsnip. Mackenzie was for following up the North Fork, but his oldest Indian guide said No—the Indian trail showed the South would be easiest; so he ascended the Parsnip. The voyageurs were so hostile to going on they openly cursed; so either McKay or Mackenzie kept in the canoe with them. One night when Mackenzie had been walking, the gun signal from the canoe and answer from the walkers alongshore brought all together in semi-panic. The voyageurs were sure they had heard the crash of firearms [106] it ^n RACE OVERLAND TO THE PACIFIC from raiding Indians. Of course, what they had heard was the smash of falling rock or ice ricocheting down from some precipice; but the alarm was general enough to keep fires out at tepees and one man on guard by turns with back propped against a tree. The water was not so wild during the first days of June, but the men were so exhausted they drowsed at the paddles. This was about twenty-five miles south of the Fork. Water rose from summer thaw so rapidly now that camp often became flooded at night. Mackenzie bade the men pole while he and McKay climbed a hill to get a lookout. Snowy mountains reared majestic lonely heads north and south; but the long winding Pass seemed to snake its coils on and on westward. They then hurried down to seek the canoe. Not a sign of it! They fired pistols. No answer! Had the men deserted? Eight, nine, ten at night; and not a sign or signal answered! Mosquitoes were in swarms. Those ashore cursed the voyageurs and were for building a raft of poles and at once floating back to the east side of the Rockies. McKay and Cancre, a boy guide, set off downstream east to seek the lost paddlers. Mackenzie was going to go on upstream. Not a bite of food had the paddlers left them. Just then a shot rang out. Mackenzie was so ill from heat and hunger he hardly had strength to go ahead. He was barefoot and drenched to the skin by showers. Then in the long daylight—he saw his people camped ahead. They pretended sulkily that the canoe had broken. Mackenzie accepted the explanation and gave all hands a drink of rum from the cargo casks. By 4:30, June 6, his canoe was again on the water. The current was so strong against them the men pulled it along by the branches overhead. A porcupine for food [107] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE and signs of recent Indian camps cheered all hearts on the 7th, but would the stream never end in a lake and another river begin flowing westward? Anyway, with Indians near and goods for barter, they need not starve. By such threads of hope did success or failure hang over an abyss. Suddenly, on the 9th, there was a smell of camp smoke through the heavy mist and voices in great clamor back in the foggy woods. Two strange Indians appeared ashore brandishing spears, arrows, bows. The interpreter shouted out assurance of peace and friendship. Mackenzie sat dead still. One sign of fear or hostility might end all in ruin there and then. The confidence of these threatening fellows he must win at all costs. The whites' canoe sidled gently ashore and Mackenzie stepped out unarmed, though one of the warriors would only shake hands with a knife in the other hand. He gazed into Mackenzie's eyes searchingly, then slowly handed his knife to the white commander as a sign of trust. Yes—the fellow told the interpreter—they had heard of white men; but these were the first he had ever seen. He had seen them coming through the Pass and his people had fled. Mackenzie erected tents, gave presents to both warriors and let them examine everything. By nightfall the Indian families came timidly peeping like shy wild animals. By signs they disavowed any knowledge of a Great River directly to the west. Their iron they obtained from middlemen Indians, the Carriers and Babines, farther west, who reported "the Stinking Water" (the ocean) as a month's travel farther towards the setting sun. There, they said, white people did come in big canoes, but not one of them could Mackenzie persuade to go along as guide. What upset Mackenzie was they said three more lakes, three more portages would [108] RACE OVERLAND TO THE PACIFIC lead to a river; but the river ran south, not "to the Setting Sun." Of course, it did; for it was the Fraser, and not the Columbia as Mackenzie thought. But the people on this River of the South were terrible and dangerous warriors. Again, of course, they were; for they were the Tatoosh raiders, whom the Pacific fur traders knew to their sorrow. Here Mackenzie saw definite coastal signs could he have known—pots that were baskets, dresses not only of skins, but of bark fiber. True enough, by June 12, the stream had narrowed to ten yards and was so shallow it hardly floated keel. He was almost at the headwaters of the Peace. Then over a low ridge, carrying the canoe for seventeen steps, and a shout—a lake and a river flowing southwest! They had crossed the Divide and were leaving the Pass. It was evidently an Indian rendezvous; for baskets and hooks and nets hung from trees. Mackenzie took some trifles and left in exchange knife, beads, fire-steels, awls. They were now paddling with the current for the first time in a month; easy enough at first, for the brook was sluggish and grown with weeds which had to be cut away; but once out of the reeds and past gravel beds, the waters began "to collect" and "gallop" over big stones, shooting in silver arrows under fallen trees that almost swept the dodging paddlers out. Dangerous pace with a race-horse current on an unknown stream, always! Mackenzie was more uneasy now than before. He knew what such signs meant and sent two men ahead to report. They came back with such a report that the stream has been known as Bad River ever since. Where there were not shallows, there were fallen trees, and where there were not fallen trees, there were rapids between rock walls. [109] J If f Iii CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE Mackenzie ordered all hands out and the canoe carried. When they launched again, he would have walked to lighten load, but the voyageurs would not go on without him. At that the galloping rapids hurled them ahead at such velocity that when one paddler tried to stem the awful pace by grasping an overhead branch, he was jerked bodily out of the canoe and the boat hit rock with such a smash the bottom was ripped to a wide hole, the braces loosened and the bark flattened to a raft. In a trice, the raft was now whirled by an eddy on a gravel bar. The halfbreed paddlers scrabbled ashore and howled in tears and curses. Mackenzie stood waist- deep in the icy waters tossing the cargo ashore. All balls were lost but there remained powder and lead that could be cast into balls. As the voyageurs got some courage and rum under their skins, despair turned to jubilation at the escape. Now Mackenzie would have to turn back. Mackenzie gave them a hearty meal. Then he broke through his iron reserve. Turn back! Never! Rather thank God for the escape. The accident was their own fault. They ought not to have run any rapid without scouting ahead. What a disgrace to go back! Were they North Men or Pork Eaters? Let them get busy and repair or rebuild the canoe! Besides, to go back would be as dangerous as to go forward! The next day, scouts who had gone ahead came back with barks for repairs, but their account of the waters ahead caused a relapse of panic. All was indecision and mutiny until one rattle-head walked across the drying powder with a pipe in his mouth. The rest emitted yells of warning. Perhaps that yell let off explosive steam; for the mutinous tendency died down. It would be as dangerous to go back as forward and at most [no] A -dSm^--- FORT WALLA WA WHERE THE WHITMAN MASSACRE TOOK PLACE AFTER THE EARLY EXPLORERS HAD BLAZED THE TRAIL TO THE WESTERN SEA, THOUSANDS OF SETTLERS CROSSED THE CONTINENT IN COVERED WAGONS TO BEGIN THE SYSTEMATIC CONQUEST OF THE WILDERNESS HEAVY TIMBER FORESTS OF THIS TYPE SUPPLIED THE EARLY EXPLORERS AND SETTLERS • WITH LUMBER RACE OVERLAND TO THE PACIFIC only thirty days more should reach the Pacific—nothing like work to quell rebellion. The canoe was repaired and on water again by the 15th and to Mackenzie's inexpressible joy, on the 17th after being deserted by the Indian guide, they came out on the floods of a great slack muddy river full of islands. Mackenzie thought it was the Columbia, but it was not. It was the Fraser. Had he followed that North Fork back up the Peace, he would have reached the Fraser without peril; but he was misled by his Indian guide and by that Indian trail which really was a road less liable to war raid. Down they swept, that great river so covered by fog that Mackenzie missed the Nechaco to the west wrapped in mist, past what is the site of Fort George, amid clouds of ducks and still greater clouds of mosquitoes, with the big trees from the banks floating lazily but requiring great care not to become entangled in branches. There was smoke of camp-fires but in the fog no Indians could be seen. The current began to pick up. Mackenzie was alarmed. It was leading directly south; and the quickened pace and the rocks rising on each side forewarned danger. Mackenzie was really on the verge of the most appalling canyons in the Rockies. Owing to the fog, perhaps, as well as to his haste, Mackenzie's latitudes here do not exactly agree with the landmarks described, which cannot be mistaken. This is largely the finical criticism of the study-chair theorist, who has not attempted the work of surveying, traveling in haste in all weather and making notes. The notes usually are jotted down at the end of an exhausting day, or in snatches during the brief intervals when the canoe is skimming with the current. Results—the notes are often from fifty to one hundred miles behind the latitudes recorded. You find these dif- [in] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE ferences in the logs of every explorer from Cook and Vancouver to Lewis and Clark. Vancouver's latitudes are the most correct of all, but in his comments on points passed you also find such omissions and contradictions as Columbia River and the Fraser. Rather than waste ink arguing these discrepancies, it is far better, as explained by Judge Howay who has spent his life on the Pacific Coast, to acknowledge frankly that long as geographic points can be recognized by descriptions, we may accept them, letting the variations in latitude take care of themselves. In fact, if old latitudes and old descriptions always agreed, one would have good reason for wondering if both had been "doctored" afterwards in the explorer's study. It is well to remember this in all these old records. I emphasize this point now; for in Ogden's Journals, in Thompson's, in Lewis and Clark's, in Irving's Astoria—each and all are caustically attacked for variations. When I told one critic that all Ogden's Journals had been dotted down in faint ink, mostly on parchment, sometimes at night with flickering candle or log-fire light, at other times on horseback in carpenter's pencil when Ogden was drowsy with fatigue, he answered—"Then in that case if Ogden had always been absolutely geographically correct, we might suspect the whole record of subsequent doctoring?" Keep that in mind as you read. Came first Fort George Canyon, "pinnacles in grotesque shapes," rocks on each side crowding the rapids into a maelstrom, foot-trails along the precipices scarcely wide enough for mountain goat, the waters "tumbling in great billows," Indians who received Mackenzie's interpreter with discharge of arrows, which the voyageurs dodged by ducking behind trees; and you will agree "it was a most afflicting passage" for men and canoe. Some [112] RACE OVERLAND TO THE PACIFIC of the rapids were run, others forced use of tow-line, others the portage of canoe and cargo. "The fog so thick we could not see the length of our canoe." The character of the Indian houses now changed from tepee to such oblong slab houses as the dwellings of the Coast tribes. Most of them were deserted; for the Indians were back in the mountains hunting. Little wonder "the canoe became so crazy that we had to construct another." However, only enough bark could be found to patch up the ripped bottom and torn sides; and yet—they went on. Cottonwood Canyon came next—"so violent we did not venture to run it"; but even unloaded, the canoe had become so heavy with patching, the men could not carry it up and down these wall rocks and insisted on running her empty down the whirl of boiling waters. Mackenzie ran abreast to the foot of the rapids and saw his half-wrecked craft fill almost to swamping and then come whirling in on the gravel, the men half drowned and breathless from the splash. Three hours' more delay patching—then out again in the fog and rain—did ever discoverer pass through worse dangers in six short weeks? Mackenzie was now so anxious he began burying caches of 90-pound packets of pemmican for the return trip, which would have to be afoot, up the river; but by June 21, near modern Quesnel, he was deeply distressed. The river was flowing too directly south for any month's traverse to the Pacific; and he had neither provisions nor powder for longer than a month. His men were now doggedly obedient—probably from fear; and then just at Quesnel to his great relief rocked two small Indian canoes. He heard a war whoop and saw the volley of arrows coming, just missing his canoe. Here was a desperate [113] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE chance. He let his canoe drift gently ashore and dispatching a good marksman to hide in the trees and shoot only if necessary, had his interpreter call out to the warriors. By signs and a sort of lingo, the interpreter was warned that to land meant instant death. Mackenzie landed alone and to quiet the fury of the Indians sent his canoe to the opposite shore. He had told his hidden marksman only to shoot if he himself fired his pistol. The Indians came within a hundred yards and—halted. Mackenzie laid looking-glasses, beads and trinkets on the ground and—waited. Some of the warriors paddled out and approached from behind, others approached stealthily face forward. Taking the presents, they ran back to their people in the woods. Then they signaled for the white man's canoe to come over on their side. Mackenzie at once treated all the little Indian urchins to maple sugar.. The Indians told Mackenzie, yes, the river did go on to "the Stinking Waters of the Setting Sun," where white men came in "big canoes"; but the river was impassable farther ahead even to their strong dugouts; better cross to "the Stinking Waters" by a foot-trail west, which they used. Would two of them come along with him as guides? Ah, here was hesitation. They would discuss that with big camps farther south. Mackenzie drifted to these camps farther south and put up his tepee right among them. Two Indians did go along next morning, June 22, at 6 o'clock and McKay got into their dugout with them to quiet apprehensions. More Indian camps were passed, who made wilder demonstrations of war than the first, but Mackenzie had now learned these hostile howls were like a small boy's in the dark—to dispel their own fears. [114] RACE OVERLAND TO THE PACIFIC A Cree slave woman here acted as better interpreter; and again Mackenzie was hopelessly baffled by the river going south where it should go west. An old man drew a map on a piece of birch bark—"falls, falls, rapids, savages, dangerous." Even the voyageurs got that. These camps had iron, brass and copper from the Coast; but they told him frankly it was shorter overland direct to the sea— not six nights; and Meares' old map seemed to prove the same thing. Thirty days' food remaining, 150 bullets, 30 pounds of shot! Mackenzie pondered. When we are baffled by the impasse of life's road, necessity usually gives us the push over the wall whether we break our shanks in the smash or not. But he would have to go back up the canyons, the Indians told him—and strike west from what is now known as the Blackwater. Mackenzie's men refused to go on down the river, but they swore to a man they would go with him loyally overland. Mackenzie records he had restless nights "thinking." The Indians assured him again and again if he would go west he would encounter "white man canoes" with "big sails." How nearly he came to meeting Vancouver we now know. Mackenzie writes—"I preferred to go overland." There was no choice. He had to. McKay cut Mackenzie's name on a tree to mark where they turned back. It is supposed to be at modern Alexandria. Back up the Fraser, the Blackwater was reached July 3, and here he was joined by the Indian who had been induced to guide them to the Coast. To hold this Indian guide from deserting, either Mackenzie or McKay ["5] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE kept close to him day and night, though their bedfellow was infested with vermin. His people were now down to two meals a day—a sort of pudding of pounded fish boiled in water and thickened with flour. Sending the others ahead with McKay on July 4, Mackenzie again cached 90 pounds of pemmican, 2 bags of rice and a gallon keg of powder. These were rolled in oilcloth and leather and buried, the ground stamped. A second hiding place concealed corn, rice and trade trinkets. Then Mackenzie hurried ahead to join McKay. The canoe was here set bottom up on a stage of poles surrounded by a fence of logs and more articles were left. Each man now carried a small sack of pemmican and a small sack of ammunition. Pistols in belts and cased guns over shoulders, the Canadians and Indians set out on July 4, single file through the woods, at noon. The trail was hard and well beaten; the heat broiling as it is in these intermountain sections in summer. At places, friendly young bucks joined the marchers for a few hours, then branched off to home camps. At night under the big trees, the Indians would strike up some plaintive ditty and sing gently as though to their god. Here Mackenzie exchanged Canadian coin for a Massachusetts coin of 1787 and another of the English King, which hung as ornaments in children's ears. These must have cheered his heart that he was nearing the Western Sea. The woods became so dense that they darkened the trail and, when gusts of heavy coastal rain came drifting in, the men huddled under screen of oilcloth beneath the big trees. The brush was so thick that after rain it drenched the marchers and Mackenzie led the pace to beat off the drip. The Indian guides seemed so restive [n6] RACE OVERLAND TO THE PACIFIC as the Coast was neared, Mackenzie slept under his beaver blankets to keep touch of them. One camp showed no wonder at white men, and the squaws wore beads and brass ornaments—better and better signs of their nearness to the Western Sea. These Indians, too, were hideously corpulent and oily like all fish tribes. One lad told Mackenzie's party that at no great distance they would come on a bay, where had been a great wooden canoe in the "flower month"—June. We now know it was Vancouver. More guides were picked up here and there at intervals, but all feared the warlike coastal raiders. Rain was incessant. Nightly clothing had to be dried before camp-fires. Still the Western Sea seemed to recede like a will-o'- the-wisp. It was always just six days ahead. The weather was so rainy and foggy Mackenzie found it almost impossible to get his latitudes. The mountains here were very high and covered with snow. Lake after lake, brawling river after river, the marchers followed and passed and forded; and it was now eleven days since leaving the Blackwater. The Indian camps they passed were in the main very kind and supplied food; so twenty more pounds of pemmican were hidden for the return journey. On the 17th, the summits of the Coastal Range were crossed amid snow; and when the wanderers came down, judging the sea must surely be near and knowing the Indian love of show, Mackenzie advised his men to pause while the redskin guides prepared some fresh venison, and to shave and dress themselves with great care. Lest the guides might desert coming back, Mackenzie broke branches along the trail and blazed cuts on trees at intervals. Walking into an Indian "big house" late one night, [117] I' CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE Mackenzie threw off his pack and sat down on it. His men came in and did the same. The surprised host passed round a planked roast salmon for each man; but Mackenzie thought it safer for the men to sleep out under the "canopy of the sky," and when the tired, muscle-strained marchers awakened the Indians had a fire going and again gave them a breakfast of salmon. If you do not know what hard walking must have done to the paddlers' soft leg-muscles—you cannot appreciate the loyalty of these men. Canoe men are strong as bullocks across shoulders, in arms and thighs; but leg- muscles are soft and the habitual canoe man often is as bow-legged as a coWboy. They must have suffered nightly toothache in knees and ankles and soles of feet. Getting two dugout canoes from friendly camps for baggage on July 18, Mackenzie now counted on faster progress to the sea. The coast fellows were the fastest paddlers Mackenzie had ever seen. At one village a chief told by signs of ten snows past (winters) when forty of his people had seen large vessels full of white men. July 20, the racing river led into an arm of the sea, where the tide was washing out and the seaweed knee-deep; but the sea itself could not be seen because of a misty haze and rocky islets and capes and mountains. It was impossible that night to get latitude or bearings by moon and stars. Supplies were down to 20 pounds of pemmican, 15 pounds of rice and 6 pounds of flour for ten hungry men in a leaky canoe on a strange coast. On the 21 st, they followed the arm of the sea which led to yet another arm. As a matter of fact, they were lost in the maze of Dean Canal, where Vancouver had been in May and June. Coasting about, they met three canoes with fifteen men under a young leader of great insolence, who [u8] RACE OVERLAND TO THE PACIFIC complained loudly that a big white canoe had been in these waters and "Macubah," their chief, had fired on his tribe and one "Bensins" had hit him on the back with the flat of his sword. There was, of course, no leader on Vancouver's vessel of these names; but the ugly-tempered fellow proved his story by a display of European fresh articles yet clean. He probably got the names mixed. "Bensins" might have been "Menzies"; but "Macubah" remains a guess. The vessel might, of course, have been any one of thirty traders on the coast in '92 and '93. This Indian was an ugly customer, and Mackenzie tried to shake free of him. The rascal persuaded Mackenzie's guide to desert. The troublesome fellow, having pumped Mackenzie's guide of all he knew, now came back and jumped into Mackenzie's canoe and went along as uninvited guest. He literally demanded to see every article Mackenzie had in the dugout. He asked for Mackenzie's hat, his handkerchief, his coat. In mid-channel, seeing some abandoned Indian log houses with rocks behind, Mackenzie had his men steer for them. If the fellow was spoiling for a fight, the whites wanted their backs to a wall. The ugly customer now had ten canoes swarming about with five or six armed warriors in each. Mackenzie told his men frankly of his apprehensions and bade them uncase guns and look to priming. The flotilla at this drifted away; but after they had glided out of sight, articles were discovered missing by all the men. When a dugout came back with pressing invitation to visit the village, Mackenzie possibly recalled the fable of the spider and the fly; for the hospitality was declined. Making a fire on the rocks, the men warmed themselves. Food allowance was now down to a meal a day. [119] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE Watch was kept two and two all night. July 22, Mackenzie got his altitudes and latitudes; but the rascals had come back and among them Mackenzie's kidnaped guide, who urged Mackenzie to leave at once; for these coastal fellows were very treacherous and were plotting attack. The poor guide foamed at the mouth in fear. The contagion of the panic spread to Mackenzie's men. Finally painting his inscription on the rock face—"Alexander Mackenzie from Canada, by land, the twenty- second of July, one thousand and seven hundred and ninety-three"—the discoverer and explorer in those simple words recorded his achievement of First Overland to the Western Sea. As discoverer, his achievement cannot historically rank high; for both Gray and Vancouver had beaten him to his objective point; but as explorer, his achievement ranks with that of Lewis and Clark; for he nailed down title inland from Russian Alaska to at least Juan de Fuca Straits and he did it against odds that were almost impossible and impassable. No more heroic epic exists in all American exploration. The foolish young Indian guide was disposed to go with the marauders. Mackenzie knew too well what that might mean—a cannibal feast, for he had read Meares and Cook; so he forcibly took the guide from the dugout. How could he go back through the boy's tribe if he did not return the lad to the father? It is in this part of his Log that Mackenzie refers to Gray's Voyage of 1789. Details of the later, epoch-making voyage he could not have known. July 23, the whites headed back eastward. The same rascals tried to impede their progress, crowding about at camping place and encircling Mackenzie in their grasp [ 120] RACE OVERLAND TO THE PACIFIC by sudden assault behind and tearing off both his hat and coat. Mackenzie realized that if he was to get past their village eastward, this camp must be taught a lesson. He bade his men "prime their pieces and come along." Entering the village, he called for the ringleader, who had lashed the village up with the lie that Mackenzie had shot four of the camp. Mackenzie quietly ordered the restoration of hat and coat and some good fish as a fine for bad conduct. His orders were obeyed. He calls this Rascal's Village. Mackenzie's men were now so frantic with fear he could hardly restrain them throwing all they owned into the river and rushing blindly to hiding in the woods. He sat on a stone and let them blow off steam, then he recalled them to reason. What would be their fate if they did this? By way of safety from pursuit or desertion when canoe was abandoned—for of course, this section of the return trip was up tumultuous coastal streams—McKay led the marchers, while Mackenzie guarded the rear of the dejected single-file procession. The kindness of the inland Indians on the return journey east was even greater than when westbound. His caches were safe. When the crews finally came to their fort east of Peace Pass, their joy was so unbounded the men almost "lost their senses." They landed at four in the afternoon, August 24, where they had departed on the 9th of May. In 1801, Mackenzie published his voyages. In 1802, he was knighted. He returned to Scotland in 1812. One has only to read his letters to Roderick to realize how the hardships of this voyage had broken his constitution. He used to walk for hours at night to quiet [121] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE his restlessness. "I could scarcely close my eyes without finding myself in company with the dead." "I am very listless," he writes in 1819. He had burned out his vital fires before he was sixty, and died in 1820. [122] PART IV: Jewitt and the Ship Boston on the Pacific Coast. 1803-1806. THE success of Gray's second voyage to the Pacific Northwest had natural reaction on the bold seamen of Boston and New Bedford and Salem. Of American statesmen, only one—Jefferson—seemed to fore- vision almost prophetically what it might mean to add a Louisiana to the young American Republic and link that Louisiana with a Pacific Empire to the outlet of the great Columbia River. Apart from Jefferson—who inspired the Lewis and Clark expedition—and Astor, who sent his ship to the Pacific, Gray's discovery was as completely ignored officially in the United States as Drake's famous voyage had been allowed to lapse officially in England. Not so with the privateers—the independent fur traders, who had more than thirty coasting vessels under the Stars and Stripes yearly trading up and down the Pacific Northwest by 1800. Unfortunately, the ships' logs of these adventurers of the sea, out from no higher motive than gain, have been lost to history. The somewhat scant narrative of one such privateer remains; and it is best told in the record of a chance member of the crew—one John Jewitt, whose account really gives one of the clearest pictures of conditions on the Pacific Coast from Gray's and Vancouver's departure to the coming of Lewis and Clark. [123] iff CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE When a handful of rusty iron nails could buy an $800 sea-otter pelt, any fool could guess sea otter would not last. Those to reap the golden harvest of the sea must be first out. Late comers would glean but a scant aftermath. What mattered the toll of life taken by the sea; or the terrible roster of vessels that breasted the wild gales round the Horn and then went careening up the west coast never to be registered again among ships that go to sea? When fortune beckoned with one hand and adventure with the other, what youth with quickened pulse paused to take count of risks? A youth lay dreaming on the sunny sands of the water front at Hull. Hull was a perilous place for any boy to do two things at once—dream of fortune and keep a steady head. It was at Hull that Cook had risen from poor lad to roustabout, longshoreman, common sailor, then to one of the greatest navigators the world had known. With Cook around the world had gone that Kendrick, whose ship under Gray found the Columbia, and those two young officers—Portlock and Dixon—who later on ships of their own had cleared $54,000 in a single voyage, and the young middy Vancouver, who a few years later had cruised the northwest coast of America and received back from Don Quadra, the courtly officer of Spain, the property seized from that English freebooter Meares. Cook's Voyages and Vancouver's account of travels had been read by the seafaring folk of Hull as eagerly as an earlier generation had devoured the tales of Crusoe. Vancouver's Voyages had come out in 1798, and this was 1802. Who in Hull did not remember the scenes described of Maquinna, the great chief of the Nootka Indians, welcoming Cook with 2,000 warriors; then on Vancouver's visit when the English commander [124] JEWITT AND THE SHIP BOSTON was in formal and solemn conclave with Don Quadra, how Maquinna came scrabbling up the ship's ladder clad in the garb of his birth only to be cuffed into the sea by the naval officers on guard; and how when the mistake was discovered, of offending Indian dignity, Vancouver and Quadra vied to make amends by a feast to the Indian Tyee—a five-course dinner served on silver plate with the two marine bands playing and Maquinna and his wives and sister sitting in state by the side of the two great commanders? Do not forget those wives and that sister of Maquinna's. One wife was the daughter of Wicanish, chief of the Clayoquots to the south, and the sister had married that terrible killer chief to the east, Tatoosh, who ranged from the Fraser to the Columbia and had tried to attack Gray's ships. Vancouver's men had danced Scotch reels with Maquinna's tribe on the decks of the English war vessels; and Don Quadra's sailors had paced majestic fandangos on the decks of the Spanish ships; and not to be outdone, Maquinna had given that mask dance up in his village, attended by 2,000 warriors; and disgruntled dignity had been appeased, if not drowned, in Spanish wines and Jamaica gin, with presents of plumed hat broidered in gold braid and naval coat bespattered with gold buttons. The boy lying dreaming on the sands of Hull knew all these stories as boys to-day know of George Washington's hatchet. The boy's name was John Jewitt. He was barely nineteen, and all the old sailor yarns of those years back had been vividly recalled by the visit paid to his father's blacksmith shop this beautiful August day by Captain Salter of the ship Boston—a Yankee vessel— outfitting for the northwest coast of America. [125] J CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE In the Boston's crew was Jupiter, the Senegal, from South Africa, and John Thompson, the sailmaker, a boxer and prize-fighter from Philadelphia, and a youth, William Ingraham, of his own age from New York, son of that Ingraham who had been with Cook and later with Gray and who was now sailing ship of his own, the Hope, on the west coast of America. Into the eager ears of John Jewitt, these Yankee seamen poured their thrilling tales of adventure surpassing any Crusoe romance ever written. And John Jewitt liked these bluff salts from Yankeeland, in spite of their blue garb with brass buttons, plain as compared to the gold and silver-braided, slashed doublets of the officers on the great English men-of-war. These Yankee or Boston men moved and met free and easy as man to man. They were not impressed seamen. They were not mongrel underlings ruled by fear of being lashed to the wheel and flogged. They were apprentices, sons of the New England merchants who had outfitted the ships to plow the seas. They earned almost $400 a year and keep, compared to the English wage of $100, and they were permitted to trade in furs on their own account. There could be no mutiny on these New England vessels, for every man was a partner. The blacksmith establishment of John Jewitt's father was not the horse-shoeing shop we know under that name. "The smith was a mighty man of valor." We would call him an iron forger. He could resheath with copper or iron the prows of ships and the keel beams of their jolly- boats; strengthen the flukes of the ponderous anchors; sharpen the barbs of the whale harpoons; transform iron sheets into knives and swords and daggers and balls; [126] JEWITT AND THE SHIP BOSTON and use the waste scraps to mend the thousands of old muskets bought from the European wars for the Northwest Indian trade. And young Jewitt toiled stripped to the waist behind the big bellows and flame and anvil with the fury of a demon incarnate. Captain Salter of the Boston used to stand watching him. "Why such fury, lad?" "Because I cannot abide the professions"; and in that answer lay the heartbreak of his parents. The Jewitts were prosperous folk and wanted their son to rise in life. Surveying, mathematics, astronomy, navigation, he ate up as a hound crunches bone; but Latin he abominated. Though he sang like a seraph in the Cathedral choir and there met all the best sons of the neighborhood and doubtless borrowed their books of Cook and Vancouver—for both had hosts of friends here —into holy orders John Jewitt refused to go, averring he stammered when nervous; and when his father apprenticed him to a surgeon, the boy rebelled against the smell of putrid flesh and moldy skeletons. He had forced himself into his father's shop and had made good by some rare devices for the Yankee ships, such as having a little workshop with bench and anvil in the hold for bad weather, as well as the big anvil on deck; so the ship's armorer could fit blades to handles and repair old war muskets as the vessel cruised the long voyage around half the world. Captain Salter and young Ingraham and the boxer, John Thompson, used to come up to his father's house, where young Jewitt would sing while his stepmother or sister played the harpsichord; but somehow those songs [127] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE would always run from church chants to sailor chanteys of Davy Jones' Locker, in which the Boston men would join. There are more ways of catching a good seaman than impressing him, or of catching a fish than harpooning it. Into the hold John Jewitt had seen trundled cases of blankets, looking-glasses, beads, knives, razors, daggers, swords, pistols, 3,000 old army muskets, casks of wine, 20 hogsheads of rum from Holland; and now in September, the ship was all but ready for sea and would sail in a few days with other Yankee vessels, which sold American tobacco and wool and fish in England, carried these cargoes for barter in furs to the No-Man's Land of the Pacific Northwest, traded the furs in China for silks and nankeens and teas and spices, brought the Asiatic cargo to Boston and Philadelphia and New York, and again and again belted the globe in the same circuit —with a profit in trade running to colossal gains. Watching the boy at his anvil that day, Captain Salter had said—"John, how would you like to go to sea with me?" How would he like? John's ears were pounding and his stammering lips could not answer. Wasn't that what he had been hoping and praying and passionately wishing beyond anything he had wanted in all his life? "I want an expert smith for an armorer. I'll pay you $30 a month and keep, and if you have any savings, you can put them in the trade and I think I'll be able to set you up for yourself in Boston " "My father will never let me go." "If I persuade him, will you go?" Would he? John Jewitt could have shouted. And this evening when John was down on the sands dreaming in an agony of hope, Captain Salter of the [128] JEWITT AND THE SHIP BOSTON Boston was up at the house persuading Jewitt's father to consent. The boy could hear the sailors on the Yankee vessels singing their chanteys as they ran round the capstan bars. He could see the naked mast arms heaving to the tide. He rose, and hardly hoping plodded home. It needed but one look at his father's face when John came in to know that the Boston captain had won. The father could hardly speak for the deep emotion that shook his burly frame. There is something unspeakably touching in the old man's farewell words as he presented the boy with a little writing desk to put in his seaman's chest; for in the little old square writing desk no larger than a small box, were a Bible, an English church prayer book, an account book, an almanac, and the money he had acquired working for his father. "John, be honest! Be frugal! Be clean! Be upright! Remember you have a mother and a sister! Never do aught to make them blush with shame! Read the Bible every day! Trust God, no matter what the trouble! He will never desert those who trust Him!" Remember those words. Never words were put to greater test. Eyes dim with tears and hope a phantom through the mist of those tears, out to sea, out to destiny, out to the great Adventure of Life sailed John Jewitt, September 3, 1802, with twenty-four other American vessels bound for ports on all the seas of the world. Again observe the warp and the woof in the shuttle of the Norns! John Jewitt could not know that a great American statesman named Jefferson was just concluding negotiations for the purchase of all Louisiana from New Orleans to the Rockies and planning in great secrecy [129] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE and haste the Lewis and Clark expedition for the Pacific to outrace the English and Spanish for possession of that No-Man's Land between California and the Russian settlements of Alaska. Yet the boy's insignificant life- thread was to crisscross that great international warp and woof of the Destinies, and almost break his heart. Because they could outrace the ponderous Spanish and English men-of-war, the Boston vessels carried neither numerous crews nor large food stores. The Boston mustered only twenty-seven men, but each was a hand-picked partner. Of course, the land lubbers were horribly seasick for a few days; but every man was so busy on his own job—the tailor mending seamen's clothes, the sailmaker sewing extra canvas for the big blow likely to tear sails to tatters down round the Horn, the armorer, John Jewitt, hammering out spikes from iron sheets, sharpening daggers, mending old muskets, casting bullets and cannon balls—that the dolors of the sea were soon forgotten; and every greenhorn was ducked as the Boston crossed the Equator. The mountainous billows made young John Jewitt gasp; but the Boston rode them like a gull; and Captain Salter was a kind master. Every Saturday, the crew got out fiddles and concertinas and mouth organs and danced the hornpipe; and every Sunday, the Church service was read and sung, the Hull boy leading as at home. A month only, the swift little ship took to reach Brazil, where pause was made to take on bananas and limes and oranges and lemons to prevent scurvy; but they were three months rounding the Horn from Brazil, and thirty-six days held back by the wild green seas, emerging to the Pacific on Christmas Day, which was celebrated by sacred service, then concert and song and feast. JEWITT AND THE SHIP BOSTON Jewitt's Log says nothing about stopping at Crusoe's Island of Juan Fernandez; but they must have paused somewhere there; for the Yankees all took on fresh water, fruits and wood on Crusoe's Island to go on up the Pacific; and Jewitt may have seen the lone Englishman whom the Spanish kept as guardian of the famous isle proudly playing the part of a second Crusoe, and giving to the passing ships those peach and orange and lemon seeds from which the first orchards of the Pacific States grew. The Pacific did not belie its name. It lay like a floor of glass with a gentle swell from the south wind that wafted the Boston on her way for the first fourteen days of 1803 without reefing a topsail or tacking off course a mile. It was like a magic voyage over a magic sea into a realm of dreams-come-true. Only two signs set the older seamen gossiping superstitions of ill luck—"the porps" went racing round the ship in shoals and an albatross dipped so close to the decks that Captain Salter shot one with wing measurement of fifteen feet from tip to tip. "Bad luck—bad luck to do that," one can hear the old salts' comment, as you can to-day when the porpoise turn somersaults round a ship, or an albatross dies on deck. "Bad luck—nothing—out with your harpoons, men, and catch a porp or a shark," the captain scoffed; and they dined for a week off a porpoise or herring hog that tasted sweet as corn-fed pork. All the same the captain may have taken cognizance of both signs of foul weather ahead, for knowing the northwest coast bulged out to the north like the large end of a ham, he sheered away from the dangers between a bad blow and rocky coast and [131] J CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE kept to the open sea; and when the gale did come up with a roar from the south, it only carried the Boston more swiftly; but it kept her off the Columbia, and that Cape Disappointment which the freebooter Meares had named because he could not find the Great River of the West, and off that Cape Flattery where Cook had failed to locate old Juan de Fuca Straits; but somewhere before going on up to Alaskan waters, the Boston must pause again to fill water casks and buy fresh salmon and repair masts and spars that had rotted and split in the tempests of the Horn; so the watch was sent scrambling up the main mast to the crow's-nest, little barrel with a platform for bottom, to try and sight that Nootka harbor on the west side of Vancouver's big island, where Cook had made his first landfall; where Meares, the freebooter, had built his fort; where Martinez, the Spaniard, had seized Meares' vessels; where Don Quadra and Vancouver had come out to settle the quarrel between England and Spain by abandoning all fortifications and restoring all Nootka to Chief Maquinna as a No-Man's Land open to all vessels as a roadstead. "Much your English braggart Meares paid for his land," remarked young Ingraham, whose kin had been out with both Cook and Gray. "Two old pistols for Hog Island for his forts." "And much your Yankee Gray paid for his—some sheets of copper for site to his winter fort," retorted some Englishman. "And how much did the Spaniard Martinez pay?" asked John Jewitt. Young Ingraham laughed. "What did Martinez pay? —rum and cannon ball to sink Maquinna's dugouts if they dichVt hand up their sea otter." [132] JEWITT AND THE SHIP BOSTON "Then why did the Indian king love Don Quadra?" asked John Jewitt, thinking of those voyages whose narratives he had conned in Hull. "Honeyed words—gracious manners—silver braid, plumes on their hats, gold on their velvet capes, satin breeches, waxed mustachios, where the English wore only the little Napoleon hats with short wig and clean shave, and rank and file of sailors a bobtail rabble. Man, Maquinna has worn a waxed mustache in imitation of the Spaniards ever since. Bad example—I've heard my folks say," added young Ingraham, "for the Indians to see the white men here seizing one another's vessels. Lost the fear of white men and got the idea they could seize vessels, too! Dangerous place ever since. Fewer ships here every year " "Because the best furs are farther north," interrupted the captain, "and that's where we'll be fast as we can wood and water—only one sail seen from the Horn. Either no ships are out yet, or they are all up north—not a day to lose." Snap and fire had come into the voice of the easygoing Yankee captain. Commander with nerves on hair- trigger for danger was he now; and John Jewitt noted the signs. March 12, 1803, just as daylight was fading the crow's-nest sighted the forest-clad heights of Nootka, and the Hull boy beheld the fairyland of his dreams rise like a mirage from the silver-blue sea. What wonder this realm went to men's heads with dizzy hopes and wild abandon to a new life? Vancouver was not an island. It was a small continent; and wedged against it was Nootka, a triangular islet, with safe roadstead from storms for twenty miles up the narrows, where a river poured down from the great forested mountains and ships [133] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE could go in with the tide, moor to a huge tree, then warp up and as the tide fell settle on the clean sand to scrape the hull of barnacles and repair copper lining to the hull and recaulk seams and take from the forests trees tall and straight as a pole for fresh masts, as well as fill casks with fresh water and trade trinkets for fresh salmon. They passed that Hog Island where Don Quadra and Vancouver had danced the fandango with Maquinna's numerous wives. Nothing of the old fort left now—the Indians had carried off all slabs and boards for their long houses cresting the darkening ridge behind the island. Only the old fort garden grown rank with the turnips and onions and carrots and peas planted many years ago. Past that Friendly Cove, which had proved so perilous long ago, up with the night tide the Boston drifted and came to anchor on sandy bottom, where she moored at midnight of the 12th of March by roping a big hawser to a tree. Not an Indian had appeared on the dark ridge to the left. Maquinna's village was fast asleep, and the Boston had glided past silent as a ghost. Far different was the scene at dawn. Jewitt was up with the birds to see the land of his dreams. Sea-gulls dipped and dived and fought for the scraps thrown out by the black Virginia cook and his kitchen boy—Jupiter Senegal. The big trees to the very water's edge were of a girth the English lad could hardly credit—some stumps of firs and spruce were wide as a family dining table. Cedars draped their plumy branches in great ferns that met other ferns coming up from the dank mold high as a man's shoulders. Where the plated bark had split and peeled, he could see the stringy softer inner brown bark from which the Indians wove their water-proof little pannikin hats and shirts and sandals and cooking utensils. [134] JEWITT AND THE SHIP BOSTON Cypress—cinnamon-tinted and clean of bole—hung over the water with gnarled roots looking for all the world like coils of water snakes washed by the waves. But the mountains edging the sky line—the highest mountain he had ever seen at home would not make a footstool to these snow-crested peaks with waterfalls pouring over precipices in wind-blown spray; and the air with the tang of the sea and the cinnamon scents of the forests and the cold clear nip of the snows, it was a wine of new life. Why, all England was no more than a third larger than this big island. The boy gasped at the immensity of that No-Man's Land to which he had adventured. But Jewitt's fancies were interrupted by the approaching apparition of the strangest water craft he had ever seen in his life. They were neither boats nor canoes. They were long narrow high-prowed dugouts hollowed by adze or fire and sand-papered in some way, black and shiny as lava rock. On the sides of the seamless craft were painted in red and blue bizarre designs of animal and fish and monster, with prow and stern lifted high in wilder carvings. The dugouts were almost rock proof against reef or wind, though they could be penetrated by cannon ball, which recalled how Meares, the Englishman, and Martinez, the Spaniard, used to get their furs. Each boat could carry twenty to forty men, who again paddled in a fashion the boy had never seen—a three-flip on one side, then a three-flip on the other, which gave the craft that galloping jump over the waters. The Indians paddled in rhythmic time to a sort of "ti-ai-ai-ai" sung together by all; and as they came over the tide to shipside, Jewitt recognized at one glance the six-foot kingly figure of old Maquinna, who had ruled these people like a Roman despot from Cook's day. His strong Roman nose, [135] 1 CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE his thin mustache, his painted moon-shaped brows, his deeply red-stained cheeks and blue tattooed arms, pot- shaped cedar-woven hat and magnificent sea-otter cloak slung over his shoulders with moose-skin undershirt belted in by a sash worked in gold and yellow porcupine quills— were exactly as all voyagers had for twenty years described him; and despite his sixty years, the chief came up the ship's ladder agile as a cat and grand as a savage king—such king perhaps as England had, garbed in wild- beast skins, when the Romans crossed from Gaul. Maquinna could speak a few words of both Spanish and English, but what the Boston crew seemed to have forgotten was that he understood, from twenty years' intercourse with traders, every word spoken in English. The captain welcomed the chief on board and at once led the way to the cabin for a glass of rum. The crew spent the next two days scraping the hull and filling water casks; for there were few furs to delay them in Nootka. The Indians brought fresh salmon for trade, and Maquinna used to watch John at the deck anvil repairing copper sheaths and muskets and pistols. He may have said "Wocash"—or, as the Sioux of the plains say, "Washte"—"Good-good"; but his immobile features betrayed not an inkling of what was going on in his cunning brain. He used to watch Thompson the sailmaker and no doubt thought his own thoughts to hear the ex- pugilist wishing all "the cursed pagans dead." Aye! Aye! Many of the traders had wished Maquinna dead these twenty-five years they had known him; but their bones bleached in the bottom of the sea; and the old chief was still here. By the 15 th, all the chiefs were coming freely to the ship, and Captain Salter had them throw back their fur [136] JEWITT AND THE SHIP BOSTON cloaks to see that no weapons were concealed. By way of compensating for this evidence of suspicion, the Boston captain invited all the chiefs to a dinner and presented Maquinna with a double-barreled shotgun. Maquinna reciprocated with a present of wild duck and invited the crew to go ashore and shoot in the fresh water pond behind the ridge. It was on the 21st that Maquinna came back to the ship with the double-barreled shotgun badly broken, saying, "Peshak-peshak"—"bad-bad." Now "bad" to an Indian does not imply wrong. It may mean—it does not work; and these Indians had not yet learned how to handle white-man firearms. They would not hold the gun close to shoulder for fear of the back kick and so usually got a backldck violent enough to dislocate a shoulder. Ordinarily, they braced the gun to a rock or tree—then fired. In such fashion, Maquinna had broken the beautiful gift. The captain, touchy as tinder at the implied slur, grabbed the gun from the chief with the words "old liar" under his breath and tossing it to Jewitt asked, "John, can you mend this beautiful fowling piece?—The old fool has smashed it." A French traveler, who long afterwards asked the Indians about the quarrel, says Captain Salter broke out in some terrific seaman's oath. Now the Indian kills and steals. Both are his life vocations; but he does not swear and he ordinarily does not lie. Looking up from his deck anvil, Jewitt saw Maquinna's eyes bulge out, then narrow to snaky points. His face had purpled under the deep vermilion and the veins of his throat stood out as if to burst. He strode straight to the ship's ladder and led his chiefs off in silence. The white traders were all alike under their fair words—bullies who gave gifts to get back greater gifts. [137] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE Before the ships went out, it was customary for the Indians to give a mask dance, wishing the white men good speed in their trade. Maquinna came across about noon of the 22 nd, and proposed they should give a mask dance that night. He was all graciousness and gayety and seemed to have forgotten his gloomy sulks. The captain was disposed to let bygones be bygones, too. "I dance here to-night—why your men not go dance my village, too? Lots good fresh salmon—they get 'um," said the chief. "Fine," said the captain. "You come on deck—my men go ashore." He thought that with the chiefs and their families dancing on deck, his men would be safe ashore. He forgot he had only twenty-seven men to their five hundred warriors and fifteen hundred people; and Maquinna's plan would divide the white crew. As the ship was to sail on the 23rd, John Jewitt and Thompson, the sailmaker, were below decks busy as beavers on final repairs. The chiefs took evening dinner on board and the mate, young Ingraham, went ashore to fish with nine men. The steward, too, went ashore to gather the bedding and linen airing on the shrubs. Below deck, Jewitt and Thompson heard the hollow beat of the dance drum—a hoop with dried walrus skin stretched taut and the time marked by the rub-a-dub-dub of a stone gavel fastened to a bone handle. He could hear the bells fastened to the feet of Maquinna's little son starting the dance. Then the castanets clicked and the rattles snapped and somewhere back astern sailors were hauling up on the davits the big jolly-boat, leaving only the other rowboat of the sportsmen ashore to be hoisted up on their return. Others of the crew were evi- [138] JEWITT AND THE SHIP BOSTON dently letting slack the hawser tied to the tree; for the Boston was lifting to the tide and swaying only to the anchor. Note that point. Through the portholes came the shrill screaming laughter and clapping applause of the squaws in the dugouts round the Boston, noisy and vociferous as the gulls. Another point to be noted. The squaws' presence usually signified peace. Not this time. Maquinna was a master of wiles. The stage had been carefully set for one of the most terrible and swift tragedies that ever took place on the Pacific Coast; and this was eight years before Astor's ship—the Tonquin—suffered like fate on the same coast. Then to the "tai-ai-ai" of the drum beater shouting at the top of his lungs to lash the masked dancers to frenzy, the Indian performance began with the pound of a hundred feet on the decks above, when there was a shrill whistle, followed by an ear-splitting shout in unison. Jewitt's mallet fell from his hands across the anvil below—Thompson, the sailmaker-pugilist, sprang from his bench; for the Indian war shout had mingled with shots/ blows, oaths, white men's screams—Jewitt leaped for the steerage stairs, but his head was, hardly above deck floor, when he was caught by the hair and lifted from his feet. You will recall that at this period hair was not cut short. It was tied in a short knot behind with a ribbon. Before Jewitt could see what was adoo, the ribbon had slipped. The savage hand lost its grip and the boy fell to the bottom, but not before a terrific glancing blow from some weapon cut his head above the temple, drenching him blind with blood. His last consciousness was of the hatch door being clamped down—then darkness and he lost his senses. It was Maquinna, who had slammed down the hatch- [139] f iVL CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE way trap door and jumped on it to keep the Indians out of the hold. This was on the evening of March 22, 1803. Down in Washington, the President was quietly perfecting plans to send Lewis and Clark from St. Louis across the Rockies to the mouth of that river which Gray had discovered in 1792. Jewitt was aroused from what seemed a paralyzing nightmare of pain by the opening of the hatch and a shout from Maquinna—"John—come up." Groping up the darkening stairs, the boy staggered to the deck still blind with blood. Maquinna ordered an Indian to bring a pot of warm water and wash the blood out of the boy's eyes. One eye was swollen shut, but with the other John saw enough to turn him faint. The six leading chiefs stood round him stark naked, with blood-stained daggers in their hands. Faint and half stunned, Jewitt fell to his knees. "John," said Maquinna, "you say No—daggers! Be my slave—fight for me—mend muskets—make knives— swords—you say Yes—live?" "Yes," gasped the boy, looking frantically round for the crew of the Boston. There was no crew—only the red-dyed decks—and the dugouts of the Indians circling the ship with wolfish yells of triumph. "Kiss—my hands: kiss—my feet," ordered Maquinna. Jewitt obeyed and the foot placed on his neck cemented the bond of white slave to savage chief. Chattering with terror and cold, Jewitt could not rise; for he had been working at his anvil stripped to his shirt when the massacre took place, and now the night wind blew from the mountain snows sharp as ice, Maquinna [140] "^ JEWITT AND THE SHIP BOSTON threw Captain Salter's great coat round the youth and forced the neck of a wine bottle between the chattering teeth. Then he led him to the quarter-deck. Where were the crew? Jewitt reeled. There were the crew—twenty-five of them in line—the bodies tossing on the red-stained, heaving night-tide; the battered heads were on the deck, with horror in the glazing eyes from the massacre and fight and treacherous carnage. "Whose head—this?" Tatoosh had held up a mutilated form. It was Captain Salter's: Jewitt had to name each head as Maquinna demanded and Tatoosh held it up. All were there, including Ingraham, whose father was on this very coast, Jupiter Senegal, the black African, Wilson, the colored Virginian cook, all there but Thompson, the pugilist sailmaker. Maquinna smiled, well satisfied with the results of the mask dance; then taking Jewitt's handkerchief from his neck, bound up the gashed flesh on the boy's temple with a big leaf of tobacco under the silk to prevent gangrene. A lad who could mend muskets and make iron into daggers was evidently one to be kept alive; but where was Thompson, who had been in the hold when the massacre began? Maquinna ordered Jewitt to show the Indians how to get the ship back down the Sound to Friendly Cove and Hog Island. Cables were cut, anchor hoisted, and Jewitt's trembling hands took hold of the ropes of jib and topsail. The boat was beached in the cove below the Indian village cresting the ridge. Drums—tom-toms—rattles, whistles, flaming torch- pine knots, shrill frenzied shouts from the village, greeted [141] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE the incoming ship. The tide would carry out the bodies and wash out all record of the crime. Maquinna led Jewitt to the chief's big house—an oblong of cedar planks and slab roof with door in end, a house exactly such as Cook and Vancouver had described—from 150 to 200 by 40 feet, benched by berth beds separated from one another by boards and screened by suspended skins with a stone fire-circle opposite each family's quarters and a slab opened in the roof to let the smoke out. Maquinna's nine wives were there, yes, that Wicanish chief's daughter from the south, who had dined in state with Vancouver and Quadra, now older, but a beautiful Indian woman with a little son; and she evidently pitied the white youth; for she came forward and patted him on the shoulder; but as the night darkened, there crowded into the big house a rabble of murderers led by Tatoosh, the chief killer, whose range was from the Fraser to the Columbia. The blood lust of wolves unglutted was still in the wild painted faces, and Maquinna could protect the white boy only by seating him on a bench by himself, where he had supper served off his own wooden tray with clam shells for spoons. Jewitt could guess the clamorous murderers were keen to complete the massacre. He learned afterwards they wanted every white man killed so no information of the crime could prevent other traders coming into Nootka; but Maquinna became so enraged at the riotous bold demands, he grabbed up his war-club and drove the Indians from the house. Then he signaled Jewitt to sleep with his own little son—a boy of eleven—so no one could molest the white lad without harming the little Indian chief. [ H2] ^ JEWITT AND THE SHIP BOSTON Indian children up to warrior age, when the hardening process begins, are the most affectionate little urchins on earth. Jewitt took the boy on his knee. The brass buttons of the dead captain's coat caught the little fellow's eye. Jewitt ripped them off and strung them on the cord round the youngster's neck. Maquinna's smile broadened. Married to a squaw this white boy would yet make a good warrior, like that McKay of Meares' day. Maquinna pushed both youths to bed on a couch next to his own, bidding John sleep for a few nights with that one eye open. Jewitt slept with not only that one eye open, but both ears, and well for him that he did; there came bursting in at midnight an Indian frothing at the mouth in rage, with word that when he had been rummaging the hold against orders, a huge white man in shirt-sleeves had jumped from hiding among the rum puncheons and dealt him a box that nearly knocked his head off. Maquinna sat up taciturn enough—What had the Indian been doing in the hold among the rum barrels? Then—a grunt, which the warrior could not very well answer. "You go back—bed," Maquinna ordered the man. "Me and John kill that big fellow in morning." The poke of a foot awakened John and the little Indian before dawn. "We go kill that fellow," and Maquinna led the way to the ship. The warriors were there before him; but not one had gone on board. They circled the ship in their dugouts, somewhat puzzled how to attack a white man whose single fist could knock an Indian head off. Were they afraid of disobeying Maquinna, or of the white man blowing up the ship? Jewitt thought and thought quick. Here was a com- [143] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE panion in captivity could he but save the pugilist. The little Indian urchin clung to Jewitt's hand. Jewitt warned Maquinna of the danger of going on a ship full of powder, which Thompson could blow up in an instant. Then he flung himself on his knees across the chief's path. "You love you son? My father loves his. If you kill white man, I will kill myself. I will not live if you slay this white man." It was not exactly a lie; the pugilist was old enough to be Jewitt's father; and to a younger Indian, the older man is always addressed as "father"; but tf there is one thing on earth an Indian despises it is a coward; and if there is one thing he adores it is a young buck brave enough to die for a comrade. One can hardly doubt that crafty old Maquinna saw through the subterfuge; but it didn't hurt Jewitt in the chief's esteem. He also probably reflected that a white man in a ship full of powder with a match lighter and such fists as the fellow used—could be both a damaging antagonist and a good bodyguard. "John—you go first—tell that white man he your father—I save his life " Jewitt went up the ship rope like a monkey and down the hatch stairs in a bound. A dim figure with a much swollen purple nose rose amid the rum barrels. "My father," cried Jewitt, knowing well Maquinna would now be on deck straining ears, "the great chief will save your life if you will come ashore and make sails for his canoes." "He wull, wull he? I'm liker to drop a match lighter and blow all the cursed pagans to " He didn't say where; for Jewitt had clapped hands to the rash mouth and fallen on his breast in a transport of joy at finding his father alive, and it can be guessed whispered in the in- [144] JEWITT AND THE SHIP BOSTON furiated pugilist's ear what kept that doughty champion's mouth shut. So Maquinna led both captives back to the Great House for breakfast, where the pugilist ate like a ravenous wolf and the white boy almost gagged at the filthy food, which he had not seen when he had eaten from the chief's wooden tray in the half-dark the previous night. During the 24th and the 25th, they unloaded the ship's cargo down to the last great hogsheads of rum and heavy chests of powder still left in the hold. Muskets, small shot, balls, blankets, swords, daggers, cloths in colored bolts, sails, spars, ropes, were carried ashore to the Great House for equal division. In the unloading Jewitt was able to save his own seaman's chest, the captain's and his own little writing desk, his box of tools, and the personal papers of young Ingraham, the second mate, who had been his own particular comrade. These he afterwards gave to Judge Dawes of New England. It would be interesting to know if this Judge Dawes was a collateral ancestor of the Vice-President, as Coolidge of Gray's ship was a collateral ancestor of the New England family. On the 2 6th, the hearts of the two white captives took a great bound of hope and the Indians' fears of retribution became a panic by the sight of two ships standing off Friendly Cove; but the Indians began firing muskets from the ridge to warn the white sails off and the ships stood out to sea. Jewitt afterwards learned these ships were the Mary under Coolidge of Gray's day and the Juno sailed by Kendrick, who had been Gray's commander. Both ships were owned by Gray; but news of the massacre had already gone down by "moccasin telegram" to the Chinooks of the Columbia—Tatoosh, the chief [14s] J CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE killer, ranged south of Vancouver Island to the Puget Sound tribes; and Indian news carries on the wings of the wind. What the two ships did not know yet was that two white men were held captive. But not a day was to be lost by the Nootka murderers to wipe out all traces of the crime before other ships came; or Nootka would be a shunned point and not a white ship would come for trade. Tribes were gathering from the north, frorh the east, from the south, from the west, for a division of the spoils; and if they failed to get a fair share, they would tell and vengeance would come. There came Neu-wit-tees, who, Irving says, massacred the Tonquin crew in 1811, and Sushwaps, Clayoquots and Chinooks, Fraser River, Columbia River, Puget Sound, pirates from distances as far as two and three hundred miles. Of course, Maquinna would have to hold a big potlatch feast, in which he would have to give away all the plunder he could not hide to hold allegiance to him as the Big Tyee—or be murdered for the plunder. The potlatch welcome set the two white slaves laughing in spite of the awful tragedy in which their lives were entrapped. Wrapped in folds of colored blanket goods and cheap nankeens flying to the wind, with painted masks on faces, the Nootka village of 1,500 assembled on the ridge above the cove and welcomed the incoming flocks of canoes with yells that made the welkin ring. Some wore daggers in their belts thick as an ancient martyr's spikes. All had guns, to the youngest buck and squaw. The cannon had been trundled ashore and Thompson was stationed behind it to fire over the canoe loads of people. We can guess the old pugilist wished to tilt that cannon at a different angle and have his revenge jf he had to die for it. To the roof of his house ascended [146] JEWITT AND THE SHIP BOSTON Maquinna, every inch of his six feet erect in triumph; and to the roof ascended with him his tom-tom beaters. The Indians had donned white men's garb in grotesque fashion—sailor's smocks upside down for trousers; tailor's socks on arms, powder horns for necklaces. Then Maquinna whistled for attention and through a ram's horn bade his warriors fire a volley of welcome up in air as he had seen Captain Vancouver and Don Quadra do. The warriors did; but they did not hold musket close to shoulder. When the cannon roared and 1,500 muskets kicked—heels over head on the sand went the Indian musketry men and heels over head went many a paddler in waves tossed to yeast; but the display proved Maquinna the greatest Tyee ever known. A song of triumph drowned temporary embarrassment over the welcome; and a half whale provided the feast; and the mask dance came on at night, the little boy chief—Sat-sat sak-sis—decorated like a Christmas tree with silver bells. Then the plunder that Maquinna and Thompson and Jewitt had not hidden by night, was divided. A hundred muskets, powder, looking-glasses, beads, daggers—Maquinna gave as if he were lord of largess, and in return he received enough dried fish to keep his tribe for a year. The hogsheads of rum had not been brought ashore; but the small puncheons had; and the drunken scene was so dangerous that the women fled to the houses and Maquinna stationed Thompson and Jewitt at the head of his bed with swords and pistols to shoot any intruders. The feast seems to have been one continuous debauch to the 12 th of April, when one night with a frightful roar the ship blew up and flamed to the sky with rockets and burning liquor. An Indian chief had gone down into the [147] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE hold with a torch seeking more liquor. That Indian and the powder and the good ship Boston went up together. The other Indians were too deadly drunk to realize the extent of the loss; and on the night of the 20th, when the bucks lay drunk and the women were in hiding, Jewitt stole out with a little gimlet and disposed of all the rest of the liquor kegs ashore. The pugilist was for taking the swords and cutting the throat of every sleeper; but that would have bettered their lot not one jot. Wicanish's tribe lay to the south; and Maquinna's favorite wife was Wicanish's daughter. Maquinna's sister was married to Tatoosh, chief killer of all the Pacific Coast raiders; and his tribe reached down to the Chinooks of the Columbia. Two days' sail might have carried them to the Columbia with a fair wind; but what good would that have done when Lewis and Clark did not reach the Columbia until November of 1805? They would only have exchanged slavery under a friendly scoundrel for slavery under a Chinook or Clatsop, who might trade them back to Maquinna's vengeance. Marooned they were, as ever a Robinson Crusoe on a Juan Fernandez Island with never a man Friday to help them. Jewitt and Thompson then went to work to win the friendship of the families by making bracelets of copper and necklaces of beads and clothing from the bolts of gay-colored nankeens; the women reciprocated by keeping them well supplied with food; and Maquinna showed his growing favor by letting them live more or less by themselves back on the fresh water pool behind the ridge, where they could have Sunday to themselves to shave, wash their clothes and hold their Christian services with that little Bible and prayer book, which had been tucked [148] ^ JEWITT AND THE SHIP BOSTON into Jewitt's little writing desk when he bade his parents farewell. He was sure now, as far as human foresight could know, it had been a farewell forever. The one hope he did not know of was that Lewis and Clark were coming overland to the Pacific; and Yankee ships were under secret orders to watch the Columbia for their coming. Fresh berries of every variety—strawberries, raspberries, blueberries—the rank onions and turnips and carrots and peas from abandoned Spanish and English forts of Hog Island, camas roots and moss soups gave some relief from the reeking fish diet with its stench of putrid whale oil. By way of keeping tally of the days, which now seemed an endless procession of deadening despair, Thompson, who could neither read nor write himself, besought Jewitt to get out the ship almanac and begin to tally off the days from June. Ink was the difficulty. That was solved by boiling black berries with charcoal and filtering through sail cloth. Shells provided bottles and goose quills the pen. The greater difficulty was to hide the Log from Maquinna; for Jewitt's chest still reposed under the bed next to the old Tyee's. "John—you tell bad things about me?" asked a guttural voice one Sunday in the deep hiding of the dank forest, where Jewitt wrote his Log. Maquinna stood behind John watching the quill fly across the pages of the little blank account book. What John answered is not recorded in the Log. Thompson was for "giving the old pagan a box to send him about his business," but Jewitt quieted the old fellow; and an Indian never despises a brave man. Maquinna sat down and began telling his life to John. Had [149] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE not his people welcomed white men from the days of Cook? To be sure Tatoosh—who had married his sister—or Tatoosh's father had murdered a lot of Spaniards long ago on Martyr or Massacre Island down by Classet (Flattery). But then had not Martinez, in Gray's day, murdered one of his own brothers, Cullicum, and had not Meares kidnapped another brother and carried him off to China? And though the brother was brought back with plumed hat, was that the way to treat a big Tyee, who was white man's friend? And had not one Captain Tawn- ington, when Maquinna was away marrying the Wicanish chief's daughter, entered the Tyee's Big House, abused the women and rifled all the furs and food? And had not Meares, to whom he had leased a site for his fort, sunk their boats with cannon ball and seized their furs? Yes, his warriors had torn six white men to bloody pieces in their hands down Tatoosh's way; but the Indian law is a life for a life. That was revenge for old wrongs; so was the massacre on the Boston; but Maquinna was good friend-^good Tyee to good white men. The old pugilist fairly spat such excuses from his mouth. He hated "them and their cursed lingo—rattlesnakes—sharks—man killers." He would gladly die to get his revenge. John would not. In fact, John's adopted father put Jewitt in more danger than did Maquinna. The pugilist had a demon temper and struck sledge-hammer blows, which he called "a gintle tap." One night when lighting the pitch-pine torches in the Big House, the pugilist got a poke in the ribs. He struck back so quick an open palm blow that he sent little Sat-sat spinning with a bloody nose. Maquinna rushed up to kill, but Jewitt stopped him. "If you kill my father, I will kill myself"; and after [150] ■^ JEWITT AND THE SHIP BOSTON all, a fighter who could strike such blows was a good defender for Maquinna himself; but the pugilist's next escapade was much more rash. As far as can be gathered from legends that afterwards crept into Spanish and English and American voyages, it was the son of Tatoosh or Wicanish he next mauled. Wicanish's daughter was Maquinna's favorite wife. Maquinna's sister was Tatoosh's wife. Both ruled terribly ferocious tribes. One of them taunted Thompson with being "a white slave." Thompson answered the taunt with a pugilist's fist. Somebody bit dust and lost teeth. Maquinna patched up truce this time; and that is why we can guess—but it is only a guess—it was a Tatoosh buck who had offended; for in spite of being Maquinna's brother-in-law, something was going bad with Tatoosh. Presumably, a gift of harpoons and daggers and fish hooks atoned for the blow; but something was going very wrong with Tatoosh. He was either conspiring against Maquinna's life to become chief, or he was going mad; for his wife came back to Maquinna in terror of her life; and Maquinna appointed Jewitt and Thompson as his night guard, armed with pistol and dagger at each end of his bed. There is a lot of legend and a lot more that will never be known here. Both Tatoosh's children, a young son and a young daughter aged fifteen to eighteen, died mysteriously. Maquinna may have poisoned them; or Tatoosh may have done the same thing, though he was indulgently fond of both; for Tatoosh was acting with a strangeness that inspired the Indians with deadly fear of the Werewolf Man, or the Mad Cannibal, who kills and devours what he loves best. It was one of the most curious cases of demon obsession in all Indian records; and such demon possession is known to this day among [151] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE all Indians of the plains and the northwest coast. From the night of the massacre, Tatoosh, who had been the most frenzied and maniacal of the dancers on the Boston's decks, had been seeing things not seen by other eyes. He would start, stare, strike at invisible foes in the air. Drunk or sober, Tatoosh saw things. Sleeping, they haunted his dreams from which he wakened to fire and stab at the unseen foe, or rush through the forest at maniacal speed in pursuit. Waking, they were still in the air all about him. Did he glance down? They were there. Did he try to eat? An unseen hand arrested his hand and he would hurl his tray of steaming food at the invisible phantom of his disordered brain. But were they phantoms? To keep him from injuring himself or his family, the Indians tied him down to his bed and when the phantoms came again, the village could hear his screams of terror. In vain did the medicine men beat their tom-toms to drive the spirits away, his family fired the white-man guns through the darkness of the forest, and his paddlers took him out in his great canoe and cast their spears and shields and hurled their harpoons on the waves where he pointed with glazed stare. Maquinna may not have regretted the total collapse of his only real rival in leadership on the Pacific Coast, especially as the other Tyees were now conspiring in his old age. Wily and sinister, his secret poisons may have had something to do with the derangement of Tatoosh; for Tatoosh had been such a villain from his youth up, only the reputation of his father had kept him from being shot by white men many years before. But was it derangement, or did he really see things? Had an unevadable Nemesis first taken his heirs and then pursued himself? Ten years ago, "seeing" things invisible to other men would have been [152] *n JEWITT AND THE SHIP BOSTON set down to delirium or insanity. Not so to-day. We know now the atmosphere has either envelope or roof of electric ether and does photograph earth events and we are getting those photographs on our wireless plates. I do not answer the question. I merely throw out the suggestion that there are more things in heaven and earth than our materialism has been willing to admit till wireless waves compelled the recognition. At any rate, Maquinna took Jewitt across to see the sick man. Maquinna asked Tatoosh if it was the two captives who called down the spirits of the tormenting demons. Tatoosh said "No—John and Thompson are good—I know you don't see them, John; but I do. They will let you eat; but they won't let me"; and he patted John's hand and clung to it in staring, tranced terror. "Who are—they?" asked John. "Hall and Wood—men who went ashore to fish and shoot night of kill—I caught them—I kill them—and now all the heads here—there—everywhere—laugh—laugh at me " He rubbed his eyes as if to blot out the hideous apparitions. Outside, Maquinna asked John what he thought of it. John thought of it what you or I would have thought ten years ago, that it was hysteria, or delirium running into the hallucinations of incurable insanity. "Any cure?" asked Maquinna. "If it's hysteria, it can be whipped out of him; if insanity, he will die"; so Maquinna decided there and then on the whipping cure for his brother-in-law. The sick man was dragged out, pegged down; and as the pugilist was given the spruce broom, one can guess it was laid on right heartily. Tatoosh then became wildly maniacal, frothing at the mouth, spitting, growling like a wildcat, [153] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE biting and barking like a mad wolf—in a word, an animal in the shape of a man, with mind a blank—the first signs to the Indians of the Werewolf, or what the plains Indians call a Loup-Garou. He had to be roped to his bed or to a tree outside his house; and then it was no easy matter to hold him; for he bit through his cords. He died, still raving of the heads, in June, 1804. Wrapped in red bark and skins, the body was lashed to a plank, placed in a deep cedar box, with sea-otter skins for barter with the demon guarding the Indian's Happy Hunting Ground, and at midnight was borne on poles by eight men through the dusky forests to a rocky cave in the mountains. All his possessions were burned at the mouth of the cave to drive off the haunting demons. The women wept and sang plaintive ditties on the solemn march through the moonlit, whispering forests; but once the fires flamed up, Maquinna gave a feast to dispel gloom and called on his Dwarf and Buffoon to perform all sorts of pranks as the little chief Sat-sat spun round in dance with bells on his feet. The three-foot Dwarf played monkey pranks on the assembled mourners. The Buffoon ate and drank oil till Jewitt thought he would spout like a whale. As a matter of fact, he did a little later; and one of his tricks was to jump through the flame without catching fire, from which feats he usually came back so scorched that old Maquinna had to heal the clown's wounds with presents; but Tatoosh's death sent the Indians back to Nootka horribly afraid. Had not John and Thompson called those devils down to haunt the tribe? Ought they not be sacrificed to appease the angry deities of darkness? But we are anticipating. The chief killer's name is variously spelled in the French, Spanish and American narratives; but he was [154] JEWITT AND THE SHIP BOSTON generally known as Tatoosh. Jewitt refers to him in one place as the great killer on the Boston and in another place as the son of a great killer; but there is no mistaking the fact that a man of his name tried to bribe the Hawaiian boy to wet the priming of the great guns so they could capture Gray's ships; and there is still less mistaking that his tribe tore six whites to bloody tatters somewhere between Juan de Fuca Straits and Puget Sound. There is great confusion in all the tribal names of Jewitt's Log; for his little book was issued from Middletown, Connecticut, where he lived, before the Lewis and Clark Travels had come out, classifying the names of all tribes on the Pacific; and there is internal evidence that whoever wrote the book for him knew less about the Coast tribes than we do about Thibet and embodied pious platitudes enough to paper a wall—which it is a safe bet the boy Jewitt never crowded into the little blank account book of his three years' slavery. Another interesting fact is that one of the most beautiful islands in Puget Sound is named after the famous, or infamous, killer and legends of him persist to this day on the Pacific Coast. For the first months of Jewitt's captivity, the amazing novelty of the adventures banished brooding. Cooking food in waterproof woven pots with hot stones; getting fiber for shirts by sheathing soft bark from the inner boles of the great trees, then pounding that to a pale cinnamon-yellow, spinning it to a skein, and weaving the skein into water-proof clothing; dyeing the porcupine quills; painting and beading the dehaired moose skins got in barter from the Clatsops and Chinooks of the Columbia and Multnomah; whale hunting with bone harpoons attached to inflated bladders enough to keep the wounded [155] i f CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE whale afloat until in spite of lashing tail, which often smashed a dugout to kindling wood, the Indians could spear it to death or tow it in to the sand on a receding tide; catching salmon in weirs or spearing them through the clear water; making spoons out of shells until Jewitt taught the Indians how to make ladles out of iron and copper; threading shells into a sort of ivory wampum, which was the Coast tribes' currency for trade with other tribes north to Alaska, south to California; puncturing noses for ivory ornaments that extended out over the gallants' shoulders—whom the pugilist called "these sprit- yard fellows" and used to bump every time he had a chance; hunting the beautiful big eight-foot sea otter now becoming shy and scarce at Nootka; hollowing out canoes from enormous trees and "sand-papering" them smooth as glass with moss and pebbles; meeting the Klamaths and Umatillas and Chinooks and Clatsops from Oregon; bartering with other wilder tribes from the Babine and Stikine Coast—modern Prince Rupert; and then watching the terribly cruel dance when adolescent boys were transformed into full-blown warriors by self-inflicted tortures from which a martyr might have winced—hanging suspended from cords attached to the naked flesh of shoulder and breast till the flesh broke—the days at first merged swiftly into weeks, of which count would have been lost had old Thompson not compelled Jewitt to mark off each day in the almanac. Even little Sat-sat, the chief's son, had to prove his nerve at eleven years of age by not-jumping when Maquinna fired an unexpected pistol off at his ear, endangering the child's ear-drum. Jewitt was getting all the Robinson Crusoe adventure of which he had dreamed in Hull; but as summer wore into soggy-wet, cold winter, his heart sank. He knew at least [156] JEWITT AND THE SHIP BOSTON fifteen Boston ships were to be on the Pacific Coast this year: only three had passed Nootka, and not one had come in. The captives were no novelty now to the Indian village and the women no longer brought food. There were hungry days. Both men could now speak a few words of Chinook and some of the Oregon Columbia tribes, especially a Umatilla man, urged the two whites to try escape; but Jewitt was afraid it was a trick to test loyalty to Maquinna—and it was. A younger sister of Maquinna's wife urged him to escape to Wicanish on the south. Perhaps she wished to marry him; for she had a defect in one eye, which deprived her of a husband; but Jewitt was afraid to fly to worse ills of which he did not know. Then, in the autumn of 1803, their hopes sank utterly. All summer, after holding Sunday service in the dark woods behind the ridge, they had both kneeled and prayed in turn for a rescue ship; but no ship had come in; and now the Indians were dismantling boards from houses to move in their dugouts to the winter hunting up the river at the head of the Sound, where no ship could find them. Fifteen miles up the river between lofty, beetling, cloud-draped crags the procession of dugouts paddled with boards athwart and belongings in the cedar boxes and families on top of the crazy pile. This was really a sanitary precaution on the part of the Indians, as the descendants have told me, to let the winter rains wash out and disinfect the filth of the roofless summer houses. It largely explained the marvelous health of the tribe in spite of filthy diet. During the winter Jewitt heard of the horrible fate of seven deserters from the Manchester of Philadelphia: [157] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE how Maquinna had captured them and put them to death by choking them with stones, except one boy, Jack, sold to Wicanish; and he had pined to death. The story was only too true; and in Lewis and Clark's day, the name "Jack" was found tattooed on a squaw's arm. Was it the name of the dead boy? But the winter became a horror to the two white men. The soggy rains drenched their tattered clothing and though they tried to trap furred animals in deadfalls, they were not successful; and they had no trinkets to barter for the warm otter-skin cloaks. Both were tortured by rheurhatism. Maquinna softened the hardship by letting them retire to a cabin by themselves, where with clay and stone fireplace, they tried to keep warm and dry before roaring fires; and if they had no blankets, they could at least bed down in soft dry leaves and the feathers of such birds and grouse as they could snare. Christmas Day, 1803—was there ever a darker Christmas Day for castaways? They held service in the dim forest cabin and prayed on their knees till they sobbed, for a rescue ship. Jewitt had craved beyond all things a Robinson Crusoe life. He was getting his wish. Their Christmas supper consisted of clams, whale oil and camas root. The root at least prevented scurvy and the oil added to body heat and purged off the poison of bad diet. Snow fell—fell—fell in a white shroud all New Year's Day of 1804. A feast at a neighboring tribe under a chief, Upquesta, filled another dismal week. It was at this feast that Jewitt for the first time saw a shy, gazelle- eyed girl, daughter of the chief, in whose gentle gaze he thought he read pity and interest for the two white slaves; but she was kept closely guarded by the older squaws, though it is not unlikely he made copper bracelets and bead trinkets and knives and spoons for her as he did for [158] aft CAPTAIN JOHN MEARES, THEv FAMOUS BUCCANEER f 1 : :;.'..-■' THE ASTOR MONUMENT AT THE MOUTH OF THE COLUMBIA RIVER JEWITT AND THE SHIP BOSTON all the Indian women; and though Jewitt and Thompson were now clad in tattered rags, their Sunday holiday kept them clean, shaved and decent to the eye. Tatoosh's madness was at its height at this time. Spring saw the wanderers back at Nootka, where the Clayoquots from Oregon frankly told Maquinna there were some twenty ships out from Boston this year and they were going to punish the Indians for destroying the Yankee vessel. In June Tatoosh died; and his death brought a crisis in Jewitt's life. "John," said the Tyee, "you marry Indian girl and become good Indian, or I have to kill you. People think you cause Tatoosh's death by black medicine and keep away any ship by curse. You marry Indian girl and have Indian boys and girls, you our friend. Not " rubbing his hands as though crumpling a dead leaf. But whom could Jewitt marry to ensure safety by alliance to friendly tribe? Not a member of Tatoosh's tribe; for they were his enemies. Not a Nootka girl; for that would bind him to Maquinna forever. Not a Clayoquot girl; for the Clayoquot's chief, Wicanish, was Maquinna's father-in-law. Fishing was poor all the summer of 1804, and the Indians ascribed it to the blood or ghosts of the slain crew and demanded Jewitt and: Thompson's lives to appease the demons of the seas. Was there no little independent chief amid the countless islands of Puget Sound, who ranged south to the Columbia, among whom he could find a friend? For he knew now he must get a letter out to the passing captains who paused at Gray's Harbor; and whom could he trust as bearer to smuggle the letter out? Far into the night he and Thompson planned and plotted and rejected plans and plots, and then prayed—prayed—numb with fear, tossed [159] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE between hope and despair, for all the world like the poor derelict dead trees that came heaving out on the waves to the sea there to sink from memory in an oblivion dark as the billows of a watery Hell. Gone was the glamor of the seas incarnadined by the glorious sunsets. Gone, the glory and majesty of the cruel and sinister, far and lonely mountain peaks. Gone, the beauty of the unseeing, heartless stars and moon silvery and cold as curved dagger blade. In another year, they, too, would be seeing things. When afraid of his own mutinous warriors, Maquinna would promise both ragged white men release, give them better clothing and station them again as bodyguard at the head and foot of his bed; but when the danger passed, he would forget his promises and affect not to understand his captives' pleadings. One day when mutinous young bucks were especially insolent and Thompson was washing out their personal blankets, a Wicanish fellow stamped the clean blanket with dirty sandals. The enraged pugilist seized a sword and slashed off the impudent buck's head. Maquinna came and smiled, well pleased. About a month after Tatoosh's death, Maquinna took—possibly as bodyguard—both captives on a war raid among the islands of the south. Jewitt had made him an especially fine dagger. For days all the raiding warriors had fasted and prayed to the Sun God for success in the wars. There were forty canoes with twenty men in each. The raid is unessential to this story. It was the usual massacre and plunder of a weaker tribe. Jewitt took four captives, which raised him in the esteem of the Nootka bucks, though it sickened him to see all the old and infirm slain in cold blood. A young chief of the Umatillas wanted to buy Jewitt after this raid. In 1926 [160] JEWITT AND THE SHIP BOSTON I met a son of this Umatilla chief. The Umatillas were not a distinct tribe. They were rather a clan acting as middlemen between Coast and Inland tribes. The chief could speak English and promised he would restore Jewitt to the Boston sea captains; but Jewitt again knew not what course to pursue; for some of these sea captains had told the Umatilla of two red-headed white chiefs now crossing the Shining Mountains, who would be on the Columbia the next year. Some instinct told Jewitt he would do better to wait for them. Perhaps Maquinna, too, had heard of the coming of the two red-headed chiefs; for he told John plainly he must marry "Indian klootzman [girl] or be killed." I need hardly tell that the two red-headed chiefs were Lewis and Clark, whom the sea captains had been told to look for on the Columbia in 1804 or 1805. That was the rumor the Umatilla had picked up. Then a great hope lightened the heavy hearts of Jewitt and Thompson. They talked it over before going up the river that winter of 1804-5. Let Jewitt pick a bride from a tribe friendly with the South, then get letters through her to the two white men coming with soldiers, whoever they were; but Maquinna was doing some crafty calculating himself. He meant to hold his gun mender. He hastened the marriage. What girl would John take as wife? Maquinna would brook no delay. Jewitt thought of the shy, gentle-eyed daughter of the chief seen at the winter feast. She at least was free of any connection with Maquinna's tribe, or Wicanish's to the south, or Tatoosh's to the east. She would be one tribe nearer the Columbia, where the Umatilla said white men were coming and white captains called. I can not in the least make out to what tribe she belonged, though I have asked every living authority on [ 161 ] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE Columbia and Coast tribes, nor can I find anything like it in contemporary voyages of which there were twenty- five or thirty this year. Jewitt calls them A-i-tis-zarts and the chief Upquesta. The explanation given of the name by the Museum of the American Indian in New York is that "the Aitizzasrrt of Jewitt when transformed into Ehatisaht (also spelled Ayhuttisaht, Ehahttisaht, Ehateset, Ehatisath and Ehattisaht as well as Aitzarts), although sounding somewhat like the first spelling, looks quite different to the eye- The Ehatisaht is a Nootka tribe on Esperanza inlet, west coast of Vancouver Island. Their principal village is Oke." Another explanation is merely a guess. The primitive tribes of the islands in Puget Sound were almost wiped out by smallpox scourges down to 1830. This was particularly true of Whidby Island, which had once been thickly populated. While they fought allied with Tatoosh's raiders, they did not speak the dialect of his tribe. They were more closely related to the Indians of the Olympics. Among these Indians can be found old names resembling the wild conglomerate of guttural consonants given by Jewitt as the clan name of his bride's people. This explanation is hardly more than a wild guess, for Indian authorities say these clans never had a sun dance. Let us call it then a potlatch give-away dance in which self-tortures were inflicted. There the real relationship of Jewitt's Indian father-in-law must rest, far as certainty can be ascertained. He chose that fawn-eyed, shy, dog-faithful looking, clean young daughter of the chief. Jewitt calls the girl Eu-stach-ee-exqua. Some one who knows old Chinook jargon may trace the name from that. I cannot. The Indian custom is that the groom must spend the first [162] JEWITT AND THE SHIP BOSTON year in his father-in-law's house; but if Jewitt thought to escape Maquinna by that device, he reckoned without the old man. Maquinna abrogated the custom by rich enough presents to atone for the groom's services to the father-in-law and brought bride and groom back with him, assigning to them a compartment in his own house between himself and little Sat-sat, who was now devoted to both white men. Statues commemorate the heroism of the Bird Woman, who guided Lewis and Clark across the Rockies. Statues will some day commemorate the girl wife of Pierre Dorion, who guided the Astorians to the Pacific; but more heroic than either was the little wife of Jewitt, who saved her husband's life by giving him up. Remember Jewitt preceded Lewis and Clark by two years, preceded the Astorians by seven years, saved himself and the Philadelphia man by his quick wit, when not a soul escaped the Tonquin, and his life was saved by a little shy Indian girl of seventeen. I am not going to describe Jewitt's marriage. Enough to say old Maquinna made himself cock of the walk and eclipsed both bride and groom. As he had nine wives himself, he must have been master of detail in ceremonies; but by his numerous family alliances, he held sway over many tribes. He perhaps counted on Jewitt's marriage adding another tribe to his alliances. He would tolerate no rivals to the last we know of him in 1818; and that is worth remembering, too, in connection with Tatoosh's mysterious death about the time Tatoosh became ambitious to lead all the Pacific Coast tribes. Muskets and sea otter bought Jewitt's bride. The Buffoon and the Dwarf cut a thousand capers to enliven • the feast. The marriage procession came back in a long [163] m CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE line of canoes, paddlers beating time to song, and the women conducted the little girl to Maquinna's house, where for ten days she was instructed in a wife's duties before being entrusted to her husband. Jewitt found, as many a white fur trader has found, his Indian wife of incalculable help. She kept his clothes clean of vermin. She made and mended his moccasins. She sewed his moose skins into wind-proof and his cedar fiber mats into water-proof shirts; and Jewitt's wife found her white husband unutterably kinder and better to her in every way than any Indian—which goes to explain these alien unions so puzzling to people who do not understand Indian life. The yearly Indian devotions to the Sun God took place in December, 1804; and as Jewitt was now an Indian, he was ordered to attend them. The celebration lasted for two full weeks, to December 29, and the usual cruel initiation of boys into warriors took place, one boy of twelve being carried round by six bayonets thrust through his flesh without a flinch from pain. At this period, Jewitt had startling enough examples of why Indian women prefer white husbands. His old apprenticeship to surgery had stood him in good stead during his captivity and now a brother of Maquinna's came to have his teeth sharpened. The teeth were sound. Why file them? The Indian replied that his wife would not live with him; so he determined to bite off her nose to keep any other man from marrying her; and he did. So much for the rosy dreams of Indian life being a halcyon golden age uncontaminated by civilization. The Indian was doomed to pass away because he was unfit to survive; and no sentimentalism can modify that fact—when people deal with facts, not fancies. [164] ^ JEWITT AND THE SHIP BOSTON Again in February of 1805, the tribe returned from the hunting grounds up the Sound to Nootka; and now Jewitt realized he must act swiftly if he was to escape. If red-headed chiefs were to be on the Columbia this year, as the Umatilla told, he must get letters to them. Jewitt's wife was to have a child. That would give an excuse to send her back to her father; and he must trust her to get the letters through either to Lewis and Clark or to some of the Yankee captains who came into Puget Sound and Gray's Bay; but it meant she must give up the man she had grown to love with all the passion of her savage heart. Jewitt himself was torn with terrible emotions of dejection and despair as if encoiled in a hopeless trap. His wife's sorrow was apparent to every inmate of Maquinna's Big House. Maquinna asked what was the matter. Jewitt told the Tyee they were not happy together; and the little wife did not betray the plan. He had told her of his own mother and sister heart-broken over his loss. "Send her back to her father and find another wife," retorted the Tyee; and back she went without a whisper of the plot; and with her went in all sixteen letters to be smuggled through to white traders. Few white women love their husbands to this degree of devotion. Then followed weeks of mental torture, of melancholy prayers for delivery in the woods beside the fresh water pond, of fears of betrayal through miscarriage of the letters—which set the two captives' nerves jumping at a footfall in the woods or a scowl from Maquinna. The little Indian wife had been sent home some time in March. Indian runners brought word of at least seven Yankee vessels on the Coast in 1805. Yet not one had come in. A list of almost a dozen traders is given in mm J CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE Lewis and Clark. None of the famous old names appears. Sea-otter trade was falling off and the Northwest Coast was becoming as infamous as it was dangerous. Early in the morning of the 19th of July Thompson and Jewitt were working over the old anvil making daggers for Maquinna, when a dull reverberation like thunder came over the sea. Both men dropped their tools. It came three times—cannon from an incoming trader signaling Nootka. The captives' hearts almost stopped beating. "Don't betray signs of pleasure, or they'll hide us— pretend you don't want to leave them," urged Jewitt. "Go on working." Maquinna strode up. "White man—big canoe," he said. "What's that to us?" returned Jewitt, pounding away at his daggers, as the old pugilist sharpened edges. "You—no glad—go 'board?" "Dressed like this—me an Indian—they'd throw us into the sea." "My people hold council—come up Big House," ordered the old Tyee. In the Big House all was guilty confusion. Some were for knocking the two white men on the head and pretending another wicked tribe had massacred the crew of the Boston. Others were for carrying the captives back twenty miles into the woods until the vessel departed. The younger chiefs were for immediately releasing both men and trusting their intercession to save the village from destruction. For once the scoundrelly old Tyee was utterly nonplused. If he did not go out and welcome the vessel, he would miss their trade and the cannon might blow his [166] 1 JEWITT AND THE SHIP BOSTON village to limbo. If he did go out to the vessel, he might be held prisoner and punished for his crimes. "What does John say?" he asked. John had to have his wits about him; for on his answer hung both lives. "White men treat good Indians as Indians treat them. If you want to go on board, you will be safe." "You write letters captain—tell him how good I have treated you and old man?" The slightest sign of joy over that question might have doomed both men. "If you wish it," said John indifferently. John wrote the desired letter. "Read it," ordered Maquinna. What John read aloud is a jumble of pious platitudes in the Log compiled by Jewitt's biographer of Middle- town. I do not even apologize for Jewitt's deception. A mistake now would have cost both their lives and might have brought attack on the entire village. Maquinna's old eyes bored into the very soul of John Jewitt. "John—you no lie?" The chief's glance was cork-screwing through the eyes of the two whites. Neither betrayed, by so much as an eyelash, either fear or concealment. "Tyee—have I ever lied to you?" "No " "Then—why would I lie now?" "I go—get ready my big canoe. You go with me, John?" "I go—no—if I go—they'll hold me," scouted Jewitt. Had the captain of the brig now casting out anchor opposite Hog Island not already received one of Jewitt's [i67] BY i CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE appeals for aid, he would hardly have failed to betray surprise on receiving the amazing missive. Here is what it said: To Captain of the Brig Nootka, July 19, 1805. Sir, The bearer of this letter is the Indian king by the name of Maquinna. He was the instigator of the capture the ship Boston, of Boston in North America, John Salter captain, and of the murder of twenty-five men of her crew, the two only survivors being now on shore—Wherefore I hope you will take care to confine him according to his merits, putting in your dead lights, and keeping so good a watch over him, that he cannot escape from you. By so doing we shall be able to obtain our release in the course of a few hours. JOHN R. JEWITT, Armourer of the Boston, for himself and John Thompson, Sail-maker of said ship. Maquinna was welcomed to the Lydia—Captain Hill, Boston—and taken to the cabin for a deep draught of rum. When he turned from smacking those lips now dry of rum for two years, he faced five pistols and felt irons clapped to his feet and handcuffs to his wrists. The old scoundrel collapsed in the coward terror of all bullies trapped. His Indians were called in to witness the plight of their old chief. "Now go back and tell your people if they touch as much as a hair on the head of the two white men, we'll blow their village to " It hardly needs to be added where. [168] 1 JEWITT AND THE SHIP BOSTON The scene ashore beggared description. All the Indians grasped weapons and rushed at the two whites; and the two whites stood nonchalant, facing a frenzied mob of fifteen hundred. Such is white blood. It required a higher kind of heroism and self-control than the self- torture of the horrible Sun Dance. Maquinna's wives, who had befriended John, and little Sat-sat clung to his hand. "Will white men kill ?" "Tyee is in no danger. I pledge my life for his," answered John quietly. Stones were grabbed up, daggers brandished—they would cut the two dog slaves in pieces no bigger than finger nails—they would burn them alive hanging by the heels above a slow fire—the leaders threatened. John smiled, and the old pugilist from Philadelphia could hardly keep his fists unclenched; for obviously with Maquinna's wives hanging to both white men and the little boy encircling their waists with his arms, the warriors couldn't exactly skin both men alive on the spot. Perhaps, too, the younger chiefs realized they at last had the chance to break the power of an old tyrant, whose wiles had terrorized the tribe for twenty-five years. They put a stop to the clamor and demanded that the mob listen to John. "Men—your Tyee is only held to ensure our release. When we are sent back he will be sent back " "Kill—kill—kill slaves," howled the hotheads. "Kill away," said Jewitt, throwing open his shirt, "and you will see your chief hanging by his neck to the yard- arm riddled by bullets." On this, there was the silence of guilty terror. [i69] Ill CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE "Send Thompson on board—I'll stay as hostage—and your chief will be released." "Not a step without you," roared the old pugilist. "Yes—go—the captain may lose his head and fire! Tell him to hold Maquinna, and I'll be safe." Thompson paddled out, cursing "the pagans" as he had all the years of his slavery; and when three Indians finally consented to row John out, Jewitt seated himself in the prow with his right hand on a pistol concealed under his shirt. Near the brig, the Indians refused to paddle farther. Let John swim for it; but John had other plans; and drew that pistol. The paddles flipped with swift speed and the dugout bumped the hull of the first vessel seen at close range by Jewitt since March 22, 1803. Samuel Hill, the captain, grabbed him in his arms and told him he had at last received one of the letters smuggled out through that Umatilla or Ulatilla. When they had got the letter, they had filled another old chief of the Columbia with grog to try and untie his tongue; but could learn nothing but wild Indian rumors. The little Indian wife seems to have concealed herself as agent and used as messenger the Umatilla or Ulatilla. The sailors afterwards told Jewitt they could hardly recognize as human being the uncouth figure scrambling up the ship's ladder. He had been painted red and black from head to foot. His shirt was of hairy bear skin. His long hair was tied in a knot on the crown of his head with spruce twigs. His feet were bare but for sandals and his nails had grown like claws. John went into the cabin and had the irons knocked off Maquinna. After all, though from selfish motives, Maquinna had saved his life and many times mitigated his lot. On hearing the full story of the Boston's destruc- [170] JEWITT AND THE SHIP BOSTON tion, Captain Hill was for hanging Maquinna to a yard- arm, or shooting him from the mouth of a cannon; but Jewitt was against such a policy. He acknowledged what both French and Spanish traders afterwards corroborated—that, as Maquinna knew every word Captain Salter of the Boston had said, the insults to the old Tyee had been outrageous—he had been called the son of a dog and much worse. Also his families and hunters had been pot-shotted and abused by drunken white crews for twenty years. If Maquinna were slain, or his village blown to atoms, the other tribes to the north and south would still remain and assuredly would take revenge on the very next ship. In view of what happened to Astor's ship, the Tonquin, in June seven years later, it is a question if this clemency to crime proved wise. There is a nice point here for historians to argue. Years after when Paul Kane, a wandering artist, was south of Flattery, he met a chief Yellow-cum, whose features bore evidence of white blood. Yellow-cum said his father had been pilot of the Tonquin, and was the only man of the white crew to escape; but as no white escaped of the crew, only the Chehalis interpreter, an Indian, the question comes up, was Yellow-cum the son of John Jewitt's bride? His age would tally with either date, as far as Indian Ages can be tallied. Jewitt's bride was the daughter of a Cape Flattery chief. Another contemporary voyager records a young Indian woman was seen with the name "Jack" tattooed on her arm; but as three Jacks left tattooed names on their dusky belles—Jack Ramsay, Jack Bowman, and a simple Jack—this point must also be left to conjecture. Yet another point is most interesting. Behind modern Astoria is a little lake named after an Indian who died fifty or more years ago— [171] f 11 CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE Cullaby—who always said his white father had been a young man who was a worker in iron and had escaped a terrible massacre in the north and was kept as a slave. Was he Jewitt's son? But what to do with Maquinna? He richly merited death. Jewitt's pledge that his life would be spared, was honored; but before returning him to the village, restitution was demanded of every article remaining from the plundered Boston. Cannon, anchors, old muskets, seamen's papers and chests were trundled back by the cowed Nootka warriors. Then Maquinna was presented with a blue coat all decked with brass buttons and a plumed hat and was sent ashore with the tears trickling down his wrinkled cheeks. As far as known, with the one exception of the Tonquin, Maquinna lived on good terms with the white traders to 1818, when his name drops from all Yankee logs. He must have been well on in his seventies when he died. Because of the lateness of the season and because Lewis and Clark had not yet reached the Columbia, the Lydia proceeded north to trade. When she got back from the north to the Columbia, Lewis and Clark had left for the East just a fortnight before, which established the date as April 7, 1806; but Captain Hill found one of the letters left at Fort Clatsop with the Indians, which is another of the dates to check up Jewitt's amazing adventures. Jewitt seems to have looked up or heard of his little son; for on the brig going up to Nootka before proceeding to China, he met Maquinna and exacted from the Tyee the promise when the boy came of age, which would be 1826 or 1827, Maquinna would send for him and care for him as he would his own son; but by 1818, Maquinna [172] JEWITT AND THE SHIP BOSTON drops from history; and if Yellow-cum was Jewitt's son, he remained with his mother's people and was friend to the white man, certainly down to the 1840's when Paul Kane met him. In fact, there is not a place name, there is not a date, there is not a reference in Jewitt's Log, which cannot be checked up with contemporary ship logs. The confusion of his names for Indian tribes with Lewis and Clark's names arises from the fact that Lewis and Clark used the Chinook names, and Chinook was a sort of universal ship lingo of all native tongues on the Pacific, whereas Jewitt used only the Nootka names for the tribes. The brig Lydia left China in February, 1807, and reached Boston in midsummer, when Jewitt, having had enough of Robinson Crusoe adventures for the rest of his life, seems to have settled down in Middletown, Connecticut, whence his log was issued before the Lewis and Clark Journals had interested the world in the Pacific Northwest; but there must be descendants of Jewitt's both East and West, and if such exist, it is not yet too late to gather up family traditions of one of the most remarkable and little known adventures of the Yankee ships that belted the world from 1792 to the War of 1812. Since the account of Jewitt's adventures appeared in the Adventure Magazine, hosts of intensely interesting letters have come from Pacific Coast points tending to corroborate the amazing narrative of the boy. I quote from Mr. P. Lawlor Smith, whose family and himself passed their lives amid the Indian tribes of Jewitt's narrative. This letter tends to confirm what museum collectors now tend to deny—that the potlatch dance was I ml CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE really a torture dance. I still hope other letters may come in with record of Jewitt's descendants. "Tatoosh is now remembered through the medium of a light-house, 'Tatoosh Light,' erected on an island of that name. A railway recently built a boat that was named after old Maquinna's daughter, Princess Maquinna. It is agreed among historians that this girl was very, very much lighter than the ordinary Indian, though squat and fat, which is typical of the West Coast Indians. "Indians of Vancouver Island, Fraser River, Oregon and Washington and the contingent country were able to cover so much territory owing to the fact of nature placing such immense cedar trees in their hands. These trees the Siwash made into a wonderful canoe; the building of one of these canoes under the circumstances that existed as far as tools were concerned before the coming of the white man, with his tools, was one of the outstanding works of the building art exhibited by any savage race on the continent of America. The river Indians built smaller canoes than their countrymen on Vancouver Island and Queen Charlotte Island, but these large canoes came into the hands of the river tribes through the media of capture and gifts exchanged—several small canoes for one large one. "Forty years ago I used to see and often was one of the paddlers in one of these large canoes that could accommodate twenty-five to thirty-five people. I know many instances where trips from the North of Vancouver Island to South of the Columbia were made in these canoes and to make that journey a vessel that was seaworthy was requisite. My uncle, who lived from 1854 until a few years ago on Vancouver Island, often covered [174] ■^ JEWITT AND THE SHIP BOSTON miles of water with an Indian crew in one of these big canoes. In fact, the use of the canoe for water trips along the East Coast of Vancouver Island delayed the opening of roads for some years. Also in my youth, I knew Indians whose legs were deformed as the result of paddling so much in squatting position (very cramped) in their canoes. Also do I remember very well an old Indian (whose wife was wash woman for us from 1875 to 1885) who was hamstrung. This was done to him years ago when he was taken prisoner in his youth. This hamstringing prevented the prisoner from running away. The Hudson's Bay Company were responsible for his return to his own tribe. He always spoke of the Nootkas, Clayo- quots, Clatsops and Cowichans (these Cowichans gave trouble in the 50's when the coal mines were opened on Vancouver Island), and a tribe who resided near Neah Bay as being 'bad actors.' The Chilcoots in far North British Columbia were very savage also, but none of our early explorers came in contact with this tribe. A relative, who came to Canada in 1851, told me that the Cowichan Indians and contingent tribes gave them a little trouble and for safety the Hudson's Bay Company built a stockade and fort at Nanaimo to protect the workers in the coal mines. The Bastion is still standing in Nanaimo (fully preserved and manned with the original cannon; many of the cannon dated 1842 and earlier). This Bastion is much visited by tourists and has been made into a museum and meeting place by the Native Sons of British Columbia. My father was a magistrate and in my youth he had many dealings with the Indians, talked their language, and used them for boatmen when fishing and hunting. I accompanied him on many of these trips and picked up the Chinook and listened to [175] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE the old Indians tell of the days when the white man first came to Vancouver Island* One old fellow had the Tonquin disaster down pat He had stories told him by four or five Indians and all were the same, but he never told of any survivors. He said of the Tonquin massacre that the whites were put off guard by the fact that the men came on board with no weapons, but the squaws who came carried knives, axes and clubs under their blankets and at an arranged signal slipped the men the weapons and the killing started. Probably a similar plan was used in the capture of Jewitt's ship. As to the tribe of Jewitt's wife, that is a matter of guess. Did you ever hear anything of the Euchlataws or Uchlatws? This tribe claims a white man married one of their princesses years ago. For a time this tribe was ruled by a Queen. Many of the tribe show white blood. [Wilkes refers to this Indian Queen.] "The old Indian dances were always of interest to me. As a very young boy, I remember going to a masked dance held in the house of the Big Tyee in Nanaimo. I can still picture in my mind that scene. The three big fires fed with cord wood cut from drift logs into pieces six feet long, the squaws sitting on benches around the side of the long building, beating time on the boards at their feet and singing a weird song, or should I say chant? The men beat on drums and rattled wooden, bone and shell rattles. The dancers wore most grotesque masks, representing wolves, birds, fish, whales and what not. Around their ankles would be a string of deer toes and shells, while other parts of the body were similarly cluttered up, and when they started prancing and jumping, the ornaments, in conjunction with the rattles they carried, set up a din that could at times be heard above [i76] Is JEWITT AND THE SHIP BOSTON the drums and the wails of the squaws as the dancers circled near you. I remember one dancer fell into the fire exhausted and was badly burnt. He had made several almost impossible leaps over the fire in the course of his dance, but he tried it once too often. Previous to the dances, the participants went through a system of purification, taking steam baths, fasting and going into the woods and solitary confinement where they were supposed to commune with the bird or beast that was their totem. The dance exemplified the animal, bird, etc., that the dancer had communed with. Our home was but a short distance from the Reservation, and many nights I lay awake listening to the weird and never to be forgotten chants of the women and men who played their rattles and beat on the boards as the men and sometimes women whirled and cavorted in their dances. Often a potlatch went with the dances and about twenty-five or thirty years ago, the Government put a stop to the potlatch and the dances (masked) went practically out of existence. However, in the later years, dances were held on Vancouver Island. In Nanaimo, Moses and Isaac, two of the best dancers thirty years ago, were well known to me. These two men claimed to be sons of famous dancers and apparently were carrying on the 'faith of the fathers.' Wilks, the son of the woman who washed for us, is now considered the chief of the tribe in Nanaimo. He was not much on the dance, but recently he made a totem pole that is a splendid example of that old art, as a memorial to the men of Nanaimo, who fell in the War. It is erected in a prominent place in that city. "I think that small dances are still held on some of the reservations, but the great dances that lasted for hours, until the participants fell exhausted or went insane, are UW?3 II CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE a thing of the past. On one occasion, so my mother told me, she attended a dance in 1870, and one of the dancers worked himself into such a fury that he had to be tied and roped to keep him from killing the spectators. On several occasions in the 8o's, I noticed that a rope was tied around the waist of the dancer and a friend held it in case the half-starved insane creature should run amuck. Many times I have seen the lips of the dancers covered with foam, that would splash over their chests and bodies and cover their furred and feathered ornaments as the dancers worked themselves up into a state of frenzy, brought on by the dance. To say these dances were strenuous is putting it mildly. I always had a great friendship for some of the Indians and during my time at the front and my stay in the hospital (1915-17) the Indians always called frequently at my home to find out how I was getting along. When I was severely wounded, one of the old women called on my mother and in the kitchen of my home, put up an appeal to the Great Spirit for my recovery. My mother said it was a heart rending wail and dance movement lasting for nearly an hour. Probably few white men will ever have that prayer for them again, as the old Indians are fast dying off and the new generation is more interested in phonographs and autos than in the dances and prayers and spirit appeals of their fathers. When I was home last year, I looked up one of my old Indian friends, who says he is ninety- five, and he told me 'Young Indians no good; will be glad when I go to see my good friends of old days.' I might say that the stopping of the potlatch came nearer to causing trouble for the authorities than any law enforcement put over on the Indians. Did you know that many of the leading citizens of the Pacific Coast are descendants of [178] ** JEWITT AND THE SHIP BOSTON Indians? This was a result of the Hudson's Bay Company encouraging their employees to marry the Indian women. One doctor who came out as Company doctor in the 50's married a squaw and his son was a leading attorney, at one time attorney-general for British Columbia. A second son, was considered one of Canada's leading doctors. Sir James Douglas also left a family of half Indians that married into some of the oldest families in England. Honorable William Ross, former minister of Lands and Works and a brilliant lawyer, was a descendant of Ross, the fur trader. Vern Stewart, chief of Victoria fire department, and considered one of the best informed fire fighters from a scientific standpoint on the Coast, is of Indian descent. I could go on and quote scores of cases to you. Strange as it may seem in all of the cases where the father was Scotch, many of the children were prominent either as leaders or wives of important citizens. A great many of the quarter breeds are pronounced blondes. The Haydii or Hadii Indian of Queen Charlotte Island was without a doubt a superior person to the rest of the tribes. They were tall and very light, rather copper colored and great artisans in wood, copper and bone. During the Fraser River gold excitement, these Indians came down to Victoria in their great ocean-going canoes and fell heir to the white man's diseases, and also victims of the bad whiskey the white man gave them in pay for hard labor transporting freight. On Gabriola Island, a few years ago, a friend of mine plowing on his farm, unearthed the graves of a group of over 500, who died in a few days from smallpox, that broke out on them while they were camped there on their way home from Victoria. But few of this tribe are left to-day. The story of Rev. Duncan and the Tsimpsians (phonetic [179] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE spelling) is amazing. It tells how this Scotch missionary went to these people who were recognized as a cannibal tribe (this cannibalism is a proven fact) and completely changed their lives. To-day, they have a community system that is really a success, own their own canneries, schools, fine homes, and are a modern race in every way. "Most of the tribes that figured in the early day stories and histories of the Vancouver, Quadra, Meares, Puget, etc., are gone or disappearing. The Songhees, who lived where Victoria now stands, are all gone, perhaps two or three are left. The Qualicums, once a mighty race, are but few. Nanaimos, Cowichans, Nootkans, Clayoquots, Clo-ooses, Kupers, Chemanius, are either dying off or becoming very much civilized. Around Neah Bay and Cape Flattery a considerable number still remain. "Another interesting thing is the going out of existence of the white woolly dog that in the early days was so numerous in the Indian camps. His wool (it was more like wool than hair) was often used to make blankets. He looked a little like the Russian terrier. I think he came from Russia years ago. His disappearance has set many tongues wagging as to the cause of his going. The explanation is simple. The dog never would become friendly with the whites, always snapped and bit at them, with the result that at every opportunity he was destroyed; the inevitable interbreeding soon destroyed what was left of his tribe that escaped the white man's gun." Mr. Smith encloses the following description of Princess Maquinna from Vancouver's Voyages: "The weather though cloudy was very pleasant, and having a favorable breeze, we reached Tahshes about [180] 1 JEWITT AND THE SHIP BOSTON two in the afternoon. Maquinna received us with much pleasure and approbation, and it was evident that his pride was not a little indulged by our showing him this attention. He conducted us through the village, where we appeared to be welcome guests, and in consequence perhaps of the presents that we distributed amongst the inhabitants, who all conducted themselves in a civil and orderly manner. "After visiting most of the houses, we arrived at Maquinna's residence, which was one of the largest, though it was not entirely covered in. Here we found seated in some kind of form, Maquinna's daughter, who not long before had been publicly and with great ceremony proclaimed sole heiress to all his property, power and dominion. Near her were seated three of his wives and a numerous tribe of relations. The young princess was of low stature, very plump, with a round face and small features; her skin was clean, and being nearly white, her person altogether, though without any pretensions to beauty, could not be considered disagreeable. To her and to her father, I made presents suitable to the occasion, which were received with the greatest approbation by themselves and the throng which assembled, as were also those I made to his wives, brothers, and other relations. These ceremonies being ended, a most excellent dinner was served which Signor Quadra had provided, at which we had the company of Maquinna and the princess, who was seated at the head of the table, and conducted herself with much propriety and decorum." [181] PART V: Last Race Overland for the Pacific. Lewis and Clark. 1803-1806. COME back to the Astor monolith at the outlet of the Columbia. Where did Mackenzie's overland rush to the Pacific from Athabasca in 1793 leave claim to the No-Man's Land of the Coast from Spanish California to Russian Alaska? Pretty much where it was before. It definitely proved what the mariners' charts had already settled— there was a vast empire between the main Rockies and the Pacific Coast. If first discovery and first occupancy were to nail down title, the fur traders from Montreal had established ownership from the Saskatchewan to the Western Sea. But what of the Great Inland Empire from the Missouri to the Pacific not included as Louisiana? It includes to-day nine wide States, any one of which would be a kingdom in Europe and fill pages of history with futile fights for possession. This area was still undiscovered, and except by a wandering Indian from Louisiana, unexplored. Gray's discovery in 1792 would establish title to the Coast; but whose discovery would fix , possession to an area that might exceed France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Austria? Look again at the monolith! Why is Jefferson's picture placed between Lewis and Clark? Because Jefferson was the American statesman first to grasp what this Western Empire meant. It is almost impossible to think [.82] <ai ■"^ The Western goal of the Lewis and Clark expedition. **1 LAST RACE OVERLAND FOR PACIFIC back into the mental atmosphere of Jefferson's day, or how he foresaw what his contemporaries missed. When Jefferson was minister to France, the American Republic was not fifteen years old. It had Indian frontier wars, north, west, south. It had more territory than it could people. It was poorest of nations among the poor; but it was big with "the faith of little children" that knows no limits; and "according to your faith be it unto you," though the sky be your limit. Also Jefferson's life in Paris gave him a wide-visioned international outlook. He knew what Cook and Gray and Vancouver and Mackenzie had found. He knew because a mere boy—John Ledyard of Connecticut, who had been with Cook—was in Paris, penniless but bursting with enthusiasm to capture this Empire with all its trade possibilities for the new American Republic. Jefferson did not quench that ambition. He caught its fire and induced friends to finance its realization by sending Ledyard across Russia along Bering's old pathway to the Pacific. Thence he was to reach the headwaters of the Missouri and cross first from west to east. Russia gave Ledyard passports, but when he was nearing Kamchatka and the Russian traders realized his aims, they sent him packing back to Europe. Whether he died in Egypt of baffled hopes or a broken constitution, we do not know. Did Jefferson's fires of enthusiasm blow out? Did he stop? Did his faith in great hopes die? They did not. He tried in 1792 to induce members of the Philadelphia Philosophical Society to finance an overland expedition of discovery from the Missouri to the Columbia. But events were moving swiftly in the weaving by the Noras of Destiny. This part of the overland [185] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE race to the Western Sea needs no retelling. Louisiana in the shuffle of European diplomacy fell from Spanish hands to French; and was sold by Napoleon because he could not protect it, for the paltry sum of fifteen million dollars to the United States. The dramatic story of Napoleon discussing the terms of sale while splashing in his bath, and of the change to three flags in New Orleans has been told again and again. It is not half so dramatic as the plain figures—fifteen millions for an empire. Contemplate those figures—less value than comes out of the mines of those Western States in a year; not a tenth of the value of some of the water power in a single state; not a fourth of the annual wheat crop in one of those states for a poor crop year; not a sixth of the personal fortunes accumulated by individual lumbermen in any one of three of the states! Yet when Jefferson came to the presidential chair and in confidential message to Congress asked an appropriation for the expedition overland, Congress thought itself generous to vote $2,500 for forty men to go across from the Missouri to the Pacific—men who might be absent one year, or might be delayed six. Most of that $2,500 had to be spent on ammunition for the hunters and trinkets for the Indians and a medicine chest for the members of the crews. Meriwether Lewis, who was Jefferson's private secretary, was chosen leader. William Clark, who was brother of the famous frontier fighter—George Rogers Clark—was appointed second or joint leader. Both had been lieutenants in the Indian frontier wars. Both were crack shots and tireless hunters. Lewis a Virginian barely thirty years old, Clark from Kentucky, a little older. The year that Jefferson completed his plans to send Lewis and Clark overland, the boy, Jewitt, was captured [186] LAST RACE OVERLAND FOR PACIFIC off Nootka by that old villain of the Pacific Coast— Maquinna—from the ship Boston. There were thirty American vessels yearly coasting the Pacific Northwest at this period. Though still following the lodestar of the Western Sea, Jefferson was charting a chartless wilderness with facts for milestones. He had hitched his wagon to the stars; but his wagon was reinforced by facts. There has been needless dispute as to the number of men with Lewis and Clark, but this can be settled by reference to the fur-trade journals of the period. There were fourteen United States soldiers, to be discharged on full pay with 160 acres of land. These for defense. There were nine bushwhackers from Kentucky, presumably gathered by Clark and carefully chosen crack shots to tramp alongshore ahead of the boats and provide food before the main crews disturbed the game. There were two French interpreters and a black servant—York. There were nine French-Canadian boatmen to paddle canoes and pole the keel-boat. Add to these interpreters and wives picked up among the Mandans; and there were never more than forty men nor less than thirty-six, which are the numbers the Northwest Fur Company reported back to their headquarters at Fort William, as the total of Americans. The cargo consisted of fourteen bales. Guns and rifles were to provide all food. In fur-trade annals, this chancy equipment would have ended in cannibalism as on the Arrow Lakes of the Columbia in this very era, or would have stalled advance through the Rockies as Thompson, the great explorer, found himself stalled again and again. This point should be emphasized; for Mackenzie's first trip across in the north, and Lewis and Clark's first across from Missouri to the Columbia, have been compared to the depreciation of [187] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE the latter, because Mackenzie did in four months what Lewis and Clark did in three years; but Mackenzie did not chart a wilderness nor had he forty camp followers to support. Both did an epic piece of work for empire; but Lewis and Clark were not only pathfinders and trail makers and road breakers. They left a chart across seas of prairies and mountains that can be and is followed to this day. Of the boats used, one was a big keel or sort of mack- inaw scow, 55 feet long, shallow draft, to be poled, sailed, towed, as weather permitted, by a crew of 22, with a small deck under cover aft to protect cargo, a sweep or tree from the stern to steady in rough water. The same type of scow is still used on Cumberland Lake in the North. The two open boats required six or seven on oar or paddle; and two horses were led alongshore for the hunters to pursue game. The average distance a day upstream was 15 to 20 miles, but often going 20 miles round sand-bars and islands, the progress measuring closer to three miles. This point, too, should be noted. From many modern diatribes one might infer that the rails of the United States set out to put Missouri River navigation out of business. General Chittenden, one of the greatest Army engineers of the West, draws attention to the folly of this line of reasoning. The Missouri coils and recoils back on itself in the loops of a python. The rails, on the other hand, follow the shortest distance between two points. There are places where the airect route is 40 miles; the winding waterway, almost 400. Pit the rail's speed against the steamer's slow pace; and as Chittenden asks, what could 400 miles in four days do against 40 miles an hour? Lewis and Clark's trip northwest from Stt Louis to the [188] ■> ,1 LAST RACE OVERLAND FOR PACIFIC junction of the Yellowstone with the Missouri—where Fort Union later became famous—has been related by many writers. Free-lance independent traders had preceded Lewis and Clark. So had the Les Verendryes half a century before. Lewis and Clark camped on the eastern bank of the Mississippi at the mouth of Wood River opposite St. Louis all the winter of 1803-4, where the men were drilled and kept in fettle for the hard work ahead; and that a tight hand was held over all may be inferred from the fact that insubordination was punished by flogging. This may seem severe; but Lewis and Clark were going into a lawless land, where one act of indiscretion among the Indians might cost all lives. Monday, May 14, 1804, at five in the afternoon, the boats pushed out. It could not have been a very gay departure such as the fur traders launched with ringing shots and shouts of good cheer; for rain was falling in a cold drizzle—ominous omen which never falsified its ill " augur. Fur traders' journals testify that the two next years marked the wettest summers and hardest winters ever known. You will find this both in the letters of the Northwest partners to Montreal and in Henry's daily log from 1800 to 1806. The.treachery of the Missouri current in such a wet spring cannot be exaggerated. Sand-bars obstructed direct advance. Soft mud banks caving in the wash of rains made dangerous work for the tow-line men and slippery foothold for the hunters nightly bringing in buffalo meat. Osage, Kansas, Iowa, Sioux camps, were met and passed; and from the Sioux, one Pierre Dorion was engaged as interpreter as far as the Mandan land of the modern South Dakota. "The sand-bars were so rolling, we were unable to stem the [189] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE current with our oars and the banks were falling in"; and towing in a temperature of 87 ° was no work for weaklings. The tow-rope broke twice, near the mouth of the Kansas; but wild deer whistling to their mates, and wild turkeys gobbling vociferously to their feathered train of ladies, delighted the hearts of the hunters at the mouth of the Platte, where "we could not stem the current with twenty oars." I have poled against such slack muddy current until I thought my back would break, only to see the canoe go round and round on a sticky mud bar. The mast had already been broken by a great tree overhanging the banks; but July 4 was celebrated by a joyous firing of guns and by one of the men being badly bitten by a rattlesnake, which gave an excuse for an additional gill of whiskey to the tow men. Always in flood-tide of the Missouri, great wreckage of floating trees and half-putrid buffalo carcasses came drifting down; and many of the men became violently ill from drinking the polluted waters. As wooded banks were passed and were succeeded by the rolling plains, hurricane hot winds brought squalls "that dashed wave after wave" over the boats for almost an hour. Then amid a labyrinth of sand-bars, such heavy fogs would drape this river that boats could not go on hi the morning before seven; and all night long the prairie wolves—the voyageurs' "string band"—could be heard howling in dismal chorus on the prairie horizon. "In the name of wonder, if fogs delayed you till seven, what hour do your voyageurs usually set out?" a city friend once asked me. Bugle call was usually at four with hot coffee; for you can't paddle with full stomach; then a hearty breakfast at eight, and rest between eight and eleven, pause at midday for luncheon, short if the weather was good, a long rest if [190] LAST RACE OVERLAND FOR PACIFIC the winds were high or heat excessive, then on as long as daylight lasted to full supper at night camp; and that regimen is followed to this day for reasons that hardly need telling. Men cannot toil like Hercules on a full stomach. Neither can they on an empty one; but if health is to be maintained, habits must be regular as the clock and belts reefed in during work and full stomachs enjoyed only at nightfall. This regimen must be and is followed to this day. Nature must be given a chance to assimilate food and throw off discard. The broken health and ruined digestion of many a bourgeois or boss, who travelled reclining on a mattress, and drank of his port wine as heavily as when at home—was ascribed to violation of this very rule. When the rough voyageur exposed to every hardship came through hard as a wolf, gaunt as a husky and tough as a buffalo, "the boss" often came out a victim to kidney and intestinal diseases that fast shortened his life. Indians say—"travel with a tight belt." It is the only good health rule of voyageurs. With horsemen, the rule is different. The horse does the work. As they advanced, Lewis and Clark heard more and more of the terrible smallpox scourge, which had swept from the Missouri to the Athabasca from 1789 to 1800, when whole bands of roving Indians were wiped out, or reduced to a tenth of their war strength. That may have been fortunate for Lewis and Clark, for once past what are now Kansas and Nebraska, the white men were in the danger zone of the Sioux, "rattlesnakes of the plains," their enemies called them, the most ruthless and hostile warriors of the West, whose sole vocations were buffalo hunting and man killing. It was somewhere near modern Omaha that La [191] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE Liberte, a French-Canadian voyageur, deserted. Lewis and Clark thought he had lost himself in the woods. "We never saw him again." He had; but it was intentional. The French-Canadian voyageur could not stand military discipline; he fled through the Sioux land to the Montreal traders of the Upper Mississippi, with whom you will find him—north in Athabasca, west in Oregon, and later in his old age strutting in the glory of Indian feathers and stinking buckskin right into the aristocratic confines of the exclusive Beaver Club, Montreal, where he threw his arms round one of the portly, pompous partners, asking drunkenly for "Madam, the old cat, and the ma'mselles, all the little kittens." The partner took the greeting in good part and fitted the old fellow out in brilliant scarlet regimentals with cockade hat. He settled in his eightieth year near Lachine, and died there. The story of the powwow at Council Bluffs with mingled tribes, the gifts of medals and uniforms to chiefs —is known to every schoolchild. The sincerity of the protests of loyalty to "the Great White Father" may best be judged by similar avowals up in North Dakota near the modern Bismarck. More rattlesnakes, more sand-bars, more oozing mud that seemed bottomless to the keel-boat poles, past Omaha's land of the Blackfoot chief, who had died in the smallpox scourge and been buried on the crest of a hill where his spirit might for all time witness the boats going up and down the great river; past modern Sioux City, where poor Floyd, the sergeant, died and to sad drum-tap was left in lonely grave, which a monument marks to-day. Floyd was the only man lost on the Lewis and Clark expedition—a [192] ^ LAST RACE OVERLAND FOR PACIFIC wonderful record. The real caliber of the youthful leaders is shown in the care for their men. Here Pierre Dorion told Lewis and Clark for the first time of the great pipestone Quarry to the east of the Missouri, where, like Wetaskiwin on the Saskatchewan, all tribes laid aside arms and were neutral. Like other neutral grounds, it was more neutral in theory than in fact; for this was always the bloody ground of the Sioux to the west and the Chippeways from the Lakes. Near the Yankton or James, the prairies were set in a red blaze—the smoke signal to invite the Sioux to a conclave. Among them came Dorion's son, Pierre Junior; and buffalo skin tepees to the number of two hundred dotted the prairies. Flags, medals, military coats, were distributed with speeches by Lewis and Clark to the chiefs professing their friendship and the burial of the war hatchet between red man and white man. Beads and bells for the children, then a dance, with peace pipes puffing for three days amid a dozen clans of the Sioux; then the boats got under way for the first three weeks of September, where Lewis and Clark note the remains of what is now known as a brontosaurus and then pass the fort of a Frenchman, Loisel, 60 by 70 feet, picketed thirty miles below what is now Pierre, South Dakota, and a few days later hold their great conclave with the Teton Sioux. Dorion having remained with the Yanktons, the speeches were first made in English to a Frenchman, then in Indian sign language and prairie tribe lingo to the Sioux, "so we curtailed our harangue and gave the usual presents of a medal, a flag and a laced uniform coat with cocked hat and feather"; but what the Sioux chiefs wanted were whiskey and muskets. Failing to get them [193] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE by asking, they prepared to take them by force, thronging the deck of the scow, throwing their arms round the mast, and hanging to the mooring ropes. Clark drew his sword. The bucks flourished arrows. The soldiers on the scow swung the swivel gun towards the shore. A dozen of the white men jumped to the rescue of Clark in the small boat. When Clark extended his hand to say good-by to the leading chiefs, they scorned it; but on second thoughts two of the head chiefs waded out and excused the bad conduct on the plea the bucks were drunk. Next day, farther on, Lewis tried his hand with another band of Tetons in another powwow. This went off better, with dance and presents on both sides. Sioux bands were now each night encamped ashore; but Lewis and Clark were strictly on guard; and when impudent bucks grabbed the tow-rope, or sat on it to keep it from being drawn ashore, the swing of the swivel usually resulted in a scuttle and apologies for a sardonic joke. "Vicious and treacherous," records the Journal, which verdict history confirmed for sixty years. In October, the explorers met a French trader, Valle, coming down from the Black Hills of South Dakota, who to the utter amazement of Lewis and Clark told what Radisson had written a century and a half before—that the Sioux of the Black Hills went yearly to plunder the Spanish settlements in the southwest of horses and made their raids south in a month's time. The distance must have been a thousand miles. Geese were winging south in the long wedge-shaped lines that forewarned winter. Such game as antelope and bear and prairie chicken seemed to be coming down from the mountains to the rolling prairies. The increasing [J94] LAST RACE OVERLAND FOR PACIFIC cold was clearing the Missouri of muddy sediment and poling was easier; but north winds were against the use of sails. Hoar frost left the grass white in the morning and on October 6, in a camp of eighty Ree tepees, again Lewis and Clark found true what Radisson had told— sedentary Indians, who grew corn and squashes and beans and pumpkins and broke the sod with buffalo horns for picks and shoulder blades for spades. Here began the early terrible winter: every fur-trade journal of the period reeks of the suffering. They were close to the north bounds of South Dakota and to the Indians now housing along the Missouri banks for the winter, York, the husky black, became a sort of wild wonder. Was he animal or man? They rubbed his skin to see if the black came off. Gravelines and Tabeau, two more French traders, were met coming out for the season, and it seems to have been their advice that the Mandan villages located very near what is now Bismarck, North Dakota, would be the safest wintering camp for Lewis and Clark. The Mandans had known the white man from the days of the Les Verendryes. Even now Montreal traders were with them. Though horribly base in the moral scale, they were less treacherous than the Crows and Sioux and utterly alien to other Indians in figure and language. In fact, the number of fair-haired, gray-eyed people among them has been one of the enigmas of racial origins in America. Catlin thirty years later thought them the Lost Ten Tribes. Others ascribed their origin to pre-Atlan- teans, and yet wilder guesses have asked could they possibly be descendants of ancient Norsemen, who were driven south from Greenland in the last Glacial Age. The enigma remains unanswered. Like the Aztec and Hopi, the Mandans were very reluctant to mix their blood [ 195 ] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE with any race but the whites. All that drove them into semi-alliances with the Rees or Gros Ventres was their implacable hatred of the raiding Sioux and Crows in American territory and the Assiniboines from Canada. Three villages, the Rees occupied, dwindling each year from man-killing raids on their enemies. Nine villages there were in all of Rees and Gros Ventres and Mandans on both sides of the river, the different tribes located three or four miles apart. The lodges were circular, dome-shaped, 30 to 40 feet across covered with branches, earth or sod, and chinked with the sticky mud of the Missouri; but owing to the smallness of the cottonwood logs the timbers stood vertically, instead of lying horizontally, and if the family head was a good hunter, were usually lined against draught with hanging buffalo robes. The fire was in a deep hole in the central mud floor and the smoke went out at the apex of the dome roof. For high winds or rainy weather, this roof hole was provided with a piece of hard dry parchment to prevent back draughts and drip. On the whole, the Mandan lodges were the most comfortable found till Lewis and Clark reached the oblong split-timber houses of the Pacific Coast. Brush brooms kept the hard-tramped earth floor clean of litter; and if some housewife swept her litter into the front alley, she was visited by a vigilante Indian policeman, who bade her clean up. A large log cut with notches led up to the roof as a lookout over the river for enemies, and over the village for such festivals as races and dances. Well armed with old muskets from Montreal and Hudson's Bay traders, the Mandan Confederacy were holding their own against all enemies when Lewis and Clark camped with them for the winter. In bitter weather the buffalo hunters' horses were brought in and [196] LAST RACE OVERLAND FOR PACIFIC occupied, like the Arabs' favorite steed, the lodges with the families. The Mandan boats were not pointed but circular like the Arabs'—buffalo skin hard-dried as flint stretched on willow branches and as easy to paddle as a whirling top, which their motion resembled. Though Lewis and Clark erected lodges of their own for the white men, it was no easy matter to keep discipline among white men and half-blood voyageurs so close to a tribe as low in the moral scale as the Mandans. One soldier had to be flogged; and the Indians could not understand punishment for moral delinquencies. Here the same comment is due Lewis and Clark as was made of Alexander Mackenzie. With nine half-breed voyageurs, it hardly needs saying, there would be temporary union with dusky brides, and the children of those dusky unions would claim the names, not of the obscure pad- dler, but of the great leaders; so when later in history one meets this, that and the other ragamuffin plains wanderer claiming paternity of Lewis and Clark, before acceptance, the claims require proof. I witnessed a comical example of this myself once. On a canoe voyage into wild hinterland, I was accompanied by a descendant of one of the most famous fur traders in Canadian annals. Wherever my companion's name became known, she was claimed as kin by a host of dusky, greasy, painted faces. Now it so happened that her famous forebear had been one of the strictest disciplinarians in all the fur trade—so strict he was criticized as a martinet; but wherever he had passed and repassed in his swift voyaging for forty years, his canoe men left descendants and his name was claimed. Finally it became laughable and could only be avoided by suppressing her name. If all the kin claimed had authentic [197] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE family tree, the gentleman must have traveled with as many wives as a Turk. Again Lewis and Clark gathered confirmation of Radisson's old record—years before the Mandans had lived a hundred miles farther south on the Missouri, but had been driven north by raiding enemies. Nor'westers from Montreal came and went all that bitterly cold winter of 1804-5, traversing the blizzard- swept plains to the Assiniboine River of modern Manitoba; almost as indifferent to the frost falling from 20° to 40 ° below, as the Indian runner who came in panting one night clad only in moccasins and his loin girdle. Henry, Charles McKenzie, Larocque, M'Cracken, were among these Canadian traders, and Henderson, a Hudson's Bay man; and Larocque, who was little more than a boy at this time, was wild to join Lewis and Clark and go on and cross the Rockies. Suspicious that he might be a spy, as he had distributed British flags, his offer was declined. Jassaume of Henry's party was engaged as interpreter. Jassaume did not have a good character among Canadian traders. He met the Indians on their own low plane and lived their life; but he could speak all the dialects among Gros Ventres, Rees and Mandans here. Big White, Black Cat, the Raven, White Buffalo and the big sinister chief La Borgne, six feet tall and forty-five years old, sometimes called the One-Eyed, of the Gros Ventres—were among the chiefs in powwow to receive the usual presents of flag, medal, uniform coat and guns, and trinkets for the women and children. By way of putting the fear of the Lord into riotous hearts, powwows were often closed with an echoing shot from the swivel; and that was needed; "for," said La Borgne and Black Cat one day to Charles McKenzie, "had I these [198] sm LAST RACE OVERLAND FOR PACIFIC white warriors on the plains, my young men would do for them as they would do for so many wolves. There are only two sensible men among them, the worker in iron and the mender of guns." A French-Canadian who knew the Black Hills, the famous Charbonneau, with his more famous little girl wife, a Snake Indian slave taken in a war raid—Sacajawea, the Bird Woman—was engaged as interpieter across the Rockies for the next spring. He was on the whole a good guide, but a surly brute. When eight hundred Assiniboine and Cree warriors came down from the Canadian border to trade in November and December, the Missouri was a bedlam of festivals, fears, panics, false alarms, races, games of lacrosse and hockey on ice, and peace powwows. One can imagine the scenes fully described in Larocque's Journals, and Henry's and Charles McKenzie's, the tepees of eight hundred warriors on the outskirts of the nine hundred huts lining the Missouri. It was a situation in which one night of careless sentry duty, or one false move on the part of Lewis and Clark, might have ended in the massacre of every white; but the Indians wanted guns and could not get them by killing off the whites. The Lewis and Clark lodges, now known as Fort Mandan, were erected on the north side of the river, with two rows of huts fourteen feet square and seven high forming the angle, planked ceiling with lofts eighteen feet from ground for storing frozen meat; and a picket wall ran across the base of the triangular rows, which the fur traders described as raid proof. The gate was guarded by sentinels day and night. On only one occasion was it found that a squaw hiding herself in the huts had unlatched the gate from the inside. Lewis and Clark then put on padlocks in- [199] I CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE side. The Minnetarees or Rees, or Gros Ventres, variously called Big Bellies and Paunch Indians, were so called from their stalky thick-set build, characteristic to this day. The Journals record much the same religious beliefs among these tribes as among the Blackfeet—belief in one Spirit dwelling in the Sun; a multitude of lesser deities guarding streams and woods and game and each individual, a sort of alter ego, as it were; legends of the flood and of a Paradise lost by a fat greedy woman breaking the holy grape vine which led from Heaven to Earth; and a deep-rooted belief in a return to Paradise after death if not swamped by wickedness in crossing the Dividing Waters—all facts to the multitude but symbolism more or less to the Medicine Men or Priests. Buffalo drifted south before the winter storms in such herds of thousands it was an easy matter for Clark to kill ten in one morning; and the fort lofts were crammed with frozen fresh meat and the dried meat pounded up with berries into the mixture of tallow and meat known as pemmican. While these pow-wows were going on among the warriors, camped back with the squaws and their baggage between modern Souris and the monument now standing to the honor of La Verendrye and Thompson— was another white-boy captive like Jewitt on the Pacific Coast. This lad's name was John Tanner. He was held as slave hunter for a vagabond band of gypsy Ojibways and Ottawas. He had been captured by the Shawnees from a Kentucky homestead and sold to the Lake tribes. He was at this time only 15; and knew Lewis and Clark were on the Missouri; but he had forgotten his native tongue and could speak neither French nor English. He was afraid to break for freedom to Lewis and Clark; and his enslavement was prolonged for almost fourteen [ 200] LAST RACE OVERLAND FOR PACIFIC more years. His narrative gives an almost identical description of these peace pow-wows with that of Charles Mackenzie. Years afterward when Clark was Indian agent at St. Louis, he befriended poor Tanner and learned how nearly their trails had come to crossing in this memorable winter. Roving camp dogs were such a curse that men, women and children carried cudgels. In spite of bad reputation, these ill-favored brutes are the Indian's best sentry and sometimes his insurance against famine. They are also his nightly "string band." The Indians spoke different dialects but all understood the sign language and could converse in it for hours without a spoken word. The frost hung in icy fog. Double suns—"sun dogs"— foreboded storms in December, and the northern blasts came in gales a day later with a thermometer registering 32 ° to 50 ° below zero. The sentinels stamping to keep feet from freezing had to be changed every half-hour. Christmas was ushered in at dawn with a firing serenade and dance and sumptuous barbecue. Lewis and Clark's blacksmith now becoming general repairman for everybody with a broken gun, relations grew more cordial with the Canadian traders. On New Year's Day to the screaming delight of the onlooking Indian rabble, sixteen of the young white fellows with flutes and bugles and drums marched to the first Indian village. A jolly French boatman with more rum in his head than in his heels, stood on his hands and danced all round the circle of applauding onlookers. These occasional visits were wiser than permitting whites and Indians to fraternize in one another's camps. There was a total eclipse of the moon early in 1805, enabling Lewis and Clark from their almanacs to get watches and longitude and latitude correct [201 ] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE to a point; for on two occasions the excessive cold at night had stopped watches. Lewis and Clark attest, and it is a fine point, that Thompson's latitudes were right but his longitudes wrong. These charts must have been loaned to them by the Montreal men. Two or three of the men suffered from pleurisy and Charbonneau's girl wife gave birth to a boy. So many buffalo were slaughtered on the deep-drifted plains which impeded the herds that ravens and wolves made raucous music day and night. By March the ice had loosened enough to draw boats up on the banks for repairs. Both Lewis and Clark and the fur traders record a typical example of marital bliss in pristine, uncontaminated Indian life, when La Borgne, the sinister, one-eyed chief, found that one of his wives had run away from his abuse to her father's lodge. The great chief scorned to be perturbed by anything so contemptible as a woman, but he strode to the father's lodge, sat chatting and smoking nonchalantly, partook with a horn spoon of refreshments offered, then as he rose to pass out, reached across and seizing his wife by the hair without a word buried his tomahawk in her head. It is interesting to put on record that at this early date, long before the University of North Dakota had developed the wonderful ceramics that can be made from her clays, the Mandans made platters, pots and beads in color from the same clays and fired and burnished them as white manufacturers do. Charbonneau from the first had been sulky as to accompanying the expedition to the Rockies; but as the little wife was a Snake slave, she was indispensable as guide and interpreter; and Lewis and Clark overlooked the surly moods of the half-breed, who had bought her. [ 202 ] T LAST RACE OVERLAND FOR PACIFIC April i, 1805, all boats were in water, though ice still edged the river. Then April 7, at five in the afternoon, all baggage was stowed in six small canoes and the two smaller boats, and with thirty-two men the advance to the Western Sea was resumed. The big scow with ten men was sent back downstream with reports to date for President Jefferson. The river shallowed to shoals. The weather turned as extremely hot as it had been cold; so that the paddlers and tow men were glad to strip to the waist. The Little Missouri was passed 1,693 miles from the Mississippi and the dwarfing of tree growth to juniper and arbor vitae and sage and cactus forewarned the entrance to a new type of country. As far as Lewis and Clark could learn, only two or three French traders had ever gone beyond this point. Bears are ravenous in spring and they were encountered at every night camp; and still the geese darkened the air in flight, or afforded easy shot when landing for rest at four in the afternoon. Owls hooted lonely at night and wolves barked in the offing and frogs croaked their spring serenade. At dawn, the hunters could see the prairie chickens in their amazing dance with cheeks blown out like oranges, strutting and coo-coo-ing to the admiring throngs of feathered ladies. The high winds tossed the canoes, as they toss to this day at Minot and Fort Union. The dust from the sand-bars here stopped watches; but sage brush scent filled the air. In a six-mile fight against wind, one mile progress might be made. The buffalo, the deer, the antelope, could not be counted. And then just at midday on the 26th of April, came in over its yellow pebble and gravel bed the French trapper's Roche Jaune, or Yellowstone River, from the south. If Lewis and Clark had followed the larger river here [203] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE they would have had easier way across the Rockies; but their instructions were to follow the Missouri across to Gray's Columbia. At this point the great trading mart of Fort Union grew up to dominate the West for fifty years. To-day, not a vestige of it remains but an old blacksmith anvil and the ditch that surrounded some of the palisades. Alkali sloughs like hoar frost, beaver gnawing down cottonwood trees, grizzlies which gave Lewis a hard run when he wounded one, the whitish current of Milk River coming down from the border, the water clearing day by day, then hotter sun and colder dark and a snowfall from the mountains on May 2, with a glimpse of those Porcupine pine-clad hills to the north—and the Missouri swerved abruptly from Blackfoot land southwest to the true mountain country, through Montana to the Shining Mountains. That Milk River paralleling the Border bothered them, but it came from too far north; so past the Musselshell they still followed the main Missouri in its snaky coils through what is now the Judith Basin, which they named. It must have impressed the discoverers now in a true No-Man's Land that the job of following the Missouri to its headwaters was like following the colossal serpent called the Milky Way amid the chartless universe. It was not one river path. It was a hundred, and any one might be the right or the wrong trail across the Rockies to the Columbia—though Sacajawea, the Bird Woman, with the homing instincts of a pigeon continued to assure them this was the trail of raiding warriors between the Sioux of the plains and the Snakes of the Rockies. I do not know why the Mountain Indians of various races were called Snakes by the [204] LAST RACE OVERLAND FOR PACIFIC ""i traders, but the trail up the Missouri to the hunting grounds suggests a reason. The elk, buffalo and beaver were now so abundant that the hunters had to drive them off with sticks and stones. All were fearless of man; and if the weather had not been so hot at midday, provision could have been made against the great shortage of food later. The cinnamon or brown bears proved as dangerous fellows to tackle as the grizzlies, with claws eleven inches long and a roar that sent any lone hunter sprinting to outrace the deer. Here the tow-line had to be used; for the crystal mountain waters riffled and boiled in rapids and slid over the black rocks in oily speed. If you will look at the waters at Fort Benton or Great Falls, you will see what the paddlers were breasting. May 25, Lewis went ashore and ascended a foothill. The air was translucent primrose light. He scanned the west and there hung in the sky the snow-powdered peaks of the Rockies, "the object of our hopes and reward of all our ambitions." Lewis guessed the distance as fifty miles. The clear air deceived him. They were much farther, almost one hundred miles. But big-horn sheep appeared everywhere. Surely the pass across the mountains of which little Sacajawea told must be near. Dead fires of more than one hundred twenty tepees; Sacajawea bade them beware: these were the lodge of Blackfeet from the Saskatchewan armed with fur-trader guns. Lewis saw that river from the Blackfoot land to the north—named Maria's after a friend—but shunned it with those signs of raiders on the war-path. Lewis can describe this section of his advance as "a vision of enchantment." The parallels of rocks and sands in the beveled cliffs seemed the work of giant hands. They were. [205] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE They were the work of prehistoric seas awash for millions of years. The colors from pink to gold dazzled him. And now, which of all these rivers tossing, boiling, leaping riotously down from the mountains was the true Missouri? The north branches were muddy and resembled the Missouri, but muddy waters come through plains; and Lewis' aim was to cross the Rockies. Like Mackenzie, on his decision hung his hopes. Sacajawea told him to follow "the river which scolds," the mountain stream. Scouts were sent out to reconnoiter. Moccasins by this time had been worn out; and one can imagine the condition of feet traversing stony cactus grounds. Lewis set out with six men. Too far north by Maria's River. He began cutting back to camp across country to the south. Heavy rains left the adobe ground greasy. Lewis slipped on a precipice that might have dumped him ninety feet into the river, when Windsor uttered a terrified shout— "Good God> captain, what shall I do?" Poor Windsor was hanging leg and arm over the same precipice, afraid to move for fear the ground would slither under him. Lewis yelled back to stick his knife into the bluff for a handhold and get up on his knees. On hands and knees, the fellow crawled to wider space and regained his feet with a gasp. That was only one of many daily experiences, but it was typical. Clark had scouted south and had almost as hard luck. One of his men had been treed by a bear and kept up the tree for a half-day. They knew now the fur traders' maps of Mr. Fidler and Mr. Thompson were wrong, also the Arrowsmith maps of Vancouver. The headwaters of the Missouri were far south of the 49 ° parallel, in fact a good four degrees south as Thompson himself proved presently. [ 206 ] CHIEF GEORGE MENNENICK, 102 YEARS OLD IN 1926, THE SON OF THE CHIEF WHO WELCOMED LEWIS AND CLARK LAST RACE OVERLAND FOR PACIFIC Lewis decided there was only one way to find the true pass to the Columbia and that was to go ahead. A cache was made of one canoe and heavy baggage; for the river was going shallower and shallower, also wider. The baggage was buried in burlap and thick hides and overlaid with sod tamped and stamped to conceal from war raids; for the rains would wash out moccasin footmarks. 5** June n, Lewis set off again with four men to scout, this time south. He was suffering so sharply from colic, that he tried a chokecherry brew and got under way again next day. Perhaps his general weakness, perhaps the rain left his senses less acute than usual to see ahead; but in the afternoon of the 13th, a great rush of falling water came through the air and spray seemed to rise over the plains in a gray smoke. At noon of the 13th, he looked over the hills. There were the Great Falls of the Missouri. They seemed the sublimest spectacle of his life. He seated himself, dumb with the grandeur of it. What would he have thought could he have foreseen that in a brief century and a quarter cities would be dotting that river which he had ascended, more populous than either New York or Washington in his day; empire states more populous than the American Republic when Jefferson had sent him out? Jefferson's vision was realized. The Great Falls were a portent of more than a mill rush of wild wilderness waters. They were portent of another later and more significant overland rush to this empire so vast it dwarfed the wildest dreams of Led- yard's ambition or Jefferson's hopes. I do not suppose we can even remotely guess what Lewis dreamed as he sat there that day, faint from his illness, and communed [207] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE with God and nature; for he died before he received even monetary reward enough to pay the debts that harassed him to suicide; but what he saw was a spectacle that exalts tourists to this day and never palls on the native- born son of Montana. A river three hundred yards wide, a sheet of glossiest crystal swift-flowing waters leaping over a precipice of eighty feet with the foam of the manes of galloping horses, the spray rising in rainbows shifting to the blowing mists. Below the Great Falls, the river galloped, living, palpitating, shouting, amid rip of foam. Lewis camped for the night under a tree near the Falls. At dawn next day, one of the hunters was sent back to Clark with word of the great discovery; for from this point westward, Lewis and Clark were absolute discoverers. Above these falls was a second fall of fifty feet—Lewis reckons. Cascades above this fall, too, in a succession of wild torrential waters. The little island in the middle of the river with the eagle's nest was long a landmark and is pointed out to this day. Buffalo grazed on the plains and foothills in thousands. Geese and ducks on the more placid currents above the falls could not be counted. Lewis had just taken a shot at a buffalo and had not yet reloaded when within twenty steps of him he discovered a big cinnamon bear charging straight down, mouth gaping. There was not a tree within three hundred yards. Lewis intended to retreat backwards at a dignified walk with his eye on the bear, when the cinnamon let out a roar and broke into a gallop. Lewis sprinted, plunged waist-deep in the river and faced the enemy with his steel-shod pole. The bear surveyed this new two-legged foe's quick about-face and ambled off. When Lewis emerged dripping like a water rat, he found [208] LAST RACE OVERLAND FOR PACIFIC the enraged cinnamon had torn up his man tracks. Paradise had its guards out here as elsewhere. It was evident the portage upstream would have to be a long one—from twelve to eighteen miles on the northwest side. He was on his way back to camp, where he anticipated Clark would have come with the main body of men, when he encountered either a mountain cougar or a very large wolverine; for when Lewis fired, after lashing and snarling as if to leap, it ducked into a burrow. Lewis surely had found a sportsman's paradise; for he had hardly turned from the tigerish beast when three buffalo bulls lowered horns and with a bellow charged. Lewis had his gun loaded this time, but when he turned to shoot, the bulls changed their minds and ambled off from this strange apparition of a two-legged intruder on their domain. Indian hunters they recognized, but Indian hunters rode four-legged horses. As far as is known, this was the most cordial welcome ever given within the space of half an hour to a sportsman. If it had not been for the cactus now stabbing through his moccasins, Lewis said he would have thought it all a nightmare; but it was a nightmare that hastened his pace back to camp; and that very night in camp he slept with his head on a fallen tree under which coiled one of those nice large green Missouri rattlesnakes, which will not get out of the way of a horse and can by actual measurement inject half a cupful of poison with one shot of its deadly fangs. Lewis, down from the cache at the outlet of Maria's River and hearing the roar of the Falls on the morning of Saturday, the 15th of June, had emerged within sight of their full splendor on Sunday. Wheels were rigged of cottonwood trees, twenty-two inches across, for low wagons to haul the baggage and [209] lM CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE boats up the long portage. The masts occasionally serving for sails on the boats were requisitioned as axles; and many a buffalo the workers saw pushed by the jostling herds behind over the river cliffs to instant death in the Falls, below which the vultures and the wolves and the bears came in snarling, raucous quarrel to guzzle on putrid carcasses day and night. The fountain, or cold spring, which boils up on the Great Falls City side of the river and puzzles people as to its whence and whither to-day, tinting the Missouri with a clear blue for half a mile and cold as ice, is described in such detail that not a landmark here can be mistaken. Like Lewis, Clark gives the plunge of the Great Falls as over eighty feet, in the heat of June thaw on the mountain snows. It was not easy work hauling those wagon loads of baggage up the rough banks in a temperature that ranged from 400 at night to 70° and 80° at midday; but the yellow-breasted lark sang overhead. The black-and- white magpie chattered and the cactus bayoneted the bare feet of voyageurs who lagged on the run with packs on backs from point to point up the portage. By the end of June, it was found advisable to double-sole moccasins. Some of the men, instead of smoking up their "pipes" which marked the runs between rest spots, fell dead asleep as they had dropped. At night, the fiddles and mouth organs would strike up a dance; but not many had feet that could endure dancing. Yet not a complaint was uttered. Clark made a second cache along the portage near modern White Bear Island, above the city of Great Falls. The old swivel gun was left here. White Bear Island took its name from the grizzlies that came nightly to [210] LAST RACE OVERLAND FOR PACIFIC guzzle on the dead buffalo and fish below the Falls and grunted in and out among the tents, so that each man slept with his hand on trigger. The prairie which the portage traversed on the Northwest side was trenched by ravines. Clark was looking for some notes he had lost on Saturday afternoon, accompanied by the big colored man—York, Charbonneau the interpreter, the Bird Woman and the baby, when following a ravine down to the Falls, he noticed a heavy thunderstorm swirling down from the mountains. Just above the Falls, all four dodged down into a ravine under shelter of shelving rocks. Laying down guns, they waited for the squall to pass. In a trice, rain and hail came in a deluge and the ravine boiled with the roaring torrent of a freshet that carried banks, rocks, everything in its billows. Clark started up the bluff pushing Sacajawea with one hand. Charbonneau had become so panicky he had let go of her and scrambled, The seething torrent was waist-high when all succeeded in topping the crest of the cut. The men portaging over the plains had fled for camp almost naked. Some were knocked flat by the hail. Clark estimated the buffalo seen that day at ten thousand. When the gust passed, whippoorwill came out and whipped his ditty all night long. Huge sleek pack rats scampered over the baggage. July 4, strange ricocheting rumblings came from the Shining Mountains. We know now they were snow slides and rocks falling in the mountain freshets from the heat; but an extra banquet of beaver tail, buffalo hump and elk ribs with a drink of the last rum in the kegs and a dance to fiddle and mouth organ and concertina celebrated the natal day of the nation to which the discoverers were now adding an empire larger than the original colonies. [211] it CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE It was apparent they were going into shallower waters as they approached the mountains; so lighter canoes were built of cottonwoods. When thirteen axe handles were broken in one day, the sort of toil the canoe builders had requires no details; and if you know anything of cotton wood canoe caulked by tallow and tar, you can wager the boatmen did a deal of baling out by day and a deal more of chinking parted seams at night. South, southwest, the little flotilla of six canoes now ascended. The abundance of buffalo meat taken at the Falls could not in a brief month be cured into pemmican; and to take thirty-two men across the trackless mountains depending solely on guns for food required a quality of leadership never surpassed in American annals of frontier life. The streams leading into the mountains forked and forked and circled and twisted; but the main Missouri could be followed till the Bird Woman recognized on the Indian trail, the deserted poles and willow brush of old Snake or Shoshone camps. Was Sacajawea a Snake Indian or a Bannock of the Inland Empire allied to the famous and friendly Flatheads and Nez Perces? Or did Lewis and Clark make a mistake in classing her as a Snake? It is one of the disputes of the modern authorities on Indian life. Certainly her people were always friendly to the whites and that can not be said of the Snakes; but into that labyrinth of mountains never before trodden by white man, the discoverers pushed, following an old Indian trail which Sacajawea recognized as the pass her captors had traversed, when she was taken as slave; and then the dilemma came, the place where there were Three Forks. Which to take? On the decision hung the lives of thirty-two men. Unless a friendly tribe were encountered, where was food to carry them [212] i LAST RACE OVERLAND FOR PACIFIC to the sea? The precipices were hard black and gray granite. The trees had dwarfed to scrubs. The Indian trail ran over some goat paths. Game was becoming scarcer and scarcer. Buffalo, there were none. Charbonneau was not guide. He was interpreter. Besides, he played out on the climbs with heat at 80 ° in midday, and frost at night. The Western Fork, Clark called Jefferson; the Middle Fork, Madison; the Eastern Fork, Gallatin. Elk and big-horn sheep, the former nimble as wind, the latter in very large herds but quick as flash on the ledges overhead—now supplied food. Feet suffered more on these rocks than over the cactus foothills. Buffalo hide had to be inserted as extra moccasin soles; and the first thing most of the men did at night was to rip off moccasins and pull out the spines of devil's club which stabbed through the leather into the flesh. Clark pulled out one night seventeen spines from his sore feet. On July 20, a smoke was seen far ahead—which puzzled them. Had a fire been caused by lightning? As a matter of fact, they found out later it was really an Indian smoke signal of foes, which sent every camp scampering for hiding frorrf invaders of the plains. There was recent track of a horse, too, at Three Forks. Lewis and Clark scouted ahead each on different branches of the Forks to find which led north and westward towards what ought to be some branch of the Columbia. The west branch had the most water; so up the Jefferson all hands proceeded on the 27th of July with more than Charbonneau "played out." Ice-cold water on an empty stomach in temperature of 90 ° plus gave Clark such colic he could scarcely walk. As Judge Callaway of Montana says, if they had gone up the Yellowstone through the Bitter Root, they would have avoided the worst sections of the [213] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE mountains now encountered; but the Bird Woman recognized this trail three miles up the Forks as the very spot where she had been encamped when captured wading a river, by the Gros Ventres. Clark marveled she showed signs of neither distress nor joy on reaching her own country. A good deal of a stupid brute as her French half-breed husband proved, he was improvement on the life she would have had as slave to the Minnetarees, or wife to warrior of her own tribe, whether Bannock or Snake. Up what is now Ruby River, past a Beaver Head Rock pointed out by Sacajawea as landmark on the trail, to the Horse Prairie of to-day waist-deep in the mud and weeds of beaver dams, Lewis or Clark always leading the way on foot, Sacajawea pointing to moccasin tracks recognized as the feet of her tribe, with the water bluer and bluer in spite of mud and beaver dams, on August 12 they came to a stream so narrow one man stood with leg on each side and thanked God "he had lived to bestride the Missouri." They had reached the Great Divide of the Rockies through Lolo Pass. Next thing was to locate those Indians, whose tracks and deserted camp poles they had passed. The longitude showed there was still a traverse of at least a thousand miles to the Pacific. A little trickle of a stream flowed northwestward. They were at the headwaters of something that ought to lead to the Western Sea. We now know it was the Lemhi emptying into the Salmon. They had crossed the Bitter Root Range and were going into what is now Idaho. Clark walking ashore stopped and bent over the sand—this time the fresh toe and heel dent of a moccasin running off uphill where grass concealed farther path. Whoever owned that moccasin had evidently been spying on the white men's camp at night. [214] LAST RACE OVERLAND FOR PACIFIC Lewis led the way ashore next day at sunrise when mist would conceal him, breaking branches and leaving notes for Clark to follow with the boats. Canoes were dragged, lifted, hoisted, poled as they could through reeds and over shoals. Lewis waded across to the north shore, climbed a hill and continued scouting ahead about twenty miles. Twenty miles is quite a morning's walk. He found a plain broad Indian horse highway. Holes ripped in the canoes below. Baggage had to be dried out. When game hunters failed to come at night, gun fire and the long winding trumpet that sounded reveille set the canyons echoing to guide the food foragers back. Incidentally it may be guessed those same echoing shots and huntsmen's ram horns must have frightened the wits out of the Indian spies now fleeing to cover somewhere behind rocks and shrubs. Lewis had just got through cliffs so narrow they were a gate when on the plain opening to the west side, through his field-glass he descried about two miles away—a man on horseback. The man was stealing nearer with the stealth of a wildcat. Lewis stopped and three times threw his blanket on the ground—Indian sign language to trade. Drewyer and Shields, his hunters, were coming along to rear. Lewis shouted for them to keep back. Leaving his gun on the blanket, he advanced unarmed; but Drewyer and Shields had not heard him call. When the Indian was within two hundred yards of Lewis, he began zigzagging—a trick to avoid shots—with his glance fixed suspiciously on the two men coming up behind. Lewis signaled the fellows to halt, and got within one hundred fifty feet of the Indian, all the while shoving up his shirt-sleeve to show he was white, when the Indian wheeled his horse, jumped a creek and scampered. [2IS] J CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE Lewis followed the track with an American flag on the end of a pole, across the creek and up the hill where he kindled a smoke signal; but a shower put out the fire and all three had to sleep that night in the rain, within range of an ambushed Indian, who took them for foes. These are the little points that show the quality of Lewis' leadership. Meanwhile the canoes were creeping at snail's pace from behind. Where the canoes crossed the Divide, the last piece of pork was eaten; and—not one murmur! On ahead Lewis again struck for that plain Indian highway. To his joy he saw ahead two women, a man and a dog awaiting him. The fugitive rider of the day before had been scout. Putting down all firearms, Lewis advanced slowly step by step with trinkets displayed. All fled like shadows but the dog, and Lewis was about to tie trinkets to the barking cur's neck, when it turned tail and vanished. No wonder plains tribes called these mountain Indians "Snakes." You looked; and there they were. You looked; and there they were not. It became a game of hide and seek. Whoever the Indians were, they were shy as mountain shadows. Ascending from a ravine, Lewis came unseen right on three squaws. The youngest scampered; but the older woman and little papoose bowed their heads on the ground where they sat for the fatal tomahawk. Lewis took the woman by the hand, lifted her up, and shoving up his shirt-sleeve showed his white skin. Then he gave her an awl, some little mirrors, some paint as sign of good will, and bade her call all her friends. The young squaw came back breathless and timid as a deer. Again Lewis gave them trinkets, and painting their cheeks red with his [216] <m LAST RACE OVERLAND FOR PACIFIC finger—sign language for peace—asked for their warriors. The squaws waved for the three whites to follow. Not two miles off the little procession of three squaws and three white men ran full tilt into sixty armed warriors galloping full speed down the road. Lewis threw aside his gun and went forward alone. Three of the leading riders leaped from their fine horses and embraced Lewis with cries of "I am pleased—I much rejoice." In fact, poor Lewis had to be embraced cheek to cheek by sixty greasy warriors. The peace pipe followed, all sitting in a circle with moccasins off—Indian vow that they would go barefoot forever over cactus spines if they proved treacherous. More presents, the rising sun growing hot enough to bake brains to pemmican, Lewis followed the warriors forward afoot to the main camp. The commotion among the Indian lodges can be imagined. These were the first white men these Indians—whether Bannocks or Snakes—had ever seen. Lewis learned the little stream would presently join large wild waters leading to a great lake where white men sometimes came and dwelt. Here for the first time Lewis tasted pink salmon; and he knew he was now on the Pacific slope. He also learned these Indians had been spying on them for some weeks and had mistaken their night camps for plains raiders. Poor Lewis slept that night amid the yells of the Indian dancers jubilant with joy of obtaining firearms at last to fight their plains foes—Minnetaree, Crow, Sioux, Piegan, Blackfoot. Having found the Indians, Lewis stuck to them like a [217] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE burr. The young chief's name was Cam-eah-wait. Lewis told him of a bigger party coming along behind in canoes and asked for a trade of thirty horses. He tried to hurry the Indians back to the canoes; but it took three long harangues to get them moving and then only a few would budge; and Lewis had had little to eat but that salmon and some dried berries for three days. Perhaps he was not sorry as proof of his good faith to mount behind a warrior on the saddleless horse and hang for dear life to the rider's waist; which his two men likewise had to do; but a saddleless horse with a sharp backbone is not exactly a cushioned chair; and trusting his pack to the rider, Lewis slipped off to rear and walked. That night there was no food but flour paste stirred in water—bad omen for thirty-two men to cross these awful mountains. On came Clark with the boats, the voyageurs getting a fairly good supply of trout each night. Suspicious as they advanced, only twenty-eight of the warriors and the three squaws would now go ahead with Lewis. This day Lewis had to ride if it cleft him in twain. He was too weak to walk, and an Indian scout rode back at furious pace to announce one of the white hunters had killed a deer. Famished, the warriors let out a yell and dashed at frantic gallop for the food. How poor Lewis felt is better guessed than told. He hung on and came to the dead deer in time to see the starving warriors fall to on the warm carcass, devouring entrails and blood like frantic wolves. At the creek, Drewyer had shot a second deer. The horrible scene of devouring a carcass uncooked and hardly cold almost turned Lewis' stomach. Getting a fire going, he cooked some ribs by which time Drewyer, the sure shot, had brought down a third deer. That night, Cam-eah-wait insisted on the whites dressing [2.8] LAST RACE OVERLAND FOR PACIFIC as Indians so if there was any treachery, they, too, would be attacked. Lewis reassured the poor fellow by clapping his own cocked hat on the young chief's head. But the canoes were slow in reaching the rendezvous; so the white men again quieted fears by handing the Indians their guns. If that was not the highwater mark of heroism, I do not know what is. Lewis was now terribly uneasy about the slow boats and sent a note to Clark with Drewyer. Five young Indians slept round Lewis in a circle that night. Did ever discoverers take greater risks? It was now August. Another month and snow would seal these passes. Lewis was as anxious as the Indians. At daybreak, an Indian dashed up from the stream with a yell—the white men were coming. Clark and Charbonneau and the latter's wife were trudging alongshore. Like a creature gone insane, the little Bird Woman began to dance. Lewis' Indians began to sing. The young squaw first found had pushed forward. With screams of joy, she and Sacajawea fell in each other's arms. They had been lifelong friends. They had both been captured, but the young girl, who had already given Lewis proof of her speed, had escaped and outrun the captors. Meanwhile Clark was meeting the chief and his warriors in a circle with blankets and robes spread for powwow, when Sacajawea was called to interpret in something clearer than sign language. She had hardly seen the young chief Cam-eah-wait when she pounced on him in a flood of tears. He was her brother. All that day was spent in powwow for horses and a guide to go on through the mountains. Medals, uniforms, scar- [219] irH CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE let trousers, trinkets, were presented. Four deer relieved hunger, but for more than sixty men four deer would not last long and Lewis and Clark were eager to be off down the slopes of the Western Divide to the Columbia. Lewis and Clark knew they were too far south. They were in latitude 43 °. Gray's Columbia was 46 °. Cam-eah-wait had conducted the whites to the main Indian encampment, but the older chief's map on the sand of the journey farther west was not promising. This steam ran into another wild torrent. It did—the Salmon. The Salmon ran into yet other wild waters. It did—the Clearwater. The Salmon and Clearwater swept into the big river that led "to the Stinking Waters"—the sea. Much of the water was not passable for boats and the road led through dry, parched sands. Clark scouted ahead on horseback to learn how correct the Indian map might be. It was only too correct. No boats could descend these tempestuous torrents. They could hardly be crossed by horses, though fish promised some supply of food. Snow, the Indians said, would fall soon. They themselves were hastening out of the country. All moccasins mended, twenty pack saddles made out of paddles, and a cache of provisions left, twenty-nine horses in all were purchased in the next week; but it alarmed Lewis and Clark to realize the whole camp of starving wretches were depending on the white men's guns for food. Were the Indians lazy or deadly stupid, below brute beast level? For in ten hours the white men could take up five hundred large trout. The Indians were terribly impatient to be off for the buffalo plains to lay up store of winter food. Lewis knew he must have their help to get baggage across the mountains. Powwow followed powwow from band to band, [ 220] LAST RACE OVERLAND FOR PACIFIC all the while creeping down the defiles north and west that were to lead towards the Columbia. Poor Cam-eah- wait was torn between impulses—to get his followers fed and to hold the friendship of the whites, who could supply firearms; but the white hunters kept bringing in deer, though Lewis went supperless to bed that the Indian camps might be fed. Many details of the awful struggle through the mountains might be omitted and usually are; but to me they show the human heroism of the leaders far more than the latitudes and longitudes, which really charted a chartless wilderness. When the Indians grew surly at the main village, out came violins and concertinas and mouth organs and the dance began. Like Ross years afterwards, Lewis and Clark's men danced their way through some of the worst difficulties. In other words, happiness conquered where force could not. May to September, the Snakes lived on Columbia River salmon, September to May on buffalo pemmican. Their life was one constant migration east and west. Though friendly with the Flatheads and Nez Perces of the north, they lived in almost as great dread of the Blackfeet Confederacy eastward and the Assiniboines of the South Saskatchewan as of the Crows, Sioux, Gros Ventres. On the whole they were honest and honorable. For instance, the Indian whom little Sacajawea was to marry relinquished all claim to her, when he found she had been married after the fashion of the country to old Charbonneau. All the same, the wife was as always in Indian life—drudge and slave. Raided north and east, these Indians were themselves raiders on the Spanish country to the south for horses; so again our modern soft theories of any savage tribe, who were not by vocation man-hunters and man-killers, fade on exami- [221] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE nation of facts. They were doomed to pass in the history of the race by the inexorable law, that the race that lives by the sword shall perish by the sword. There was not much difference between their implements of war and those of other tribes, except perhaps having fewer white- man guns, they had more skull crackers, or pogg-a-mog- gons as Lewis and Clark called the long-handled sling with loop for the wrist at one end and heavy stone encased in hide at the other. Stirrup and saddles were used only for the old and the young; and the women rode as well as the men, not because the men were more chivalrous but because there was abundance of horses and the life was one constant move. As warriors they were fighting demons. They had to be; or they would have been exterminated. There is a nice point here for the humanists to wrangle about. Here was an empire vast enough to support millions in peace inhabited by only a few thousand human beings. Why was the universal vocation—killing? Twenty-nine horses with packs on half meant at least twenty men out of thirty-two had to walk. When Lewis and Clark set out northwest in the last days of August, the Snakes set out northeast. An old Indian and his four sons accompanied Lewis and Clark. Judge Caraway of Montana here identifies their trail as across Big Hole Basin, then Lolo Creek or "Traveler's Rest," past modern Salmon City, Idaho, down the Clearwater (Kooskoo- skie) to what is to-day Lewiston, Idaho. On September 2, all the Indians except the old guide left. Fallen trees had to be chopped from the old spring road. Overbalanced pack horses somersaulted down slippery hillsides; and the drizzle of rain drove game to hiding. The Bitter [222] LAST RACE OVERLAND FOR PACIFIC Root Mountains to the east were mantled in snow. In the valleys this snow turned to sleet; and the very burlap over the baggage had to be thawed. Camps of Indians to the number of four hundred were passed and eleven horses bought. They were Nez Perces. Whether the guttural tones were to be ascribed to the high dry air, or to the animal level of living, Lewis and Clark did not know. They were very friendly and had great wealth of horses. Flour was exhausted, and supper for thirty-three people on the 6th consisted of two grouse and some dried berries. No complaints. The men reefed in belts and went to bed. Indians say a tight belt makes a good hunter. Two deer next night, two cranes, two grouse. Cactus everywhere and devil's club with spines like a darning needle. On the Clearwater, they found the great Indian highway to the Missouri, by which they should have come. Flathead Indians here not very friendly with the Snakes, who had been mixing horse herds, but were cordial to the whites, whom they t6ld a river was just ahead, which would carry them to the Columbia and on to the sea. "Traveler's Rest" here is given as latitude 46 °. As only one mountain grouse had been the day's food and a small black-tail deer the next, a colt was sacrificed for the pot the second Saturday in September. Lewis must have been counting colts and humans pretty anxiously these nights in a No-Man's Wilderness with winter coming on and the road ahead utterly unknown. Switchbacks up the mountains with horses blowing like whales and men clinging to tails, and corkscrews down the other side with groans from the ponies as packs slid forward on sore sway-backs. A crash and a horse goes rolling down with pack under its girth and contents spilling as it rolls, then camp near three feet of snow for water, [223] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE the bones of the colt picked for supper, and bed in buffalo robes with every muscle setting up an acute toothache. Who that has traveled mountains in chill autumn weather does not recall such nights, when you cursed yourself for being such a fool as to essay the unknown, and the very next year went out and did the same? The drip of sleet from the trees soaked the men to the skin and the wet moccasins stiffened in frost at night. Colt again for supper with Clark leading six game hunters next day desperate for better food. No luck that day. Camp at Hungry Creek, for there was no supper; but neither were there complaints. Soup of bear's oil from a canister of leather grease next night. Clark still ahead finds a horse, kills it, feasts and leaves the rest for the main camp. The men were getting thin and suffering from hunger colic. Clark hurries on and three Indian boys lead him to a lodge of Nez Perces, where the dried salmon and berries and camas root seemed a feast for kings. It is not surprising that all the next day, Clark and his hunters were very sick men. Anyway, these Nez Perces of Twisted Hair Chief, cheered him with the news the Columbia was very near. Here three deer "completely satisfied our hunger." Here we note the laconic words: "and we proceeded in much better spirits." Naturally for the last supper of the main body of explorers had been soup from the ears of the horse. Once out of the defile of the mountains, Lewis and Clark recognized that starving men cannot march swiftly. They must build canoes. Half the men were laid up in the Nez Perces Lodges. The weather was now positively hot. This and better diet among the Nez Perces somewhat restored health, [224] n LAST RACE OVERLAND FOR PACIFIC though all suffered from colic due to the sudden shift from meat to fish and roots. Both leaders were deathly ill. The thirty-eight horses picked up in trade were branded and handed over to the Nez Perces to be guarded till Lewis and Clack returned. Saddles and provisions were cached, and the canoes launched again on October 7. The old Snake guide slipped away here. He had not calculated on going on beyond Snake territory. He forgot even his payment. Rapids were run every day for the second week in October, sometimes without injury, then again with splits to be repaired at night; and the invalids found a shift to dog meat less trying on stomachs than cakes of flour from roots. Oblong houses with flat roofs indicated coastal tribes, though the Nez Perces were strictly inland Indians living, like the Snakes, a life of constant migration. As near as we can judge, Lewis and Clark were now abreast of modern Lewiston. Dogs and fish could nightly be purchased from the Indians, but rapids compelled use of the tump-line, and even then one canoe was ripped flat, the men dumped on a rock and the baggage floated on downstream to the shoals. Canoes were repaired with planks from Indian houses, a new guide engaged for the next rapids; and now at last on October 16, at the camps of the Yakimas and Walla Wallas, after powwow with two hundred Indians, the discoverers came on the blue waters of the Columbia in what is now eastern Washington. A treeless plain extended back from the river in billows of wind-waved sand. Here all Indians used canoes or dugouts, and the universal diet was fish, with the usual result—corpulent bodies and squat bow legs, not as high a type as the warrior. What Lewis and Clark call the Topteal is really the Yakima. Away to the southwest they described a tremendously [225] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE high peak covered with snow—either St. Helen's or Adam's. Powwows every night with the Indians here, lodges everywhere and never a sign of alarm; for these Indians knew white men. Fishing and curing fish seemed the only occupations. The houses were of split timbers and though the clothing was buffalo, moose, or elk skins, these seemed to have been bartered from the mountain tribes for the coast fish. Large rocks, black rocks choking the channel, with pelicans and vultures gorging on the dead fish, and an Indian Valhalla with bodies laid wrapped in leather robes on shelves in a great house 60 by 12 feet, of which tourists can still see two or three in the Blackfoot land and at least one on the islands of the Columbia. The shores now begin to lift in rocks, the current to quicken to a gallop and near John Day's River, the Indians have two blankets of scarlet and a boy wears a white sailor's blue jacket. The Indians forewarned there were "timms" ahead, bad "timms"—falls coming down from the snows of a great opal peak to the south—Vancouver's Mount Hood. The river was, of course, the Des Chutes, near Celilo Falls. Men who could not swim were set ashore to walk. Fishing villages were nearly all on the right bank for fear of the Snakes to the south. The discoverers had reached the famous Celilo and Dalles, so called from the old voyageurs' "d'aller," water that would go-go, and Lower Cascades or Great Shoot. In the high water of spring, the rapids of the Columbia could be run, but not in the low water after midsummer. All baggage was taken out and portaged over land on the north shore. The Indian pirates famous in this region were generous as to carrying baggage but amazingly light [226] LAST RACE OVERLAND FOR PACIFIC fingered as to helping themselves to rewards. In fact, they considered such pilferings to be their legitimate toll; and Wishram on the north shore with its basalt columns commemorates this pirate section of the great river highway in the race to the Western Sea. Clark crossed to the south side of the river to avoid a vertical drop of twenty feet; but the water took another "chute" of eight feet and again canoes had to be lightened and let down by line. An elk-skin rope broke and away dived one canoe; but the Indians rescued it below. That night in camp, the men went almost mad with the pest in this section of the river for thirty years—fleas. David Douglas used to drown them out before he lay down to sleep, and the grease-smeared Indians were evidently oiled and painted too thickly for flea pincers to penetrate. Between the Dalles and the Cascades, Lewis and Clark first observed the one-tree dugout of the coastal tribes, wide in the middle, sharp as salmon's snout at the prow, with cross bars for strength and much tougher in wild waters than the inland canoe of cedar and birch bark. Guides here insisted on going back up to the Walla Wallas and Nez Perces; for these Wishram pirates were ugly customers. Though the water boiled in fearful eddies and then went galloping over ledges or gliding oily as ocean billows, Lewis and Clark feared the rapids less than the pirates and with their deft voyageurs picking the currents that led off the rocks glided down at racehorse speed to the amazement of Indian onlookers assembled to witness a wreck and no doubt to profit by it. Again, men who could not swim had been sent overland with baggage, chiefly guns and ammunition. That night below the last portage, to the joys from the fleas at the camp was added the perfume of some irate skunks; but [227] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE the violins were again uncased and surly moods danced away. More Indians came in sailors' jackets. The cliffs rose higher and higher and one can only explain the omission on the trip West of all reference to the beauty of the mountain gorges of the Columbia to Lewis and Clark's frantic anxiety to reach the Western Sea before the autumn rains and to the fact, though the days are reported clear, that morning and evening were enveloped in mist, and turbulent waters required all attention by day. But they did note among the tribes traders' muskets, swords and kettles. On October 28, the winds were so high and the rains so continuous that they lay on the wet sand under a niche of rock for shelter. They were on the north side of the Columbia; but the Indians, knowing the safe channels through the reeds and with dugouts less liable to smash from a bump, kept paddling across to peddle food and pilfer whatever they could lay hands on, leaving a nice aftermath of jumping fleas that set the men nearly tearing the shirts off their backs, but still they got out violins and danced at night camps. Still cloudy on October 29, with a chief displaying fourteen forefingers of Snakes he had recently raided and killed. It is a little sardonic that Lewis and Clark named these lodges Friendly Village. Higher lifted the mossed and fern- grown cliffs in the mists. The famous Sepulchre or Mem- lose Island is still visible from either side of the Columbia. Rain again on the 30th, with four mountain torrents pouring over the cliffs in cataracts on the south side where tourists to-day camp yearly in hundreds of thousands on the Columbia Highway. The mountains now literally hem the river in a gorge, and the rock islands stud the riffle of foam fret and milky blue like black onyx. The waters shoot like arrows here and the men are wet to the [228] L LAST RACE OVERLAND FOR PACIFIC skin in the drizzle and can get a fire going only once that day to dry off their rain-sodden, rotting buckskins. Rain, more rain on the 31st, with higher and higher cliffs on the left, and the river "collecting"—is the voyageurs' term— arching up its bark for a wild leap would be a closer description, with tigerish roar of angry waves for ten to twenty foot plunges. Clark comes back from scouting ahead with report they must portage. This section cannot be run; and again they camp under dripping rocks for shelter from the rains. November came in bleak and cold. Need one ask why the topography of the river is so much more accurately described going back than coming down? Like the river, Lewis and Clark were racing for their lives. The rocks were slippery as grease to the soaked moccasin soles; but the smallest canoe and the baggage were carried; and the four big heavy cedar boats were slid along poles or let down in places and towed along the shore. Sea otter now on the rocks where they reembark on the right or north. The Indian villages here are the usual coastal type, slabs for roofs and sides; and the Indians seem to use beads for barter and exchange. Corpulence, greasy skin, red rimmed poor little pig-eyes, vermin, seem to increase as the coast is neared, with the wretched scurvy teeth of nearly all fish eaters. "Filthy to a disgusting degree," say Lewis and Clark; and every one knowing Indian life bows to the verdict as true of fish-eating tribes, be the explanation what it may. Condemn them as harshly as we may for ruthless cruelty, the buffalo hunter stands highest as type of man. This was the last bad water on the Columbia. The river widened. Water lapped night camps and one pinnacled rock rising in a spire, Lewis and Clark named [229] i CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE Rooster and another Beacon Rock. They are twenty- nine miles now below the Great Shoot. Fog so thick on Sunday the 3rd that a man could not "see fifty steps." Where the river is almost a swamp of reeds, they see on the left the outlet of another river behind island or sand-bar, now called the Sandy. When they attempted to wade the sand-bar it proved to be quicksand. When the fog lifted, Mount Hood could be seen to the southeast, a translucent pearl above cloud line. Indians here reported that three trading vessels were at the Bar of the Columbia. A Snake Indian slave tells them that night of a big river south, the Multnomah or Willamette. The slave had a European gun with brass barrel. Tide eighteen inches that night, and on, racing the weather and time, Monday the 4th, past more wooded islands and a people we now know as Chilcoots with fifty-two big dugouts beached along the sand and Indians in scarlet and blue blankets and sailors' jackets and trousers, shirts and hats. These fellows were bold, petty thieves and treated the whites with unconcealed insolence. All the same, Lewis and Clark's hearts must have been singing, for the signs of the sea were no longer a will-o'- the-wisp receding faster than the swiftest paddles. To the northeast, Vancouver's St. Helen's, could be seen round and white like a sugar loaf. The Indians they now passed had no curiosity but boundless impudence. They followed the swift canoes, and hung round the night camps with sinister sneers. Tuesday the 5th, they had not been able to sleep for the call of geese and the splash of chill rains. The river seemed to be coiling up sharply north. Would its snaky coils never end? Here the river narrowed between rocks with numerous islands in one of which they paused for [230] LAST RACE OVERLAND FOR PACIFIC supper. Twenty to thirty Indians in each dugout now passed and repassed, heavy timber back on the uplands, but plains to left of a soil the richest seen, with a mellowness to the chill of November airs. Early, Wednesday the 6th, the canoes are gliding among the islands and pass a river on the right called the Cowlitz, where they pause for noonday dinner on an island of redwood, briars, pine, alder and ash so thick the hunters can not penetrate; but they recognize the knobbed rock rising eighty feet up in the Columbia, as Vancouver's Coffin Rock and the spire up the Cowlitz as the Castle. Look forward only a century and a quarter. At the junction of these rivers stands the new city of Longview, with the ships of every world port lying at its docks, the hum of a thousand saws loading these ships with lumber enough for literally forty thousand houses. The men slept that night under a mountain to the right. It had rained all day and all bedding had to be dried not only of rain but to roast out the long-range hopping fleas. More rain on the 7th and fog in a blanket and islands cutting the river into north and south channels of which the south current seemed deepest. The chiefs of the Indians here had shirts of woven bark fiber and hats of basket ware. This is the famous Puget Island opposite the Clatsop Crest of Columbia River Highway. An Indian in a sailor jacket was engaged as pilot through the almost countless swampy islands now dotting the widening Columbia. The river had broadened to almost a bay. The fog cleared towards nightfall. Lewis and Clark could hardly credit their eyes. Who glimpsed it first— we do not know. Were they awed with the realization of hopes and dreams of two hundred and fifty years? We [231] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE can guess the paddles of the far voyageurs from east to west stopped and pointed. We can guess Lewis and Clark rose from where they sat in different canoes and called to each other. We can also guess the exuberant half-breed paddler let out his usual yell of triumph. "We enjoyed the delightful prospect of the ocean; that ocean, the object of all our labors, the reward of all our anxieties. This cheering view exhilarated the spirits of all the party who were still more delighted on hearing the distant roar of the breakers. We went on with great cheerfulness along the right [northeast] bank, the shore so bold and rocky that we could not find any spot fit for encampment . . . having made 34 miles [from camp above Longview] we spread our tents on the ground and passed the night in the rain." Here the smallest canoe lost in the fog of the day came in to camp. In spite of the rain, one can guess the captains enjoyed the soundest sleep they had known since leaving the Three Forks of the Missouri in the middle of July. It would be easy here to pause like Lewis and Clark and utter platitudinous paeans on the greatest epic of American history; but if the hardships met, the difficulties mastered and the obstructions overcome do not write the verdict on the achievement of Lewis and Clark in the final race of discovery to the Western Sea, no mere words of cheap praise could. The Pacific Empire is the monument to that epic. The cities dotting that empire are its truest inscription. The happy, prosperous lives lived there are its everlasting paean, just as the shouts of many waters carving their way through the eternal canyons to leap to the seas are typical of the human race always overleaping its own bounds, when it follows the lodestar of God's Destiny. [232] 11 If if LAST RACE OVERLAND FOR PACIFIC Where did Lewis and Clark camp that first night on the north shore of the Columbia? Judge Carey says, just inside Baker's Bay near what is now Chinook. Dr. Holman, "opposite the present city of Astoria." Lewis says "opposite our camp is a rock at the distance of a mile in the river twenty feet in diameter and fifty in height." Towards the southwest, they could see a snowcapped peak, which in November might have been Hood. They got out in their boats round the Sand Islands "to the left" and entered an outlet on the right, which must have put them directly in behind Cape Disappointment. As the tide receded, they rode out "but the waves rolled so high," the voyageurs became seasick. Here we easily recognize our old friend Cape Disappointment, where the inner lighthouse stands to-day. Night fog and night tide came moaning in pierced by the lonely cry of the gulls. There was hardly room to lie level between tide rip and rocks in the camp of November 8. The baggage had to be raised on poles above the splash of spray and the men huddled together soaked to the skin. Next day, rain too heavy to see which way to go, but go they must; for wind from the south and flood-tide set breakers roaring, whicb tossed the great corpses of dead trees in such a tumult over the beached canoes there was momentary danger of men and boats being smashed or washed away. Sunday the ioth, the wind quieted, but when the canoes tried to get out of the bay, the waves came with such a crash, that baggage was tossed on the rocks above and the men camped on the heaving log-drift below a hill five hundred feet high. Rain and more rain all that night. The logs began to lift and float. Monday, rain in torrents set stones rolling down the hill. The men were now [233] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE astraddle floating logs. When the hunters tried to go out for game, they found themselves in such thickets of timbers they could not penetrate; nor was there a chance on earth of finding game. Fortunately five Indians in a dugout came across from the south shore. They knew white men, for one was dressed in sailor jacket and pantaloons, and they traded the famished men thirteen fish, which would be about a third of a fish for each of the thirty-two. Then the Indians went riding in their strong canoe over the wildest breakers back to the south shore in perfect safety. A frightful gale lashed the bay all Tuesday and the predicament became more alarming than any that had confronted Lewis and Clark from the Mississippi to the sea. Bedding and buckskins were rotting in the rain. In a glint of clear skies on Wednesday the 18th, Clark attempted to climb the hill behind and get a glimpse of surroundings to find safe camp. Like all good mountaineers, he followed up a steep brook-bed. It was the only way he could get through that tangle of undergrowth. He had to draw himself up by the bushes—a trick prospectors and miners learn in following mineral float to its sources. The size of the pines and firs—ten feet across—and the thick foliage overhead forced Clark to get above them for a view, and every pine was a dripping eaves-trough. I know what Clark experienced; for I have gone through the same in forests farther north. Only in my case, I knew I could return to the dry roof of a fur post. To make matters worse, when the Indians came next day selling fish, they forcibly seized one of the voyageurs' fish baskets; and the little camp of marooned whites where now stands Fort Canby had to threaten shots to stop pilfering. However, the hunters returned with word [234] LAST RACE OVERLAND FOR PACIFIC of a good sandy ocean beach if they could get round to it. On that shore to-day—North Beach—a pleasure world plays. For only two hours in ten days it had not rained. Lewis went round with four men to examine that beach. The hunters had the usual bad clash with the rascal coast tribes. They had slept with rifles under knapsacks to find the Indians had stolen the rifles during the night and now defied the whites. Just then Lewis came round the bend with his men and the Indians handed the stolen guns back as unconscious of wrong as a plundering dog. That eight-foot tide and the great roll of surf, which sends bathers scampering ashore to-day with ropes for hand-hold—made Cape Disappointment as impossible a winter camp as inside the Columbia Bar. That Indian camp at Chinook might have been possible; but the Indians were horribly diseased from their own filthy living and filthier vices. The Indians pointed across the wide bay to the south shore as the best winter camp. Chinooks were now nightly round the white men in a mob—among them one Comcomly. Some Clatsops from the south shore, by signs and the coastal lingo called Chinook, explained that the other side of the Columbia was more sheltered and had better hunting. Certainly across the river were Indians of a higher type than these squat, diseased, insolent fish-eaters of the North. Now look out from the monolith of Astoria! Below you on the south shore is a little cape sticking out in midriver, called Tongue Point. Behind that are two rivers coming out in two silver ribbons to the Columbia— Young's River east and Lewis and Clark River west. Between the two is a cove sheltered from wind and tide [ 235 } CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE and yet so overgrown with great firs and ferns shoulder- high that it is dark as a fairy den. Hugging the north shore like castaways on strange seas, Lewis and Clark with field-glasses searching the South beach, the paddlers reascended the Columbia to Pillar Rock, and now when the tide set out on the 26th of November slipped across to Warren's Landing just beyond that Tongue Point; and on up the little sheltered cove. Of course, it was raining—raining torrents—one of the wettest seasons ever known on the Pacific. They could hardly get fires going under the dripping firs, though the men were shivering in ague from almost three weeks in perpetual damp. The Indians traded dried roots for fish hooks; but dried roots on empty stomachs increased illness; and every Indian visit was followed by discovery of axe missing, or knife, or anything light fingers could filch away. The only thing those Indians did not steal was fleas. They left them behind to line the gaping seams of tattered shirts. If one were following fiction instead of fact, it would give one's spine an almost creepy feeling to read that Lewis and Clark's entire array of articles for trade had now dwindled to what could be wrapped in two pocket handkerchiefs. The thirty-two men had neither clothing nor food and were thirty-five hundred and fifty miles away from any possible supply. Jefferson in his instructions with the meager $2,500 for supplies had evidently gambled on the chance of American trading ships making up deficiencies on the Pacific and then Lewis and Clark putting through drafts on the Government which a stingy, short-sighted Congress would have to honor; but the expedition had come too late for any help from the American vessels. The season was past. The trading ships [236] LAST RACE OVERLAND FOR PACIFIC were all up the coast or spreading their swift sails for flight back round the world to home harbors. If reading fiction, just here the average human would skip to the last pages to see if they escaped. They did; but Lewis took his own life before he could reach Washington with his report and get his personal debts paid. In great crises of life, we all stand up to fight adverse fate because we have to; but when the tension is over and the elastic of nervous endurance snaps slack, too often all that is left of the fighter is a nervous and mental wreck. Friends may drape the veil of loving reticence over such collapses and the world never know. To this there was one exceptional class in American annals—the tough old "wolves of the north," the fur traders; and having lived on dog and pemmican, they seemed to grow proof against all odds but a bullet or scalping knife. The fort was rushed up on a site near a pure spring of fresh water on Lewis and Clark River about two hundred feet back under shelter of the giant trees—good to keep off gales and rain, but bad because excluding sunlight. Fort Clatsop, where there is to-day a little fenced enclosure marking the very spot and an American flag waving amid the same ancient trees, was 50 by 50 feet, court in the center, walls for huts, planks for timbers, poles for pickets, slabs for ceilings. It took a month to build and had not its house warming until New Year's Eve of 1805. How simple it all sounds. Yet I venture to say that not ten workmen could be picked up in America to-day who would tackle the job of sawing and chopping down trees of ten to twenty-five feet in girth, splitting them into planks with wedges and axes and using a drawing knife as plane. It is work from which Chinese and . [237] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE Japanese coolies shrink and for which the power-driven machine is now substituted. The stump of a wide tree was used as dining table. That old stump is still there rotting gradually away; but a dining table presupposes food; and the hunters were out in these drenched thickets of fallen trees and ferns day and night. "Hunters hungry, drenched with rain, having seen neither deer nor elk . . . rest remained round the smoke of our fires drying leather to make new clothes." Poor little Bird Woman must nave had a busy needle these rainy days. It is a safe guess the seams of coats and trousers displayed the nice long hop-skip-and-jump stitches of the man's needle, with many a pulpit expletive where the thimbleless point pushed through wet leather into fingers. Why expatiate on the rains? It was the worst winter known in the West from the Pacific to the Mississippi for fifty years. The high winds drove the shy elk to the deepest thickets. The cold rains sent the game birds in to hiding; but the elk and birds did prevent starvation; and "the squaw made soup" of the very marrow in the bones. Fish hooks were traded to the Indians for root meal; but this root meal gave bad colic. The men found, as every camper finds, that elk skin resists moisture much better than moose or buffalo leather. It does not crinkle and harden and crack. Clark had amazing adventures in those cranberry bogs, which are now yielding such profit to investors and are valued all the way from $1,000 to $2,000 an acre. When he and his hunters went after the elk, the men sank to their hips. His Kentucky bushwhackers, to the amazement of the Indians, could bring down birds awing; and no doubt it was this quality that kept the sulky coast tribes on good behavior in spite of the appalling destitution of the white men, so [238] *n LAST RACE OVERLAND FOR PACIFIC poverty-stricken compared to the brass-buttoned sea traders from the ships. When eighteen elk were brought back in one day, the gloom of impending starvation lifted and the men's health began to mend; though the rain often turned the elk moldy before it could be eaten. Had ever adventurers more dauntless souls? Christmas was ushered in with volley of firearms and those carols which the habitant voyageurs' ancestors had sung in old France; and the captains kept up the rejoicing by dividing the very last pound of tobacco, "though there was nothing to excite much gayety." Every time an Indian came to Fort Clatsop, with him came a host of fleas. Five men were sent along the sandy shore to boil salt water into salt; and to-day where stand a luxurious play- world's great hotels, one has only to go off the boardwalk a few feet to see surrounded by its pickets, the salt cairn of stones, where these desperate Robinson Crusoe adventurers of 1805-6 scooped up the salt water and in drenching rains kept the smudgy logs burning to boil down the salt; and then packed it in empty powder canisters. It is an even wager! Try it on any ten people you meet in a day! From age ten to seventy, hardly a soul does not know and has not thrilled to Robinson Crusoe's story; but there is hardly a soul outside purely historical circles who does know a single fact of Lewis and Clark's adventures except the names, and still less has ever felt one thrill from their heroism. I have tried it on loyal folk, in the very states peppered with Lewis and Clark names, who would tear you to tatters if you said one word derogatory to their state loyalty. Yes, they knew all about Lewis and Clark crossing overland from Missouri [239] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE to Pacific; but ask them where Lewis slept with a rattlesnake for a pillow, or Clark nearly sank out of sight in quicksand bogs—those same people looked blank. What is the matter with us that such an epic remains unrealized so long? By New Year's Eve, gates could be closed against the Indians and the fleas. Whether the sentinel pacing before the gate needed a back-scratcher is not told. Again a volley of firearms to welcome the New Year at dawn of 1806, elk roast for dinner, water from the cold spring for rum, and a visit from an Indian buck twenty-five years old with red hair, red freckles, fair skin—son of some white man from Cook's or Meares' day. The big Tyee who got the present of old satin breeches is called Comowol; and to vary diet of elk and fish, he traded the white dogs. He excitedly brought word that a whale had been cast up on the sands down Tillamook way on Clatsop Beach. The salt boilers found the whale steaks tender and white as fresh pork; so the white men set out from Fort Clatsop to get some whale meat; and the poor little Bird Woman, who had never seen a whale or salt water and whose fingers must have been stitching Hood's "Song of the Shirt," pleaded to go along; so she went off with Captain Clark and twelve men in canoes to see the big foundered fish. The moon shone silver and at last the skies cleared and the trip must have been one of the joys of her adventurous girl life. They climbed Tillamook Head—twelve hundred feet, Clark gives the height—and camped near Ecola (Indian word for "whale") on Cannon Beach, thirty-five miles from Point Adams, where motors whirl in thousands to-day. They [240] 1 LAST RACE OVERLAND FOR PACIFIC saw the billows climbing with ghost fingers up the Haystack Rocks, and the quicksand pools under the receding tides, and the lodges of Chinooks and Clatsops assembled to strip the whale, and then as they slithered down the rock and sand and mossy foothold, the big fish itself— one hundred and five feet long. As night came on, flitches of whale meat were broiled over the fires on the sand and the little Bird Woman, papoose on back in mossbag, must have had the time of her life. About ten at night a shrill whistling brought feasters to feet in alarm of raiders; but it was only one of Clark's hunters, McNeal, signaling which way to join camp. Blubber was trundled back to Fort Clatsop for candles. Good old Drewyer was coming in each night with six or seven elk. Practically all February was spent dressing elk skins for shoes and clothing to return East. Why both Chinooks and Clatsops flattened heads in infancy—unless to make the head fit the little teapot hats of basket fiber tied under the chin—the whites could not learn. On the arm of one squaw was tattooed the name "J. Bowman," who has gone down to a fame many greater men have missed. The voyageurs as usual took tawny girls as brides; so let us not ascribe to the two captains all dusky descendants who bear the leaders' names. Among these coastal tribes, the women had equal rank with the men simply because the easy fishing and root digging made them independent for support. The same factor applied to the aged. They were well cared for, because until totally blind they could feed themselves; and yet these ease- loving and easy-living tribes were the lowest in morals of all Indians known. They could all swear in good English dialect, though they used a Chinook jargon to trade. From them Lewis and Clark learned that vessels seldom [241] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE came to the Columbia before April and always left by October, and that they anchored on the north side of the river. That information was bad news to Lewis and Clark. They must leave the Pacific before April to cross the Rockies in summer to the Missouri; but now as the weather cleared in March and the feathered and furred game receded to the mountain uplands to bring forth their young, the necessity for food compelled the whites to bestir themselves. Hindsight is always wiser than foresight. We know now that if they had ascended the Rockies by way of the Yellowstone, instead of the Jefferson, they would have found an easier pass; but they might not have found the friendly tribe they did among Sacajawea's people to furnish horses. We know now that if they had waited only a few weeks the ship Lydia, which rescued Jewitt, would have carried them back to Boston; but thirty-two hungry men could not take chances on waiting. A canoe was obtained in trade for an artillery officer's old uniform. Another canoe was forcibly seized from a Clatsop to pay for stolen elk meat. Certificates were given to the Indians to prove that Lewis and Clark had been here, with a list of the company's names, the date of arrival and date of departure. Captain Hill of the Lydia got one of these certificates; so did Alexander Henry at Astoria in 1814. For the return journey of thirty-five hundred and fifty- five miles, they had one hundred and forty-five pounds of dry gunpowder in thirty-five cans, twice as much lead for bullets, two pocket handkerchiefs of fishing trinkets, seven blue and scarlet robes, a suit made of the United States flag, some ribbon and new elk-skin suits for all. [242] LAST RACE OVERLAND FOR PACIFIC This was to supply twenty-nine men, Charbonneau, the Bird Woman and the papoose—in all thirty-two. "We have lived," penned Lewis, "quite comfortably." Food dwindled to a single day's supplies. Loading the canoes did not require days this time. They pushed out on the little friendly river you can see from the Astor column, March 23, at noon, 1806. The Clatsops fell heir to the fort and no doubt quickly populated it with fleas. Sixteen miles they made that first afternoon, or halfway to what is modern Longview. This time they did not make the mistake of following the north shore but hugged the south beach above which runs to-day the great Columbia Highway. Clear weather enabled them to make more accurate surveys than they had coming down; and they threaded that chain of swampy islands under that Clatsop Crest which overlooks the beautiful Puget Island, lying like an oval emerald in the ocean blue of the great river, which every vessel passing up and down to Portland now skirts. First camp must have been on Puget Island; for they reached the Cathlamets village and bought dog meat, and wound through what they called the seal islands, getting tangled in the channels till an old Indian put them right. Slow going against the current, but they reached the Cowlitz River by the 27 th, where the great saw mills today belch their flames to the skies and the hum of electric- driven saws fills the air with the imprisoned forest fragrance of a thousand years and the electric lights of a city shine like myriad stars in the blue river, with Coffin Rock sticking up in the blue mist—an Indian Valhalla— and Castle Rock pointing to the skies in Gothic pinnacles, and five far snowy peaks translucent as opal— Hood and Jefferson to the southeast, Rainier and Adams [243] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE and St. Helen's to the north. On one of these islands near Longview they took dinner on the 26th, and rested for nooning because a high wind was chopping the waves to a bounce; but somebody must have stayed ashore, for they admired tremendously the open park area and the oak grove, which is now a city park, where motors in thousands converge for the night from every state in the Union. There were villages of Chilcoots on both the Columbia and the Cowlitz and they were very friendly and generous in trade. The open woods gave the hunters a chance both on the islands and at what is now the city of Rainier: they brought in seven deer. Owing to rain and wind only five miles were made after passing the Cowlitz and the big isle was named Deer Island. Next day they saw what they had guessed must exist behind the sands of the big swampy Sauvie Island—a large river coming in on the south side: the Multnomah or Willamette, where Portland and a host of lesser cities stand to-day. Geese and ducks were winging in thousands. Kingfishers bobbed on the bars. Frogs croaked so stridently the men could scarcely sleep at night; but as they could not cross the mountains till snows cleared and as food was here abundant, they camped on Wapato Island and Clark went off south up that big river where he predicted some day largest ships would ride. They do and they moor at modern Portland. Now he definitely located the five snowy peaks, gave Jefferson's name to one of the two on the south and Adams' to one of the three on the north. He camped where the University stands to-day. Beyond the Willamette they were, of course, again in the region of the Cascades and the Dalles and the Falls. [244] "a LAST RACE OVERLAND FOR PACIFIC Hugging the south shore as the Columbia River Highway does to-day, what use to attempt to describe what they saw all the month of April? Gorges so narrow the slit of daylight between would hardly give a man's shoulders passageway; roses in bloom clinging in frail tendrils to precipices yellow and gray and black; ferns like trees; trees like Grecian pillars; moss in the tender glowing green of early spring; mountain shrubs in blood-red and golden bloom that hung tremulous with the passion of the glad waters shouting their spring disimprisonment from mountain snows; and waterfalls, waterfalls over the precipices so numerous that, though I passed and repassed them ten times in two years, I each time lost count and heard their wild music for nights after in my dreams: the Latourelles just beyond Rooster Rock at the Pioneers' Crown Point leaping sheer two hundred and twenty-four feet to a pool cold as ice; the Wash-Kee-na coming down in a series of cascades to go babbling and gurgling off to the river over pebble bottom; the Multnomah, rainbow-tin ted in the sunlight, falling sheer six hundred feet and setting all the evergreen dryads atremble at the plunge. The reaction of these sublime scenes on Lewis and Clark can be felt. They reckoned with caution that the River Willamette might some day support forty thousand souls. Do not smile! One city on its banks to-day supports with suburbs almost four-hundred thousand people. At any rate, they had dried enough meat to carry them to the friendly Nez Perces of the Inland Empire, where the Columbia takes its greatest bend to the north. They had the usual ugly experience portaging up past the Cas- [245] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE cades and Dalles and Falls. The river pirates were sulky. They tried to pilfer. The south side of the river was impassable: they had to cross to the north. Tow-ropes pulled the boats along but baggage had to be carried overland and uphill. The river Indians threw stones down on the white voyageurs climbing up the slippery rocks. Shields was rudely jostled off the trail. If his pack had fallen, it would not have lasted long. Enraged to murder, Shields drew his long knife. The thieves scampered. One Indian stole Lewis' dog. Two men went after it. Again the thieves scampered, and the dog was rescued. Lewis had gone across to the south side to buy canoes. Sixty fighting men were in the lodges. He bought his canoes and three dogs; but at the Upper Falls it was found that six tomahawks, a knife and two spoons had been stolen. Clark was buying horses for the mountains wherever he could trade awls, guns, elk skins for them. Another tomahawk was stolen and that night, April 21, Lewis caught a sneak thief in the act and kicked him head over heels out of the camp; but that did not prevent a horse "straying" at dawn. The Walla Wallas were passed, not overfriendly. They would sell few horses, though a dance to the violin put them in good humor. The Walla Walla river was reached. Here dogs were bought for food, and Captain Clark got a fine white horse in trade for a sword. A Snake prisoner here acted as interpreter through Sacajawea. Eye-water brought hosts for treatment and, what was better, by the time Nez Perces camps were encountered that same eye-water had got in barter some twenty-three horses in all. Over the rolling, wind-waved sand-banks Nez Perce guides led them through sagebrush aromatic as lavender into what is now Nez Perce County, [246] LAST RACE OVERLAND FOR PACIFIC Idaho. Though it was May, the Bitter Root Range lay caked in snow; but they made their way up the Clearwater towards the camp of Twisted Hair, where more horses had been left. Here occurred the one discourteous act of all contact with the Nez Perces, when an Indian buck, thinking it a great joke white men would eat dog, threw a squirming puppy almost into Lewis' plate. The poor pup went howling back in the impudent buck's face, and Lewis after him with a tomahawk. Fortunately, they picked up here as guide a man from Twisted Hair's lodge and finally reached that friendly chief on the 8th of May. Saddles and horses were found intact, though the horses had- been used hard in raid and counter-raid against the Gros Ventres of the Saskatchewan. The mountain Indians, from Nez Perce land to the Rockies of the Snakes, had had a terrible winter, having tasted meat scarcely once a month; and the bear meat brought in by Clark's bushwhackers proved a godsend. The Nez Perces were described as the highest type of Indians met on all the journey; and that reputation they bear to this day. They were honest, gentle, truthful, fine riders and fearless fighters. While camped with the Nez Perces, Lewis saw a salmon dropped by an eagle; and the sight delighted the hearts of the hungry tribe. It meant the salmon were ascending the river, and starvation was past for at least six months. Supplies were now down to one awl, one knitting pin, a half ounce of paint, two needles, a little thread and a yard of ribbon for each man; but there was not "the least anxiety." Colts supplied food; and the Bird Woman took advantage of the pause to give her little papoose a course of sweat baths with mint for colic, to the great improvement of his health. [247] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE Packs and saddles were whittled out while waiting for the snow to clear from the mountain passes; and the snows were very late in clearing that year, as we know from the fur traders. They got away at last from the Camas Meadows on June 10, and each man had a horse to ride, a pack-horse for provisions when they could unearth the caches among the Snakes and on the other side of the Rockies at the Three Forks, and an extra horse in case of accident. It is a guess if eye-water ever brought higher value. Deer thin as cranes gave a picking of food, bears tough as leather stopped hunger pains, and then occasionally a colt afforded a feast followed by a dance. Were ever such ragged, merry, carefree knights of the wilderness? Why has no one sung their Robin Hood chant? Frankly, because as a people, though their names are on our lips, we have not yet realized what they did. Floundering over masses of sun-crested snow, warmer and warmer at midday, colder and colder at night, but easier traveling than the year before over slippery rocks and fallen trees, they found the cache of the westbound trip at Travelers' Rest perfect and were joined by a Nez Perce* guide to go as far as the Great Falls of the Missouri. July i, definite plans were laid to make their exploration complete on the east side of the Rockies. Lewis would strike direct for the Great Falls and go north to see whence that Maria's River of the boundary came. Clark would cross by the old trail to the Jefferson, which nine men would descend with canoes, but Clark with ten men would strike for the Yellowstone, and wait for the rest to come up with him. July 4 this year seemed to have been forgotten. Do you wonder? [248] m LAST RACE OVERLAND FOR PACIFIC Both captains had their adventures. Buffalo were seen in tens of thousands, wild and savage at this season. The cache at the Falls had been badly damaged by the flood waters of the spring, but charts were dry and goods in trunks and boxes unharmed, though a bottlefof spilled laudanum had ruined all unbottled medicines. All the old cottonwood wheels were in good order for the portage down the Missouri; but again a man was knocked down by a grizzly and the grizzly knocked over by the musket which broke from the blow; but the man escaped by scrambling up a willow where the grizzly kept him for half a day. That was opposite the same old White Bear Island named on the westbound trip. While the men got over the portage, Lewis and Drewyer and the two Fields with six horses struck across country north for Maria's River. Where the slim spire marks Lewis' adventure at the Great Northern entrance to the mountains, some eight raiders with thirty horses from the Mine- tarees of the Saskatchewan, six days away, came camping for a night raid on the four whites. At breakfast on Sunday, July 2 7, while Lewis and one of the Fields were still asleep in the tent, one of the Indians snatched the rifles of the Fields, and two others seized Drewyer's and Lewis'. Off went the Fields in a race after the thieves, one of the brothers drawing his hunting knife in the scuffle and stabbing one of the thieves through the heart. Drewyer, the mighty hunter, had already wrested his gun from one thief when Lewis awoke and leaping up pulled his belt pistol. He shouted for the running thief to halt. The Indian turned to aim at the Field brothers but dropped the gun; the other Indians were driving off the white men's six horses. Both the Indian and Lewis fired. The ball almost grazed Lewis' bare head, but [249] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE Lewis' deadly aim had hit the Indian below the waist. Retiring backward—for he had not time to reload his rifle—Lewis got back to camp. Two of his six horses were driven off but the whites got twelve of the Indian horses. Leaving a medal round the neck of the dead man, the whites mounted their horses and fled in a wild gallop back for Great Falls, a distance of sixty-three miles, then seventeen miles at slower pace and a rest for supper on a buffalo shot as they raced, then twenty miles more until two in the morning. They awoke so sore in every bone they could scarcely stand; but Lewis was in deadly fear lest the raiders swoop in revenge on his little band of three at the Falls. He directed the men what to do if attacked—tie the horses bridle to bridle and stand to the last man—but the raiders did not pursue, and the Missouri was greeted with a joy seldom felt since. Ord- way, a sergeant, had come on to the White Bear Camp from the Madison with nine more men and the Falls were left with never a sigh of regret on the 27th—some of the party in the old flat-bottomed boat, others in the five repaired canoes. It can be imagined the four riders slept for a few days in the canoes. The Musselshell was reached on August 1, Milk River on August 4, and then with joy too great for words the outlet of the Yellowstone at four in the afternoon of August 8, where marks were found from Clark, who had come down the Yellowstone and was awaiting them below on the Missouri. On the 12th, Lewis caught up with Clark. Clark really did try to celebrate July 4 with his fifteen men. The feast consisted of mush from camas root and [250] 1 LAST RACE OVERLAND FOR PACIFIC venison. Clark had come through the mountains by Lewis Pass and followed down the gorge to what is now the town of Livingston, one of the entrances to Yellowstone Park. The Bird Woman recognized her tribe's old hunting ground. At the bend of Jefferson Creek had been dug up the old cache, sending the bushwhackers almost insane with joy to get tobacco, which they had not known since they camped on the sea. Ordway had come downstream with six canoes, and Clark struck across country with fifty horses, Charbonneau and Sacajawea and ten men for the Yellowstone. The horse trail was excellent, which explains Clark's speed in reaching the rendezvous ahead of Lewis at what is now Fort Union. A raft of poles had been lashed into canoes to glide down the Yellowstone and three men struck across country for the Mandan lodges near modern Bismarck. Those canoes were pretty rough; for they must have been seamed with adobe and tallow. With a last look at the mountains on Sunday, the 27th, they swept out on the Missouri on August 3, and left the signs which Lewis later found. It is rather a tender touch to read they did not wait at the junction of the two great rivers because the mosquitoes had bitten Sacajawea's little child till its face puffed out in knobs. Two days after the reunion of Lewis and Clark, a blunderbuss was fired to notify the Gros Ventres and Mandans of the white explorers' return. The deceitful Black Cat and La Borgne were loud in welcome. Indeed, Black Cat was almost servile. One would think every soul of the expedition had had enough of adventuring for a thousand years; but Colter, famous in later annals, begged for his discharge here to go back [251] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE up the river with trappers. La Borgne was given the old swivel. Charbonneau and his brave little wife remained. To him were paid $500.33 for their joint services. September 17, they met on the river a Captain M'Clel- lan of the United States Army, who told them the universal opinion was that the whole expedition had been destroyed by the Indians or lost in the mountains. No time to camp and shave and put on fine regimentals for triumphant acclaim. In fact, these wanderers had no fine regimentals nor much clothing of any kind but tattered buckskin left. At noon on Tuesday, the 23rd of September, 1806, a ragged band of long-haired bearded fellows was seen to steer in towards the muddy flats of St. Louis. They raised muskets in air and fired a salute. A rumor ran through the little water town that Lewis and Clark had returned; and the whole village turned out to hurrah a welcome. The far wanderers had traversed in all over seven thousand miles. So drops the curtain on one of the greatest epics in American history. Lewis perished by his own hand at the age of thirty- five, on his way to Washington. Clark lived to become governor of Missouri and friend of every trader for thirty years. The Journals were not fully given to the world until 1812 and owing to the War received scant attention for another hundred years. [252] PART VI: Astor Takes Up the Procession to the Western Empire. The Tonquin to the Pacific. 181 o-1811. /*^\NE of the curious things in the modern mind is that ^-f' it wants to know the meaning of things beneath what we see. Are there any ethical laws beneath the Great Machine of the Universe? What is it all for? Are we the Sports of Chance; or the tools of a Great Hand in Destiny; or the masked figures in a Dance Macabre of Life amid Death? Youth—even in high schools to-day—is asking those questions and they cannot be eluded in a cloud of platitudes. History is no longer a glittering pageant of sawdust heroes, as Masefield says, "riding cock-horse on parade." There is no parade in trench warfare, in poison gas, in long-range guns shooting at unseen foes fifty miles away. There was a day when every history textbook portrayed the Crusades as a Holy War blessed by church and state. We know now the Crusades were a bandit war—futile as well as stupid—leaving between Turk and Christian an aftermath of hate which persists to the confusion of high aims down to our own times. What good did they do? None. What effect did they have? They left the Holy Land—the shrine of two great religions— the cockpit of battle for almost a thousand years. There was a day when any Napoleon, if the bands [253] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE played loud enough, could lead half the world into morass of blood and death. That day has passed forever. The man who blows the bugle in the band, the man whose hand and brain controls the long-range gun, must know he is fighting for something worth while, call it right or patriotism. We are no longer merely national in our outlook. We are no longer merely international in our outlook. We are almost cosmic in our gropings, though feeble and fumbling in our findings. What is it all for? Where are we going in our Procession? Return to that picture of the Stars in the Grand Central Terminal. Where are the Stars leading? Where are the cross-currents of human effort—often blind, frequently terrible in wolfish cruelty and in many cases utterly selfish—carrying us? Even the rationalist hesitates to answer these questions. He can prove that cause and effect produce this and that; but he can not prove why cause and effect here were paralleled by cause and effect there, and when the two parallels had run along just so far in the human story something jumped into the parallels and produced a result undreamed of or unplanned; and the result in the long run projected a new era in the progress of the race. Let us get down from theories to facts. The diplomats of five great nations—England, France, Spain, Russia, the new American Republic—were indifferent to the Pacific Northwest until—until what? Until some private adventurers out for the low aim of quick gain stirred the great nations up to reluctant effort. Cause and effect again, says the rationalist. But wait a bit. [254] *a OHN JACOB ASTOR, THE FINANCIER WHOSE FORE- IGHT MADE AMERICA'S PACIFIC EMPIRE POSSIBLE ASTOR TAKES UP THE PROCESSION Why did Gray happen to blunder in first on the Columbia exactly parallel with three other factors—Vancouver whose blunder kept him out; Jefferson in Paris dickering to buy Louisiana; Napoleon ready to sell Louisiana because he couldn't protect it and because he wanted to stab at British possessions in America? Did it ever strike you that if any one of those factors— Gray, Jefferson, Napoleon—had not been paralleling the others in exactly the same ten years, that what is now the Pacific Northwest might be a French Quebec? And that everything west of George Rogers Clark's victories in the Middle West might not be American territory, no more American than Mexico or Central America? Remove any one of those parallel factors, and who would have possessed the vast No-Man's Land west of the main ridge of the Rocky Mountains? It might have been an independent republic like Mexico, a British colony, or a Bloody Ground of the Pioneers' Frontier. In this one case of parallel movements, the chance parallels explain more than the movements themselves; and the rationalist denies all chance. All chance is cause and effect; and cause and effect do not explain why these parallels came together simultaneously in a jump across one another's circuit. Again sit down below the Astor monument on the Pacific, and meditate these questions. Gray's motives may have been utterly selfish; but he did a great thing for the nation. He nailed down American title to a No-Man's Land. Vancouver's aim was obedience to instructions; but the instructions were animated by diplomacy to find a Northwest Passage; and the aim missed its target. His over- [255] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE carefulness of navy ships lost title to the No-Man's Land. Mackenzie's motive was utterly devoid of selfish aim; but his results were utilized by self-seeking fur traders who had derided him; and they nailed British title to a Northern No-Man's Land. Jefferson and Lewis and Clark had as purely patriotic and scientific and unselfish aims as ever animated any movement in American life. Yet if they had not been preceded by a Gray and followed up by an Astor—would motives have materialized in what we can describe only as the blessedness of a vaster Destiny? What of Astor? Irving paints him as a far-visioned patriot, who had risen from poor German immigrant boy in 1783 to millionaire in 1810; and a millionaire in 1810 would in value of coin be rated a billionaire to-day. By selling furs from Baltimore and New York and Montreal direct to European markets, he had accumulated a colossal fortune and practically controlled the strongest fur companies ramifying from Mackinac to the Mississippi and from St. Louis up the Missouri. Instead of sitting down on his fortune to let it hatch out its brood of profits, he risked almost half to add a Pacific Empire to the United States and open up that commerce with the Orient which was one of James J. Hill's dreams; and, it may be added, he lost half his fortune in the risk. He could not have been much past forty when he embarked on those world-encompassing aims. Hubert Howe Bancroft portrays him as a selfish, grasping money-grub devoid of one spark of patriotism; but when Bancroft and Irving wrote, though a good half century apart, both were terribly short of definite charts to localize the struggle of the Astorians. When Irving ran short of facts for charts, he winged [256] ASTOR TAKES UP THE PROCESSION away in the realms of fancy and panegyric. When Bancroft lost his thread in a thicket of unknown facts, he hit round in the abusive blows of a trail-blazer's axe-head. At a later date, Chittenden, who knew every twist and turn of the Astorian trail from his own army life in the West, took the middle ground that Astor was both a great merchant out for gain and a far-visioned patriot aiming to add a Pacific Empire to a republic not yet thirty years old, but Chittenden hardly touches on the fact that, if a Jefferson and a Gray had not preceded him, Astor could not have adventured to the Pacific Northwest. Each factor in the great drama of the Pacific Northwest can only be likened to the different fibers woven in a Tapestry of Destiny; but who planned the designs of the Tapestry? In all art, where is a Master Hand, there is a Master Mind behind the Brush. In all mechanics, there is Mind behind the Machine. What Mind, and what Design in the Mind, wove the Tapestry of Destiny for the Pacific Northwest? Astor was a personal friend of Jefferson and knew that Congress, in order to stop the frightful abuses of liquor traffic among the Indians, was about to pass a law excluding foreign and unlicensed traders from setting up fur posts in American territory. The law, it may be added, was more honored in its abuse than its observance for the simple reason that beyond the Mississippi there was no law nor any means of enforcing law* Who was right—Irving, Bancroft, Chittenden? "Why," asked a tourist, who had been up Coxcomb Hill, Astoria, to view the monolith, "should we erect a monument to these old chaps? They were utterly self- seeking. Settlement would have gone ahead without them." [257] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE Would it? The best answer to that question is to follow their adventuring. Then after your blood has thrilled and cooled and thrilled again—answer for yourself. Picture that Beaver Hall Hill of Montreal, which every tourist goes clipclapping past to-day. Recall just a century ago. There is a banquet on in the Beaver Club of the Northwest Company, and the members are swearing blood and vengeance on the Hudson's Bay Company for obstructing their brigades in the far Pay d'en Haut. There will not be much "running of rapids astraddle chairs" after the high wines have been passed, though two or three portly old gentlemen in Highland kilts may get up and dance the Highland fling to the bag-pipes. There is more serious matter to be discussed to-night than "a beaver's tail," or "moose hump," or "bear steak." There are invited guests to-night. There is my Lord Selkirk of the Hudson's Bay Company actually proposing—indeed, the plans are under way—to pour a stream of Highland colonists right into the center of the fur domain in what we now call Minnesota and Manitoba. It does not matter much to us to-day whether Selkirk's motive was that of philanthropist to provide refuge for Highland and Orkney men suffering poverty, or that of selfish Hudson's Bay fur trader trying to get a colony loyal to himself to fight the Montreal merchants poaching on his fur preserve. Madness, the Nor'westers regard it. These colonists will be massacred; or the Nor'westers themselves, with two thousand hunters in their brigades, will run them out. There is Sir Alexander Mackenzie, with his head a little high—for has he not been knighted in reward for [258] ASTOR TAKES UP THE PROCESSION his trip to the Arctic and overland to the Pacific?— warning the Nor'westers they must all hold together in one big company, or between the Hudson's Bay traders and the Missouri traders they will be crushed to ruin. "I like not my Lord," says Sir Alexander from the depths of his high white choker, to his cousin Rod Mackenzie, "and I like his design less." There is a little plain man—hair cut very short, the high forehead of an idealist with brains behind his ideals, sharp eyes that bore into other men's designs like a corkscrew, tight lips that keep their own counsel, and a very high white choker—diplomatically suggesting that, as the clash between Hudson's Bay and Nor'westers is costing so much in life and profits, it would be wise for Nor'westers and Americans to avoid further clashes of lawless drunken free traders by combining for the Pacific fur trade. The agreement between Vancouver and Don Quadra has left the most valuable fur-trade area between New Spain and Alaska—a No-Man's Land. Why not combine, avoid the ruin of different prices and competition and liquor traffic, and divide profits? They could build a strong military station on Gray's Columbia River to defy Indian attack and open sale of furs directly to China, bring back Chinese silk and teas and then send their ships out again. No empty hold on any leg of the trade round the world. Nay, gentlemen, yet more. They could string a chain of fur posts up Lewis and Clark's trail from the Missouri to the Columbia and control all fur trade west of the Mississippi. That would not encroach on the Hudson's Bay charter to the north. The little gentleman pauses to see the effect of his feeler. His name is John Jacob Astor. [259] < CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE His suggestion is received in frigid silence. The Montreal fur traders are a proud, stiff-necked lot of Highlanders. Astor says he will put up $400,000 in cash as his part; and if the Nor'westers feel that proportion to be unfair, he will put up two-thirds and they can put up one-third. If the Nor'westers did not explode there and then, it was because life had schooled them to reticent diplomacy. With war threatening between the United States and Great Britain, with bloody civil war wasting the resources of the Nor'westers and the Hudson's Bay, $400,000 cash would have broken either of the English companies flat; and Astor, an individual American citizen could propose that, seriously, nonchalantly, as though $400,000 coin in a treasury were a casual possession. The Napoleonic Wars had crippled British finances. Neither Hudson's Bay nor Nor'westers could look to home banks for one cent of financing to tide them past this period of awful slump in fur values. They must make their profits from the fur trade itself; and here is Astor proposing to divide those profits among three companies. One Nor'wester whispered behind his hand, "We'll beat him to it! We have David Thompson going through the mountains now establishing fur posts down the Columbia to the sea." Another opines below his breath, "If there is a war, what can the poverty-stricken American colonies do against England's navy? Let him go ahead and build his fort on the Columbia. The English navy will take care of it." Another thinks this is just another sharp move of Jefferson's. Isn't Astor a friend of Jefferson? Hadn't Jackson, the English consul in New York, told them Jefferson had already assured Astor [260] ASTOR TAKES UP THE PROCESSION the American Government would stand behind his venture? The atmosphere turned cold as the winters of the Pay d'en Haut. They would sell Astor their furs, yes; but to be beaten off the ground by a young upstart who had been a fur peddler only twenty years ago! No doubt, some of the pompous gentlemen sniffed and whispered "son of a German butcher—peddler." They forgot that they also had been fur peddlers in 1771. All the same, there were some partners present, who did not sniff at Astor's plan. There was Alex McKay, now a middle-aged man, who had gone with Mackenzie to the Pacific. He had not been advanced as rapidly as his work warranted. There was Duncan McDougal, a great mixer with the Indians and a good trader, but too irascible in temper and self-important and fussy to attain the place among partners to which he felt entitled. There was David Stuart, too easy-going for these deep ruthless Nor'westers. There was his nephew Robert; fine fellow, but too loyal to David for swift promotion. These two were relatives of Lord Strathcona of later date. There was Alexander Henry, ancestor of Norman Kittson, morose, but watching which way the cat would jump. I do not know how Astor made contact with these men, but I do know that before he returned to New York he had engaged several partners for his Pacific Fur Company. Alexander McKay was to be chief trader on the coasting vessel going round the Horn; McDougal, chief bourgeois at the fort to be built on the Columbia with full proxy power for Astor himself; the Stuarts, also traders, but for the posts inland from the Pacific. Astor was to put up $400,000, go 50-50 with his partners on the profits and bear all loss if the venture failed. The [261] i! CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE. papers were drawn up for twenty years, but if the venture proved a losing one, it was to be mutually dissolved in five years. In other words, with war impending, Astor risked half his fortune on a chance that would have scared a gambler. McKay was to gather up a dozen voyageurs for inland waters and a dozen clerks to come down to New York by canoe and board Astor's ship, the Tonquin, for the Pacific. The scene shifts. It is a clear Saturday evening of August, 1810. New York had grown since Lewis and Clark's day to ninety or one hundred thousand; but Brooklyn was still a little muddy village with pig-wallow gutters. The Bowery and Broadway were New York's main streets; residences were just beginning to shift from Canal Street up to Fourteenth Street. Beyond this was an Astor farm, sections of which are owned by the Astors to this day. Loungers out late that Saturday night were amazed to see coming down the Hudson such a big birch canoe as Algonquin and Huron raiders used three centuries earlier. The paddlers camped quietly, probably on the banks of one of Astor's farms; then early on Sunday when church bells were ringing, the canoe swept down the Hudson: New York idlers forgot church chimes and paused to gaze. The voyageurs had colored hatbands and gay cockades of feathers. In rhythm with their paddle- strokes they were singing chansons of Old France. The canoe skimmed the waters of the Hudson like a gull, down to the Battery. Sailor folk sauntering on the sea front cheered and waved. The canoe cut the placid waters and headed up East River, beaching in Brooklyn for lodgings among other water men. Mr. Astor, who [262] 1 ASTOR TAKES UP THE PROCESSION was standing on shore, gave the foreman and steersman two gold coins "to go and drink healths"; because while the onlookers wondered how they would moor such a frail thing as a hobbling birch canoe among gunboats at the docks of Brooklyn, the foreman and the steersman had picked it up, turned it upside down on their heads and with thwarts supported on shoulders, marched swaggering off up the street to moor it to their lodging-house door. Then, as one of the clerks describes it, they spent Sunday sightseeing along the "beautifully bordered poplar-shaded walks" of the wondrous city. The markets, the parks, Vauxhall Gardens, the Battery, thirty-two churches (!!) and some American gunboats hauled up for repairs—were marvels that almost robbed the voyageurs of breath. It was the custom among the American companies more liberal than the Canadian to pay half the wages in advance; and it is a safe guess, most of the clerks and voyageurs had not much left over when the month of waiting in New York had passed. Not because of designed disloyalty to Mr. Astor, but because they wanted to know what their positions would be if war broke out with England, McDougal, who was to be governor, or, as the Americans called him, "boosh- way" (bourgeois), on the Columbia, called on the British consul, Jackson, in New York. Would they be shot for traitors? Jackson assured them they would be all right, but it is also a pretty good guess he sent up word that the Nor'westers of Montreal had better hasten if they were to be on the Columbia first. Anyway, that very month at the meeting up in Fort William on Lake Superior, the partners sent couriers rushing to the Rockies to speed Thompson down the Columbia. Winter would stall him, of course; but it would take Astor's ship [263] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE a good six months to round the Horn. Thompson must not lose a moment; and Alexander Henry was also to hasten overland by Saskatchewan for the Columbia. With him went a brother of that Larocque who had wanted to go with Lewis and Clark; and both carried Pat Gass' Journal, issued in 1807, of his account overland with Lewis and Clark. The scene shifts again back to the Columbia. You can see it all as you read the panels of the monolith, and then gaze over the almost sapphire sea where the high knob on the north known as Cape Disappointment stretches out into the bay to meet the low sands of Point Adams four miles distant on the south. The Tonquin had sailed from New York in September, 1810, under Captain Thorn, a young American naval officer. It was perfectly natural for Thorn, who knew war was brewing over seamen forcibly seized from American vessels by English cruisers, "to order lights out at 8." It was equally natural of McDougal, who considered his rank equal to Thorn's and knew that he and his partners would not be seized, to resent the order. Divided command and divided allegiance from the first engendered bad feeling. Thorn resented the Nor'westers' familiarity with what he called "underlings." They resented his "quarter-deck" pomposity. Thorn had scoffed at these braggart fresh water voyageurs now so seasick they hung disconsolate over the taffrail. They had paid back his scorn by talking only in Gaelic and habitant-French with expressions on faces which left him to guess the nature of their remarks. He could not tie them up to the wheel and flog them as he could mutinous sailors. Long before the Tonquin reached the Falkland Islands and the Horn [264] ASTOR TAKES UP THE PROCESSION at Christmas the captain and his thirty-three passengers were not on speaking terms; and when McDougal and David Stuart and Alex Ross and five voyageurs failed to hear amid the roar of breakers the Tonquin's signal for departure from the Falklands, and Thorn sailed off without them till Robert Stuart threatened "to blow his brains out,"—the feud flared to open enmity. The Tonquin itself was a little schooner of 290 tons with 21 of a crew, 20 guns of which only 10 were usable and 10 "shams" poked through the ports to scare off pirates. If Thorn had scoffed at these fresh water gasconades, down at the Horn they scoffed back (in French) at his seamanship; for sails "were blown to rags," somfe of the guns "getting dismounted rolled like thunder over the deck," and great waves would have washed men overboard had they not clung to masts and ropes. At the Sandwich Islands, where fresh water, provisions, 100 hogs, goats and poultry were taken aboard with a dozen Hawaiian boatmen for service on the Pacific Coast, the feud flared to flame; and the flame almost to explosion; for what did these crazy Highlanders and wild voyageurs do but don "kilties" and the gay attire of gallants to dance the Highland fling and the can-can and the dear knows what with the dusky belles of the Happy Islands? When the little Tonquin got clear of the Islands, there came a tidal wave in March gales that washed away rails, pens for the stock and half the stock. It was a very ugly sea all that March of 1811 on the last stretch of the voyage from Hawaii to the Columbia. Captain Thorn was so nervous by this time that he was not himself. In a rage he had marooned one man on the Sandwich Islands and had sailors flogged and his own younger brother clapped in irons. He wanted to get rid [265] mm CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE of those partners on land and relieve the tension of divided command before the discontent spread to open mutiny. It was not an auspicious introduction to the Columbia; but as we look back over the race to the Western Sea, whose ship with the exception of Gray's had an auspicious approach to that Eldorado of adventure? "Land at last," on March 22, the lookout calls from the crow's nest, the very land you can see from the play- beaches north or south as you motor up and down the hard fine sands between the inrolling tides and the high, rocky, dark, forested coast. If Thorn had not been exasperated to the breaking point where he drew what he dreaded, as we all do, he might have dispelled the gloom by the old Nor'westers' tactics of forgetting smaller insubordinations in larger aims and letting nerves blow off in a wholesome explosion and—a laugh; but Thorn was not so built. He wanted to rid the Tonquin of the pestiferous passengers and get off up coast to trade. Let them bicker it out ashore. Land them he would and at once if he risked half his crew. Even Alexander McKay, the soul of sunny happiness, and the genial old David Stuart, used to Labrador gales, now looked mighty grave. The Columbia entrance is easy enough to-day for countless vessels to pass in and out unscathed; but the safe channels were not charted in 1811. With the equinoctial gales lashing in the tides billows high and the Columbia swollen to floods by the spring thaw of mountain snows, the angry bar with its fret of fighting waters and the angrier beaches with the ghost fingers of wave sirens snatching at rocks three hundred feet high, the coast looked ominous enough. Gabble of habitant patois and Gaelic gave way to portentous silence. [266] H ASTOR TAKES UP THE PROCESSION The Tonquin tacked up and down three miles off the bar. A terrible surf was boiling. Of course it was; for the tide was running in. At half past one, Thorn ordered Fox, the first mate, one sailor and three Canadian lads who had never been on the sea before in their lives—two were carters and one a barber—to get in the small boat and sound channel ahead. Fox suggested it might be well to wait till the tide was receding; but Thorn was bent on riding in on the tide as Gray had done. "If you are afraid of water, you should have remained in Boston," Thorn sharply answered. They had scoffed at his seamanship. He would show them. The small boat was lowered to rattle of pulleys and flapped on the tossing waves. Was it Alex McKay, or kind old Dave Stuart, who again suggested better wait till the squally wind abated? Thorn threw Fox two bed sheets for sails, and the men jumped in and grasped oars. Fox turned as he dropped over the rail of the Tonquin—"My uncle was drowned here and now I am going to lay my bones with his—farewell, men—meet again in next world," and the little boat was off, a top whirling in a Niagara. The onlookers saw her ride the crest of a billow, dip out of sight, come up half a mile away with flag of distress on the end of an oar, dip—then she did not again come up. No need to tell what had happened. A wave had caught her broadside and she had gone down. The expostulations now exploded to fury. The partners told Thorn what he ought to have done; but Thorn was now right, however wrong he had been in forcing the little boat to launch. Where the small jolly-boat could not go, he dared not risk the larger Tonquin to save the lost seamen. The ship drew off from danger and seems to have spent all the 23rd and 24th trying to, spy out [267] mm CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE Gray's safe channel. Stormy voices were heard between Mumford, the second mate, and Thorn. Noon of the 23rd, or 24th, the Tonquin anchored again just a mile from the breakers. There was no wind, so Alex McKay, who had run wildest rapids, Dave Stuart, who had breasted the gales of Labrador, Alex Ross, who knew the tempests of Scottish coasts like a porpoise, pulled off in another rowboat with Mr. Mumford to sound. Sound! The suction of the tide was whirling them so crazily, Mumford at the helm shouted—"Pull back to the ship for your lives." Three more attempts these brave fellows made that same afternoon. Gray—we recall—crossed the bar early in the calm of morning; so on the morning of the 25th, Aiken, the third mate, went with Coles, the sailmaker, Weekes, the armorer, and two Sandwich Island boys, who could swim like sharks, to sound that North Channel where Gray got in. There was a gentle breeze landward. The little boat evidently signaled. The Tonquin followed and hurled past the rowboat "within pistol shot." The men in the little boat were apparently being carried to sea by the current of the Columbia. They shouted for a tow-rope to follow the Tonquin. Thorn dared not stop; for the Tonquin had struck unseen rocks with such violence the timbers splintered and rode past into a hideous plunging trough. Waves went over astern. Every one scrabbled for handhold to the rigging. The schooner seems to have reeled about among the boiling surf all day till incoming tide or wind carried her just at dark inside Baker's Bay, where Gray had moored. Thorn anchored just as a black March squall enveloped the night. The gloom on the schooner that sleepless night could have been cut with [268] ASTOR TAKES UP THE PROCESSION a knife; for it was evident a third of the crew had been lost on the bar. The reaction of all this on Thorn's morose, tense nature and McDougal's irascible temper can be guessed. Every Montreal man wished himself back in the Nor'westers' big canoes. The Astorians were not the first men after Lewis and Clark to build a fort for trade on the Columbia. The Winships of Boston had attempted it in April of 1810 and gone up close to modern Longview, when hostile plots by the Indians had driven them to abandon the logs of the fur post then half built. At daybreak on the 26th of March, Thorn, the ubiquitous McKay and Alex Ross set out to see if they could find the two crews lost from the little boats. They were going to climb Cape Disappointment, when fifty yards alongshore, they found Weekes, the armorer, stark naked, half-dead with cold, chattering so he could not speak. When they got him aboard and some rum revived him, he shouted, "You did it on purpose! You might have saved us"; but when he learned how nearly the Tonquin had come to wreck, he regained composure and told how the row-boat had swamped. The Sandwich Islanders had got her right side up. All three had clung to her desperately. When the chill numbed his arms so he could cling no longer the Hawaiian boys had held him up with their teeth in his shirt, and when his shirt tore to ribbons, had flung him into the boat drowsy with stupor; but of the other two white men naught was ever seen. Weekes and the Sandwich Islander had sculled to North Beach with their hands. Naked of clothing flung off to swim, one [269] Ml M 'u'm\ I 1 1 CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE Island boy had died of cold during the night and the other flung himself half-dead with grief over the corpse in the bottom of the little craft now filling with water in the thick dark. Then the breakers had thrown the swamping wreckage ashore on the sand, where Thorn found them. The remaining Island boy was rescued and survived to meet a worse fate. All this took place where to-day thousands play amid those same tidal waves. McDougal now took command of land operations. Exactly where did the Tonquin anchor? Mighty close to Chinook Point on the north shore. It can be seen to-day across that Tongue Point on the south shore below modern Astoria. Pens were at once built to herd in the hogs and goats left alive from the gales; and of course, Thorn was disgusted to nausea to see McDougal at once hobnob familiarly with the old one-eyed chief Comcomly, who had known Lewis and Clark; but McDougal knew his job as trader. The Astorians must have the friendship of the Indians; and the Indians advised him as they advised Lewis and Clark, to build on the south shore— better hunting, better anchorage, more shelter from gales. A full week was spent searching the north and south branches for the other lost seamen; but only the Hawaiian boy and Weekes were found. And, of course, crossing from north to south in frail birch canoes, the inland voyageurs came to grief in an upset amid the wash of a flood river and incoming tide. The river here is eight miles broad in some places, fourteen in others; and the Canadians would have drowned but for Chinooks and Clatsops dashing to the rescue in dugouts, tossing the helpless men into the righted canoe— every paddle had been lost in the upset—and towing her ashore. Another two weeks passed picking the best site. [270] 1 A MODERN TIMBER TOPPER BEHEADING ONE OF THE GREAT TREES OF THE NORTHWEST ASTOR TAKES UP THE PROCESSION Lewis and Clark's old Clatsop, still visible in ruins, was too far up a shallow river for ocean vessels. The place chosen was the site of modern Astoria, high enough to be out of tide reach, about fifteen miles inside the bar, sheltered by Coxcomb Hill to rear, engirt by great trees which still remain. The shore front was not far from the tablet near the city hall—which reveals what silt drift in the great river has done in a hundred years. Spirits rebounded now; for the land seemed a perfect Eden to the weary voyageurs. Spirea in white and yellow, wild roses, mountain flowers, were in a blaze of bloom. The daylight was long and the angry March gales gave place to perfumed April breezes through glens where the great trees drooped to meet giant ferns and the mountain brooks babbled in laughter over#the precipices in white cascades. The bay so treacherous in March gales, now an empurpled crystal, seemed transfigured to primrose at dawn, to fire in the sunset. When the Tonquin glided across south, the enchanted land workers welcomed her with three volleys of musketry and three cheers and the morose Thorn and his depressed crew answered with three big guns and three cheers; but Thorn was frantic now to be off; for the trading season north was April to October, and it was nearing May. Ship carpenters got busy putting together the frame of a little schooner brought along to be named Dolly in honor of Mrs. Astor. Land carpenters were putting up temporary shelter until the fort could be completed. How simple that sounds! Here is what actually went on. The trees to be felled were a hundred feet high. Some were twenty-five feet in girth. Their stumps can yet be seen up behind Astoria. The Indians prowled in and out of the woods so constantly and crowded so close on the choppers [271] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE to snitch and pilfer that the men worked as Ross says "with an axe in one hand and gun in the other." Guards kept watch day and night. A scaffold would be raised round a big tree and the trunk felled by saw or axe in the lengths needed; but when a tree twenty-five feet in girth began to topple, the workers had to scamper. Then the Indians got in their petty pilfering of tools and guns. It took two days to fell one tree. Then wedges and mallets had to split the trunk into timbers and boards. Before an acre had been cleared, three men were killed by Indian ambushed attacks, two badly hurt by falling trees and one had an arm blown off by gunpowder blasting out roots. Four men deserted and were brought back by the Indians, who demanded and received a ransom. Comcomly then constituted himself guard for the white man. While the builders were busy, McKay, who was to be chief trader, went off up the Columbia in a canoe with young Robert Stuart and four voyageurs as far as the Cascades to spy out possibilities of trade; perhaps, too, to find out whether the Nor'westers had beaten them in the race to the inland tribes. They recognized Vancouver's Castle Rock and Coffin Rock and had gone a short distance up the Cowlitz when twenty dugouts of Puget Sound raiders—doubtless warriors of that Tatoosh who had perished in Jewitt's day—came whooping with a flourish of arrows. McKay landed, smoked a pipe with them, gave them presents and went on up the Columbia past those falls "leaping from rock to rock," now seen on the Columbia River Highway as far as the Willamette, where his descendants dwell in Portland to-day. He spotted Hood and St. Helen's, and met a blind half-breed who said his father was massacred in a Spanish boat years ago, with Martinez's or Don Quadra's crews of the 1770's. [272] ASTOR TAKES UP THE PROCESSION Having gone up to the Cascades and found that no Nor'westers had yet come down the Columbia, they glided back to Astoria. Here a field of potatoes had been ' planted and walls were laid for the buildings 60 by 26 feet though no palisades were yet up; but goods had been put under shelter ashore. The Tonquin was repaired and ready to sail by June 1st. McKay, having been to the North Pacific with Sir Alexander Mackenzie, was to go on her as chief trader and young Lewis, an American boy, as bookkeeper or accountant. For the first and only time in his life, McKay seemed daunted. Just as he went aboard he drew Ross aside with the sadly prophetic words—"The captain is in one of his frantic fits. If you see us back, it will be a miracle. Take care of my son—Tom." The Tonquin was seen standing off the bar until about June 5, when she slipped out and was lost to view behind Cape Disappointment. What happened next can only be pieced together by the scraps of Indian rumor that came down to Astoria for three months, and out to the world for a century. When Irving wrote his wonderfully fascinating narrative of Astoria, not all these scraps had been gathered and there is confusion in names of places and Indians, which is not surprising when you try to twist your tongue round the Chinook jargon. Ross' account written in Red River, Winnipeg, came out in 1846. That of Franchere, who died in St. Paul, was issued in French in 1819, but not generally known in English till 1856. As far as we know, what happened was this—up near Gray's Harbor, the Tonquin picked up an Indian interpreter and pilot, who is variously called Lamazee, [273] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE Chehalis, Tchikeylis, Kasiascall, Jack. He belonged to the Wicanish tribe of Clayoquots; but what must be kept in mind is that the fierce Tatoosh people of Puget Sound, the treacherous raiders of Chief Wicanish at Clayoquot and the cannibal assassins of Maquinna were all bound together by marriage and conducted their raids together. Jewitt's story relates all these details from 1803 to 1806. So do the Gray Logs. Where did the Tonquin go in to anchor? Irving says at Neweetee. Franchere says frankly at Nootka at the village Newity. Ross says at Newcetu. Wicanish was chief, but the leader coming in dugout to trade was called "Nookanis"—"grown gray in traffic with New England shippers and in crime." It need scarcely be told that, if this was our crafty old friend Maquinna, he and Thorn would clash at once. Alex McKay as usual went ashore, slept in the chief's house, gave presents and made friends at once—friends, with his hand on his belt pistol. When he came back on deck in the morning, he was paralyzed by what he saw. Thorn had goods for trade spread all over the deck. No wire nettings protected the rails. The crew were unarmed. The Indians had free run of the deck. Now an Indian loves to haggle. He asks three times what he expects. So the old chief had dealt with Thorn for very fine sea otter; but Thorn was no huckster; and if he did not kick the old scamp off, he threw the furs back in his face with a threat to flog him. The Indians withdrew. McKay was terribly alarmed and begged Thorn to sail at once. Thorn scoffed the advice. No Indians came to trade the next day, though an invitation was sent for McKay to come ashore. Some of the rumors said that was to save McKay's life. Others said it was to divide Thorn's forces. The next day, Thorn [274] ASTOR TAKES UP THE PROCESSION asked McKay—"Are the Indians coming to trade today?" "Yes, they are; I wish they wouldn't," said McKay. "Such sudden changes are treacherous." "Pah! I humbled the fellows. They'll not be so saucy now! You pretend to know a good deal about Indians, McKay. You know nothing at all." McKay was so heartsick he could not eat his breakfast. Sticking two pistols in his belt, he went above decks to see the Tonquin surrounded by dugouts thick as gulls. In the dugouts were laughing squaws—good sign of peace. McKay was leaning over the rail joking with the women when he noticed the wire netting was not up and the Indian warriors were swarming the decks and literally pitching their furs to Thorn at his own price. He was trading them mainly knives and guns. McKay was so alarmed he was just turning to thread his way through the throngs to warn Thorn when a fearful blow from a skull-cracker knocked him senseless. He was flung over the rail to have his brains beaten out by the women's paddles. The interpreter leaped overboard to relatives among the raiders. The last seen of Thorn, he had his jack-knife out and was slashing assailants when he fell stabbed to death. Whether two men or four men were up the rigging getting sails righted is not known; or whether indeed they dropped down the hatchway and clapped down doors. Weekes was one. Lewis was another. Two or three others gained shelter in the hold. Now whether the Indians remembered the awful explosion that had roared from another Boston ship whose crew they had massacred, or whether they feared foes below in the powder magazine—they scampered from the decks helter-skelter. The Tonquin lay deserted all that day and night, "sails flap- [275] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE ping to the wind," just as the sailors had left them when they dropped to the hold. Whether four sailors escaped by night leaving only one wounded man in the hold to wreak terrible vengeance and were caught by the Indians and tortured to death and eaten by the cannibals— will never be known; or whether all the men in the hold sacrificed their lives in the vengeance; but when the Indians saw the decks deserted, or having caught the escaping sailors judged the ship abandoned—they now came back in a rabble. Some accounts say there were one hundred men, some two hundred, some five hundred warriors on the decks, when ship and Indians were hurtled to midair in a terrifying explosion that dyed the waters blood-red; and the hull of the flaming Tonquin heaved and sank in a burning mass. The only inkling of the disaster that came down to Astoria was that both Clatsops and Chinooks suddenly withdrew as if in furtive fear. The Astorians could not understand. It was only after the overland Astorians had reached the Pacific that the full horror of the catastrophe came out. .Meantime, old Comcomly, judging this withdrawal would not promote trade, brought first an Indian from Gray's Harbor with word the interpreter was back and something terrible had happened. When he found he was not blamed, he brought the interpreter himself. The interpreter was certainly a treacherous brute and may have been in the plot; for he later led an attack on Astoria and was never again seen. Or he may have brought word in hope of reward. The Astorians never knew. They only knew the Tonquin was lost with every soul on board—thirteen white men and at least eleven Hawaiians. [276] ASTOR TAKES UP THE PROCESSION When Astor heard the news from ships that returned to the East in 1811-12, he appeared at the theater as usual. Friends gathered round him to condone. "What would you have me do? Stay at home and weep for what I cannot help?" As for help, he was immediately despatching another boat—the Beaver—to the marooned fort on the Columbia. [277] PART VII: The Highland Chiefs of Astoria Found the Inland Empire. 1811 -1818. A COOK, a Vancouver, a Gray, Lewis and Clark, an ff * Astor, racing for possession of the Pacific Northwest, do.we still persist in regretting America has not a thrilling past of song and story? No marooned heroes of rocky wilds! No gay Highlanders in kilties with bagpipes droning through mountain dells over turquoise lakes of "Bonnie Prince Charlie." No Robin Hoods and Rob Roys leading their greenwood outlaws against stern old Highland chiefs ensconced behind moat and castle wall, my lady heaving a volcano of sighs over her knight outside the gates! Are these regrets ignorance, or swank? When Bonnie Prince Charlie's followers had to fly for their lives from final defeat in 1745, where did they go? To Quebec and Montreal, which fell from French to British power in 1763, where Macs and "T"onalds and Alexanders and Duncans, where clans Stuart and McKenzie and McTavish are thickly spattered as the cobblestones in the Lower Towns of both cities. Their modern descendants are the hierarchy of banks and rails and shipping. By 1793 those "Macs" had gone as far afield as Pacific and Arctic. By 1811 they were down on the Lower Columbia. By 1821 they had traversed what is to-day the Inland Empire of the Pacific. There you feel their racial stamp in the society of descendants in [278] Lit! HIGHLAND CHIEFS FOUND EMPIRE speech and standards, found nowhere else in America but in Montreal and Quebec. Yet no one has sung their song or put it into story. Far as I know the only effort to put it into art is on the panels of the Astor monolith. Try to dream back to the shadowy figures of the past on the Pacific after the good ship Tonquin sank in flaming pyre to her own tragic end up off Vancouver Island, British Columbia! "Moccasin telegram" carries among the Indians on the wings of the very wind. Like the wind, you know not whence it comes nor whither it goes. If you have lived much in the wilds, you will find it almost as uncanny as wireless waves. You "sense" a depression in the very air. Perhaps that "sense" is the Highlander's "double sight" or clairvoyance; but down to Astoria, with its five partners, nine clerks, and half hundred servants, huddling amid the giant trees, a half-built fort, in all the glamor of spring bursting in gorgeous bloom, with opal peaks and wild flowers glorious in color as the very fiery tints of the sun, came the "moccasin telegram" of fearful disaster to the ship Tonquin. The first wave of apprehension that a fort three thousand miles from human help might be as completely marooned as a Robinson Crusoe, put speed in the builders' work. Mr. Astor had been very generous of his Rhine wines to the Scotch traders sent out in 1810. Whether it was that his chief man, McDougal, held a loose hand over his men, or the isolation of distance made all reckless, those high wines and the heady air of an almost perpetual sunshine during summer set a lawless spirit running wild; but when both Clatsops to the south and Chinooks to the north began withdrawing [279] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE furtively, almost guiltily, as if plotting a combined attack, the hard drinking ceased. The choppers worked at feverish pace. The carpenters toiled from sunup to sundown. The schooner Dolly was launched. The picketed palisades fifteen feet above ground went up by magic with a loop-holed gallery running round inside from which defenders could shoot; and two bastions of three stories were placed to flank all four sides, with roofs like the basket hat of the Pacific Indians from which the attic sharpshooters under cover of the brim could pick off assailants ambushed amid the dank ferns and drooping dark of the evergreens. Four small cannon with stacks of loaded muskets were carefully placed in each bastion for instant action on first bugle-call to arms. A kitchen garden lay between the pickets and the water front, where to-day runs Astoria's main street. Beyond the garden soon displaying proud crop of potatoes and vegetables growing with the speed of mushrooms, a wharf ran out. Here lay canoes and boats and dugouts and here rocked the Dolly. The fort was some distance below the modern Tongue Point. That is as the Columbia twists and loops its python coils here, Astoria was to the left of Tongue Point as you look down from the monument- Clay chinked all logs. Astoria Fort was no mean one but equal to many a moated grange in old land story—a dining room to seat sixty to ninety men, a sitting room with library, sleeping quarters and a hospital along the walls, carpenters' shop and blacksmiths' building to forge iron and mend guns and hammer out on the anvils spikes for the paddlers' poles. All this was not completed until spring but it went ahead with fear in every man's heart— fear that became panicky and caused some desertions until the runaways learned that Indians on the watch in [280] fr HIGHLAND CHIEFS FOUND EMPIRE the woods lining the shore invariably caught the absconders and restored them for ransom in the form of blankets, kettles, pistols and powder. It was then McDougal adopted the usual tactics of Nor'westers from the Arctic to the St. Lawrence. He sent for the chief who seemed most powerful—old Com- comly, the one-eyed—and married his daughter. That at least would bind the Chinooks as faithful allies. He did a much more dangerous thing. All the Nor'westers not only used liquor but doped it with laudanum; but the Chinooks were not drunkards; so McDougal tried another trick. The coast Indians knew how terribly smallpox had ravaged mountain and plains tribes. They feared it more than the demons carved on prow of every dugout and set up on totem pole before every village. McDougal sent for Comcomly. He showed the greasy old chief a little bottle. In it was corked, he said, the smallpox demon. If the Indians were friends to the white man, the cork would remain in. If not—McDougal did not finish; but the terror of the white man's power spread for a half century, from the coast to the mountains; and when in 1847 measles ran a fatal epidemic among the Walla Wallas and Cayuses up the Columbia, that threat of McDougal's was remembered and exaggerated by a son of the very Dorion who had guided the Astorians overland from the Missouri to the Pacific. Meantime, what was delaying those Overlanders? Why didn't they come? They, too, were Highland chiefs gathered up in Montreal that same autumn of 1810 with French voyageurs and sent from Mackinac across Wisconsin down the Mississippi to St. Louis. They had ascended the Missouri under Wilson Price Hunt of New [281] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE Jersey and Ramsay Crooks, a trusted fur trader of Mackinac and St. Louis. They had set out in January of 1811 at least forty strong. What with Pierre Dorion and his little slave wife picked up as interpreter, and renegades like Rose engaged among the Crows and as quickly dropped for his treachery, and trappers found lost in the mountains, they numbered from forty to sixty men. They, too, had such Highlanders as Donald McKenzie, who knew the wilds from Athabasca to Montreal and lived to become a governor in modern Manitoba and retired to die in New York not a great distance from where I pen these words. How they had wintered up the Missouri when the Tonquin was beating round the Horn that winter of 1810-11; how they had raced the Spanish trader Lisa up the Missouri to the Mandan villages of modern Bismarck and the leaders had almost fought duels over Lisa trying to hold Dorion for "a whiskey debt"; how at the head waters of the Platte in the summer of 1811 they had abandoned canoes for over eighty horses, and in the autumn of the very year the Astorians were straining eyes up the Columbia for their arrival, they had camped near the Three Tetons and then pushed northwestward, lost for four hundred and fifty miles between the upper waters of the Colorado and the upper waters of the Snake—is a story told by many pens. Where they were lost in their wanderings westward is not known. Enough to say they had split up in three parties to avoid cannibalism—one led by McKenzie, one by Crooks, one by Hunt;, and their trail westward is every man's guess. It was between northwestern Wyoming and southeastern Idaho. Their path eastward later can be and has been carefully posted from the Columbia to the South Pass. One man was drowned. Another [282] HIGHLAND CHIEFS FOUND EMPIRE had gone mad. Crooks became so ill from starvation he had to be left behind with a few friends. Some of the trappers had dropped out in southern Idaho to hunt and await the return of the chiefs from the Columbia; and of these some fared so terribly among the Snake Indians they had drunk their own blood from opened veins to quench thirst. The rest that winter of 1811-12 were passing on through mountain snows which the bravest man on earth would not essay to-day; and while hammer and axe and crash of falling trees echoed behind Astoria, the Over landers were laboring painfully but dauntlessly towards the land of the Snakes and friendly Nez Perces. But from the first whisper that the Tonquin had met catastrophe up off Nootka, the men of Astoria had strained eyes and field-glasses up the Columbia for hope of news or help overland. Sometimes of a Sunday, the workers would paddle up that little stream where Lewis and Clark had wintered five years ago. The roof sagged in at Fort Clatsop, and the pickets had decayed; but the old stump standing yet for us to see was still intact; and in it were cut the names of men in the American captains' company. Surely if Lewis and Clark could cross with only thirty men, Hunt and Crooks and a formidable McKenzie could with over fifty and greater store of provisions! They noticed, though animals abounded in the woods, except such winged game as gulls and ducks and hawks, birds were scarce—a characteristic of Pacific forests to the present. It is easily explained. Where the fox, the weasel, the mink, the fisher, the otter, are plentiful, birds are scarce. Either their eggs and young are eaten, or the birds shun the danger zone. So June of 1811 wore into July, when Indian rumor by [283] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE "moccasin telegram" left no manner of doubt the Tonquin had been lost with every soul on board except the rascally Chehalis interpreter. Then in a bolt from the blue sky— was Uranus, the planet of the unexpected, in the ascendant?—came an astounding Indian rumor that set all hearts beating with hopes afresh. There were white men on the Upper Columbia sticking up poles at every fork of the river, where the Snake came in from the southeast, the Palouse from the northeast and the Spokane from the far north; and on the poles were little bits of paper claiming this Indian land for the whites. Were they the Over- landers? The Americans thought so because they hoped so. The Nor'westers did not; for they remembered those old dinners in Beaver Hall back in Montreal when Mr. Astor had asked the Highland chiefs of the Canadian fur trade to go shares on a venture to the Pacific and the Northwest Company had refused because they had boasted they could beat him to it. Who said there was no romance on the Columbia? The Indians who first brought down the news were two of the most astounding specimens that ever amazed a white-man fort. They did not dress like Columbia River Indians. They looked like Crees of the Canadian plains and, though affecting not to understand questions from the voyageurs in Cree, plainly did understand every word. They pretended to be man and wife but kept off to themselves and were afterwards found to be two women, who could pass through hostile territory more easily than men, to be, in fact, spies—spies for whom? For the Nor'westers, for the Indians, for whom? Whoever they were, they were not poor. They had been paid liberally by some one and passed on from tribe to tribe as if by secret passport. [284] HIGHLAND CHIEFS FOUND EMPIRE To this day no more is known of those two women spies than Astoria could extract from their taciturn lips in that summer of 1811. The new fort buzzed with the sensation of two spies. Instead of forcibly seizing the spies, McDougal craftily entertained both and was hurriedly preparing to send Ross, a clerk, and Dave Stuart of Labrador upstream with half a dozen men, when on the 15th of July at noon, just as the canoes were being pushed out on the water, there swept round Tongue Point with British flag flying astern a large cedar canoe with eight paddlers. A well-dressed white man stepped ashore, Mr. David Thompson, the great explorer for the Montreal merchants—just four months too late. McDougal and the Stuarts fell on his neck. This hardly need be ascribed to treachery. A friendly white face even from a rival camp must have been sheer delight to the Astorians abandoned on a desolate coast. Thompson was welcomed to the fort and given quarters. Among the gaping onlookers were the two spies whom Thompson at once recognized. He informed McDougal they were women in disguise. The tale told over the great dining table must have set all ears tingling and lasted far past midnight. Thompson in 1809 and 1810 had been in the mountains as far south as Pend d'Oreille and Kalispell and the Windermere region of British Columbia, when attacks by the Piegans and Blackfeet drove him pellmell north as far as Jasper House of the modern Canadian National Railroad. He had got through to the plains by Athabasca River and the Saskatchewan to go to Montreal when word came to him from Fort William to go post-haste back to the Upper Columbia and, avoiding Blackfoot territory of the Lower Saskatchewan, get through the mountains by the Atha- [285] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE basca Pass and on down the Columbia to its outlet on the Pacific. Alexander Henry of Grand Forks fame and a brother of that Larocque who had wanted to accompany Lewis and Clark to the sea, would follow with supplies. Thompson was not to delay a day. He did not. The order nearly cost him his life. He reached the Rockies via modern Edmonton in September of 1810 about the time Astor was sending the Tonquin out of New York harbor; but when he headed south, the Piegans and Blackfeet were on watch at all passes to stop supplies of firearms to their foes, the Flatheads. He had starved in Athabasca in October and passed the most of December on diet of one horse and five dogs. January of 1811 saw him through Athabasca Pass. How did he do it in a region where snow falls on a level five feet deep? That story would fill a book; but he avoided the Piegans and Blackfeet by gliding down the Columbia in April and May. Had he not been delayed in Athabasca Pass, he would have beaten the Astorians to the Pacific by a month; for the delay cost him those precious months from December to April, whereas the Tonquin had reached the bar in March of 1811. Though flying his British flag gaily, Thompson was even then at the end of his supplies in food and ammunition. McDougal gave him both. For this he is blamed. Should he? Division among white men in the face of those furtive foes watching from the ambush of ferns and trees behind Astoria was a policy shunned by all Nor'westers. They knew too well what such a rivalry was now costing them up in Canada against the Hudson's Bay men. Besides, Alexander Henry was now posting down after Thompson with supplies; and both sides knew [286] i^Sl^ THE GREAT INLAND EMPIRE OF THE NORTHWEST, BOUNDED ON TJHE NORTH BY CANADA, ON THE EAST BY THE ROCKIES, ON THE SOUTH BY IDAlStp^AND OREGON AND ON THE WEST BY THE CASCADE MOUNTAINS 1 i HIGHLAND CHIEFS FOUND EMPIRE that war between England and the United States was only a matter of months. McDougal no doubt believed Astor would send a ship to the rescue. Thompson no doubt knew the Montrealers had already arranged for the British Government to send out a man-of-war to capture the American fort on the Columbia. But here was a pretty to-do. Thompson had stuck up flags and papers claiming the best fork points as fort sites for his Montreal company. Very well! Give him supplies quickly to go on back the way he had come and again beat him to it. Before British man-of-war could arrive from a voyage round the world, or more Montreal men could come gliding down the Columbia building forts, let the Astorians send their voyageurs upstream and build forts just a little higher than Thompson's flags and so capture the trade now going down the Saskatchewan, or across the Rockies to the Missouri. The decision was a wise one. Let us give McDougal credit. In all conscience, he falls under black enough cloud later, when he sold Astor out at from ten to twenty cents on the dollar and took a partnership with the Montreal men that gave him an income for life. From this time on, every move of these doughty old Highlanders holding their own against impossible odds is the story of the founding of every center from the Inland Empire to the Pacific. It is a story fraught with comedy, tragedy, daring, unparalleled in the world. How urgent was David Thompson's haste to be off up the Columbia again to make contact with Alexander Henry may be judged from the fact that he left Astoria in a week; and in his big cedar canoe went the two mysterious spies. Weave any romance you like about these [287] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE two young Amazons. The only inkling of proof as to whom they were acting for was found on a paper they carried addressed to a Montrealer far up on Fraser River, British Columbia. It was signed by a red-headed firebrand, Finan McDonald, whom Thompson had left at the Forks of Spokane River to build a fort for the Canadian fur traders. When asked how they had come to Astoria, their only answer in Cree was they had got on the Columbia in mistake for the Fraser and so drifted down to the Western Sea. If spies for the Nor'westers, Thompson recognized and betrayed them; for certainly two Indians capable of taking care of themselves through seven hundred miles of hostile territory would hardly be likely to come such a distance south instead of going directly north. It was much more likely they had been spies for the Blackfeet and Piegans, who had blocked Thompson in the Rockies and hung so closely on Alexander Henry's footsteps when he had tried to get supplies through to Thompson in Athabasca Pass all the winter of 1811 that Henry could only get off by making every Blackfoot and Piegan dead drunk with drugged liquor—then sending help off to Thompson at two in the morning, while he stayed on to divert the dogging by these warriors of the mountain passes. The fate of the two women is unknown. To defend themselves against the Columbia IJiver pirates at Wishram between the Cascades and the Dalles, the Astorians bound inland in July of 1811—whatever their faults, they were losing no more time than the frantically swift Thompson—set out with Thompson. Follow first Ross, the young Scotch clerk, and Dave Stuart of Labrador up to Okanogan. This time they used the big Chinook dugouts to resist [288] SPi HIGHLAND CHIEFS FOUND EMPIRE the jar of rocks and bars at the Cascades and Dalles and Falls. Ross set off with Dave Stuart, two clerks, three voyageurs and two Sandwich Island boys—the clerks with umbrellas—do not laugh, we were all tenderfeet once and these fellows came back so toughened they could sleep in rain or crawl under a snowdrift for a blanket— the "booshways" (bourgeois) in grand silk-lined cloaks with old books under arm to read as the voyageurs paddled, or towed against the current, or put up a paddle for a mast with a blanket for a sail; and such a landward gale swirled them round Tongue Point that the waves washed the water-tight dugout half full and set the "booshways" nice soft comfortable mattress-beds afloat. Down crashed the paddle mast on swearing heads and all the books washed out but Ross' Bible, and all the gay camp furbelows but the little Spanish dog—Weasel. Sail up again and as far as that beautiful Puget Island, seen from Clatsop Outlook on the Columbia Highway, where they camped beneath the very precipice on which you stand. Coffin Rock and Castle Rock and Longview, where the Cowlitz comes in from the north, and on past the Willamette, where friend Ross predicts a great city (Portland) will one day grow; and then the black ominous rocks of the Cascades and the Dalles and the Falls; "by no means cheering" even to frontier Highlanders. Mr. Thompson had been camping on the north side of the river, the Astorians on the south; and Thompson crossed over and suggested they had better be on guard as they portaged and towed. The river pirates were in a swarm; but on gift of a few blankets as toll signaled "all clear—pass on." Easier said than done! Ross breathless from his load threw his pack of tobacco in a 90 pound bundle down and offered [289] I CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE a Wishram pirate every brass button on his coat to carry the load up the steep river bank. The Wishram ran off with the buttons and the tobacco which he pitched to a smash where Ross could not gather it but the laughing pirates could. They camped that night above the Cascades and McLennan wakened to find his grand broadcloth suit missing. He was so furious, he rushed from his tent and threw his shovel Napoleonic hat in their faces: "There's the hat," he yelled, "the suit is now complete." Thompson hurried ahead and the two mystery spies dropped back and camped with the Astorians. Wise old Dave Stuart held the Indians at these danger camps by all night dance with no doubt liberal allowance of tobacco and doped drinks. Then the whites could slip away in the mists of morning before the heavy Indian sleepers wakened. Fortunately in the high water of the August thaw, the white-men canoes got past the Falls without unloading. Then came the barren, wind-tossed, sandy plains. No Indian visible, with a high wind filling sails and the dugout scudding so fast there "was a nice spill when up from the sandy billows rose Indian heads in a rabble. Alexander Ross was a canny Scot, but his blood was up. As the voyageurs dried out the soaked packs, he stuck an axe-handle in the sand and by way of amusement began puncturing it with pistol shots. The Indians fled like locusts before a wind. The Blue Mountains, filtered in purple heat haze in a blazing sun, were now ahead just where the Walla Walla and the Palouse and the Snake come into the Columbia. Ross noticed the change in the Indians— raw-boned, tall, richly dressed in white buckskin—Walla Wallas and Cayuses and Nez Perces on plains alive with [290] HIGHLAND CHIEFS FOUND EMPIRE bands of horses in thousands. The Indians were friendly here as they remained friendly for almost forty years and danced and chanted all the night; but right where the Snake came into the Columbia at modern Pasco was one of those poles planted by David Thompson claiming this territory for British traders and forbidding the Indians from trading with other nations. Curiously enough these Indians had guns of British make. Was the trick to force the Astorians to the dangerous Snake River tribes of the south? Old Dave Stuart and Ross trumped the trick by an ace of their own. They would go on north, they told the Indians, and establish a fort where the Okanogans came down from the mountains. There would be more game for all comers with good furs. The old chief Tumm-ata- pam was so pleased that when Stuart and Ross proceeded on upstream forgetting a bag of shot, he rode after them and restored it. And right where the Okanogan comes into the main Columbia they paused and picked site for their fort. While they pause, let us pause, whether we are traveling by train or motor. From the Yakima and Wenatchee and Lake Chelan coming in on the west side of the Columbia are such continuous groves of fruit orchards to-day it is with difficulty you can see which roads to follow, or count the little cities and towns ensconced amid the trees, or descry the dwellers' beautiful homes ranking from mosquito-wired bungalows to the mansion of the retired magnate. Yet in Ross' day—yes, even twenty years ago—these were ochre-colored river-silt lands banked by the high rock bluffs that reflect the sun and give such color to the fruits that fill in a single year from [291] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE 20,000 to 40,000 carloads of apples alone. If you realize that 100 cars make a very long train and that it takes 400 trains to carry that fruit to far markets, and that the little cities rank from 5,000 to 15,000 people, you will also realize that Ross' dream of empire here has been far surpassed as a modern train surpasses a dugout. It took Ross the better part of a month to go up the Columbia to Okanogan. A trainload of that fruit can be shot across the continent in a week. Priest Rapids were named after an old Indian doctor, Haqui Laugh who "fished" rattlesnakes by forking their heads with a branch, than extracting their fangs and twisting their tails. Sopa of the Wenatchee Indians presented the passing travelers with venison and on receiving presents of firearms, spent the night dancing and chanting with his people to pound of drums that now would his tribe be happy ever afterwards; for the white men had brought "the stick that thundered" and iron. Poor Sopa! Where are his people now? But perhaps as one writer suggests, his dance was more significant than Ross and Sopa themselves guessed. At one jump, his race now passed from stone age to iron age! Where the Columbia veered almost directly east, Ross and Stuart stopped. About a half mile up the Okanogan, they pitched their tents. The Indians pledged their friendship and a great comet switching its tail across the sky, the Indians shouted it was the signal of the Good Spirit heralding the glad tidings. And who can say they were wrong? The Indian day had passed in human history from the time the white men built a fort on the Western Sea. About a half mile up the Okanogan dugouts were unloaded to build one of the first fur posts of the Inland [292] HIGHLAND CHIEFS FOUND EMPIRE Empire; and for more than half a century the Okanogan marked the great horse and river trail up into British Columbia as far as Kamloops on the river named after David Thompson, by Fraser in 1808. The choice of site was dictated by the fact that there was pasture for horses. There was light wood on the bluffs of the dreary plains to build and there were navigable waters north and south. Here the Okanogan Indians delivered to the two Amazon twenty-six horses loaded with provisions; and the two visitors vanish from history. A little driftwood log cabin 20 by 16 feet was rushed up and later pickets were driven round what was by grace called a fort. It was the first city of the Inland Empire! Then two of the clerks and two of the voyageurs went back down the Columbia to report at Astoria what had been done, and Dave Stuart with the other three men set up the Okanogan to modern Kamloops. Poor Ross was left alone with the little dog Weasel and his Bible. A whole book could be written of Ross' life in the first settlement of the Inland Empire. In order not to tempt theft, Ross hid goods in the cellar. Then he began learning the language of the Okanogans. "A day seemed a week, a week a month, a month a year." At night he primed his gun and his pistol and rested one against the wall and the other by his pillow. Then the latch-string was drawn in from the door hasp and the door so barred it would rouse Weasel if human or animal intruder came padding to examine. When Weasel barked back to wolf howl outside, Ross sat up to listen whether any Indian howls mingled in the chorus. Then Ross would lie down and little Weasel stand sentry again. One night Weasel began [293] «•: CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE dashing about barking wildly. In a jump Ross was up pistol in hand, but did not kindle light for fear of drawing fire through the parchment windows. Ross tiptoed up and stirred the coals of the fireplace enough to see Weasel's alarm was over thieves in the cellar. Now the cellar door was inside, but wolves and Indians could burrow an entrance outside. Ross lighted a candle; with taper in left hand and pistol in right, cannily lifted the cellar door. Sure enough, a thief was there in the cellar —he could see its eyes gleaming above a ninety-pound pack of tobacco. Ross' ill luck seemed to run with tobacco. He fired and blew the enemy's head off, but unfortunately not before the enemy got in action; and still more unfortunately, the enemy was a skunk! Ross went out to study the stars the rest of that night. So did Weasel. It was now November. Stuart should have been back from Kamloops. His prolonged absence and the tobacco which Ross had to throw out of the cellar emboldened the Okanogans. They wanted goods advanced for trade. Ross bade them go and get the furs first, and henceforth slept with two ears cocked as well as all triggers. New Year's Day of 1812 came with none to celebrate but little Weasel. It was March before old Dave Stuart's canoes came sweeping down the Okanogan loaded to the gunwales with $11,000 worth of beaver for which he had bartered goods that cost perhaps $200; but against those profits had to be balanced such losses as the Tonquin. The wonderful old Labrador trader had been as far north as those lakes at Sicamous on the Canadian Pacific, where a world of tourists takes its pleasure to-day. John Clarke was over at Fort Spokane. One December day, Ross decided to ride across country one hundred and [294] HIGHLAND CHIEFS FOUND EMPIRE fifty miles east and visit his next-door neighbor. The ride took four days, Ross spent three visiting and then set out for his home at Okanogan. Possibly he had ridden his horse too hard, or was exploring the country on his return trip; for he and his half-breed pack-horse men got off the horses and climbing a steep hill left the ponies to follow. Climbing a very hard switchback trail, Ross became so overheated he threw off his coat and strapped coat and gun case across the pony leading the line of pack-horses. On the crest of the mountain—and if you want to know just how high some of the mountains round Spokane are, take a ride in a motor up Spokane Mountain, which is one of the showplaces of the modern Spokane, or drive your own motor out along the rim rocks, which line the great canyon cut where Spokane to-day nestles and the cut below you shimmers in the haze of a Grand Canyon—a terrific snowstorm burst from the encircling clouds and the wind blew through the passes in a hurricane. Horses and pack-horse men and trail were wiped out in the swirl. A line of pack-horses may stretch behind a mile, or loiter back two or three miles. Ross shouted through the muffling snow tornado for his men to let the horses shift; but his voice was smothered. If this had been a summer snowstorm 7,000 feet up, it would probably have passed in an hour or two; but it was not. It was a December storm and the thermometer, which seldom goes far below zero on the plains below, at. this height fell like a stone with the wind a whiplash and howling cold. In the white darkness Ross bumped into a living thing. It was a pack-horse, but not the one on which he had strapped coat and gun. Cutting the ropes, Ross threw off the bundle, jumped on the pack-saddle and made the mistake all tenderfeet make, tried to guide the [295] If CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE horse instead of trusting its homing instinct. In a few hours, the horse was floundering belly-deep in the snowdrifts of a terrible blizzard; and the white dark of a day storm became the black dark of a roaring all night "norther." Ross felt arms and moccasined feet numbing. The poor horse was blowing so hard that after a few more paces it would have fallen. Ross dismounted and tried to restore circulation by walking; but in the dark no shelving rock of shelter could he find. The horse could go no farther; neither could he. Ross tried to burrow under the snow for a blanket with the pack-saddle as a frame to hold off the suffocating drift. "Keep awake— keep awake—keep awake; sleep and die; sleep and die; sleep and die," he kept humming to himself to hold consciousness; but the numbness was creeping from his feet up his legs. He pulled off his sweaty moccasins now freezing and contracting to iron ice and tried to pull his buckskin leggings down over his feet. Daylight came but the sleep stupor was gaining on him in intervals of drowse amid consciousness. Then he found that he could not get on his frozen moccasins. He got the pack-saddle out and on the horse but, with legs that no longer belonged to him, could hardly get into the saddle. He thought of traveler's yarns where men caught in storms had killed their horses and skinned them for robe or used the carcass as shelter; but he had had experience enough to know these were only traveler's yarns; for a wet horse hide or a carcass of freshly killed animal used as Jonah used the whale would have frozen stiff with Jonah inside the whale for good and all. The storm began to fall fitfully next day. Ross was now giving his horse its head; and when the sun burst clear at three in the afternoon, there not many miles away lay his own little Okanogan [296] HIGHLAND CHIEFS FOUND EMPIRE Fort, which he reached at dusk. His pack-horse men had trusted their horses and had got into Okanogan palisades safely; but one packer, who had made the same mistake Ross did, was rescued by the Indians almost dying, and his horse was dead. An Indian family crossing the same divide between Spokane and the Okanogan had perished in the same storm. Another time coming down from visiting Stuart up in Canada, Ross and his man Jacques were caught in another such winter gale. They wisely camped to let the storm pass. Jacques thought to help the reluctant camp- fire along by opening his powder-horn and pouring a little powder on the flickering flame. He did and both Ross and Jacques landed about six feet from where they had been sitting. This finished Ross' desire to pay midwinter calls on neighbors from a hundred to three hundred miles away. He took to reading his Bible to pass the weary winters when nearly all Indian hunters were far afield. Or take another of these Inland Empire centers founded by the famed old Highland chiefs of the fur trade—Spokane. When you visit modern Spokane, take a motor ride out nine miles to where the Little Spokane joins the main Spokane River before both pellucid streams tear on down the rim-rocked valley to pour into the Columbia, which here again takes one of its sharp bends almost directly north. You will see in the plum and apple orchard of Mr. and Mrs. Gordon—two of the great historic students of the Inland Empire—the ruins of a little log cabin—all that is left of the Highland chief's stronghold of a century ago. It has been moved from its first foundations to its present site. The logs still lie intact and the roof still defies weather, but the big barn [297]. CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE door entrances to rear and front yawn drowsily wide open, where padded footfalls used to trot up and down from the river dumping off fur packs from the Indians, or goods for trade brought round the world from Montreal and New York. A more ideal site could hardly have been chosen—a fishing resort where the Indians cured fish for winter, good hunting ground, abundant pasture for horses, shelter by the rim rocks from winter gales and hot summer winds, fresh good water and streams that would carry canoes far up into Canada or far down to Walla Walla and Cayuse and Columbia River tribes. One glance shows that the palisaded walls must have extended back behind the residence of Mr. and Mrs. Gordon, and not much closer to river front than the open doors; for spring thaws always raised these river levels. What a tale could that old house unfold if it could speak; for this was one of the forks first chosen by Thompson on July 9, 1811, and built by his clerks—Finan McDonald and Jacques Finlay; but the Astorians didn't purpose letting the Montreal Nor'westers capture all the inter- mountain trade. (Curiously enough, if you keep your perspective and your funny bone properly lubricated, it is precisely the same dispute convulsing the Coast and the Inland Empire to-day in the yearly controversy over long and short haul freights. The Coastal cities are determined to get that Inland Empire traffic down to the sea to build them up. The Inland Empire is determined to hold that Inland Empire traffic to build itself up; so there is nothing new under the sun, though our modern Solomons in the Interstate Commerce Commission have not yet given a formula satisfactory to both sides.) Anyway, the Highlanders down at Astoria decided to send up an expedition to Spokane and fight for their [298] HIGHLAND CHIEFS FOUND EMPIRE share of the fur trade. To lead the invaders were chosen John Clarke, formerly with .the Nor'westers in Athabasca, Mr. Ross Cox of Montreal, four able assistants of whom two were of course "Donalds" and "Macs" and the usual twenty to thirty voyageurs and pack-horse men. Now John Clarke was a pompous young fellow terribly quick of temper and shot, and Ross Cox was a fiery little Irishman at that glorious age when youth seeks adventure for its own sake. At Spokane both got all the adventure their temperaments demanded. Clarke had obtained from the Palouse Indians a magnificent gray steed, which set a pace in the horse brigade hard for the little cayuse ponies to keep over the sultry sands of August midday heat; and Cox, unused to that drowsy heat of midday and riding a dilatory little pony, kept falling to rear. Both had come out on Mr. Astor's second ship—the Beaver—which had reached Astoria the 9th of May, 1812. Dave Stuart had brought back with him from Canada that Bruger so famous in Blackfoot annals; and it was Bruger's report of the furs the Montrealers were attracting up to the Saskatchewan that determined the Astorians to contest the ground right at Spokane; so they set out up the Columbia for Spokane on the 29th of June, 1812. The second ship had come out superabundantly supplied with goods, and Cox says frankly "every man was nearly drunk on quitting the fort." It took five days to reach the Cascades. To-day it can be done in a few hours. Then there were those Wishram pirates. Every man was given a musket and forty rounds of cartridges, as well as pistols and a sort of hide shield against arrows. Twenty-five guards were posted right along the portage to protect goods. Of course, amid tipsy clerks, one pistol had to go off at night and instead of hitting a pirate Indian punctured the calf of another clerk's leg. [ 299 ] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE To Cox, the Columbia here seemed a perfect boiling whirlpool and, of course, the "old wolves of the trade" laughed at the greenhorn's new sensations. Again as in the Ross trip up the previous year, horses were bought from the Cayuses and Walla Wallas and Nez Perces at the price of five shillings, or a dollar, a head. A large rattlesnake curled up on a sleeping voyageur's chest one day at noon, and how to shoot that rattler and not shoot the man made Cox's eyes bulge. One man attracted the snake's attention, and when it darted out its forked fangs, another man with a seven-foot pole pitched it ten feet through the air; and the sleeping voyageur arose from the sand to mingle his thanks to the "La Bonne Sainte Anne" with "sacres" aplenty at all rattlesnakes. Not far from what is now Palouse River of wheat fame, the Spokane Astorians struck northeast overland by horseback for Spokane—pretty much along the road now followed in going from Portland to Spokane, only that the road now used has been shortened of all unnecessary curves and carries one over the sand-hills at forty miles an hour. The road the horse brigade followed wound hither and thither as water could be found for one hundred and fifty miles and took from five to ten days. As I rode across those rolling wind-washed sand-plains four times last summer and watched my fellow passengers drowse in the selfsame August heat, I wondered how many realized the shadowgraphs of the far past playing in the hazy blue atmosphere. The sand-hills are cut by canyons of black rock. The horse trail up and down these canyons was narrow as a goat path. Riders usually dismounted to let the horses climb leisurely and stop to blow for breath before another traverse over the hot sand billows. Poor little Cox was probably pausing for "a [30°] HIGHLAND CHIEFS FOUND EMPIRE blow himself," when Clarke rode back ordering all hands "to close up and keep together." The little Irishman exploded. "Give me your horse," he yelled, "and I'll ride with yourself at the head." Clarke, quick of temper, raised his whip to strike, then probably reflected this was the Irish clerk's first experience and rode on to lead the brigade. Cox rode sulkily in the rear. Utterly exhausted, Cox flung himself down to rest at noon and was presently in one of those deep heat sleeps like a nightmare in which he did not hear the bugle call "to horse." At noon, of course, the horses were not hobbled; the packs were taken off to ease backs and the tired beasts turned loose for a couple of hours to pasture and wallow in the cool of the river. When Cox wakened in the evening there was neither horse nor camp visible. He shouted! Not a sound but the desolate echo of his own voice from the rim rocks and a night wind blowing down from the mountains that was as chill as the noon wind had been scorching. Cox sprang up to try and follow the horse tracks—easy enough over the sand but impossible along the hard goat tracks up and down the rim rocks. He climbed the highest ridge he could find, the wind piercing his sweaty cotton shirt, the cactus pricking his light leather moccasins. He had neither hat, coat, nor pistols. All had been thrown on his saddle as he dismounted. Utterly fore-spent, he threw himself down, pulled some coarse grass over himself for covering and fell asleep to dream of poisoned arrows in his feet and rattlesnakes under his neck. He wakened at dawn drenched with dew and famished as a gaunt wolf. He knew Spokane lay somewhere to the northeast and kept working northeast when the second night he noticed two horsemen galloping furiously against the sky. He [30i] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE rightly guessed they were a rescue party sent back for himself; but the men were on the crest and he was in the hollow; and though he took off his shirt and waved it frantically and shouted shrilly as his weakened voice permitted, it only came back in echo from the rim rocks and the horsemen disappeared. Terrified now, Cox ran along parallel with the rim rocks trying to get up some goat trail when at dark he sank exhausted, knock-kneed from hunger. There was a rustle in the August sun-parched grasses. He turned. There lay not a dream snake, but a rattler. Cox hurled a slab stone and buried the rattler's head in the sand. The soles of his moccasins were gone, his feet were swollen from the cactus spines. Youth was getting its adventure, all right. He had sense enough to keep a stream in sight as he wandered and he now quenched hunger and thirst with a meal of wild cherries and water. He had been forty- eight hours without food and to aggravate his desperation that second night, a flock of what he calls geese and ducks waddled all round a little tarn; but he could neither wing them with a stone nor hit them with a stick. An Indian could have done either. Again he slept under a grass blanket. The third day he still kept beating northeast, but his moccasins were now shreds and his trousers rags. He chewed grass, pine, spruce, birch bark. That night he dined on wild cherries with a howling chorus of wolves from the rim rocks. He had noticed a cave in one of the rim rocks and he now steered for that with a hefty club to expel tenants, whether rattlers or wolves; but when a wolf came out of that cave and Cox hit him with a stone and the wolf retreated howling to the cave, Cox decided not to preempt that cave from its tenants. He began to tear off his trouser legs to bandage his feet. [302] HIGHLAND CHIEFS FOUND EMPIRE The sunrise showed him he was working too far east; so he headed north. He came on some old horse tracks that gave spur to flagging hopes—tracks of Cceur d'Alene and Flathead mountain Indians, he learned later. Choke cherries and raw haws were the diet for that day; so wore away the days and nights from the 17th to the 25th of August. That night a huge wolf gaunt as himself disputed his way along the old Indian trail, and though it took his last ounce of strength, the little Irishman let out a yell and raised his club to strike. The wolf let out a howl and backed. A lynx scuttled past, which was probably what the wolf had been hunting, for it at once vanished. Cox meant to use a flat stone for a pillow but taking the precaution to lift it, found a nice cluster of snakes coiled below, which he smashed, and so got his pillow. He was now in such delirious fever that when he heard the sibilant "whush" of a waterfall through the stillness of the night air, he was afraid to credit his senses and almost fell in the pool below to gorge himself with water. That night bark from a huge dead pine was his blanket; but he was awakened by the growl of a bear hunting ants' eggs in the hollow rotten log where Cox had partly ensconced himself. Cox scrambled up an adjoining tree. The black bear came after him. Cox got out astride a branch too frail for the bear, where he could aim at its snout as it crawled for him; bruin retired to the easier and tastier meal in the rotten log. In the morning the bear retreated; so did Cox and he did not loiter. The horse track now had human tracks mtermingled. He passed a camp used but the night previously and found some half-picked bones of grouse, partridge and ducks, which were the best meal he had ever tasted in his life. There was now nothing left but [303] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE his shirt and the moccasins made from his trousers. Was it the neighing of a horse or the humming of his own ears? He came on a group of Indian ponies pasturing beside an unknown stream; and then he saw the curling smoke of a camp-fire and two Indian women and two Indian bucks were running out to him. They gathered him up in their arms and carrying him into a tepee, gave him a root pancake and a broiled fish. The Indians consisted of a family of seven. By signs they conveyed to him they had known a white man was lost on the trail and Indians had been scouring the plains in search of him. He had been fourteen days lost but to his credit had piloted within a few miles of Spokane to a branch of the Cceur d'Alene east of Spokane Fort. The Indians took him down to Spokane on their horses. Though the jolting of the horse with food in a stomach that had starved for fourteen days gave him an awful colic, he rode up to French-Canadians and half-breeds cutting trees for the new fort; and Francois Gardepie, whose descendants can be met to-day on the Blackfoot Reserve of Montana, rushed to him with the words—"Holy Virgin—ma friend—he is found— he is found—Monsieur Cox—Monsieur Cox. Voila— voila—it is he." Did Cox sleep that night under skin tepee? Did he? Did he sleep for a week? His absence had not been noticed until as usual his "booshway" had galloped back to bid the lines "close up," when Indians were sent back to the morning camp to search for him; but some of the packers had resaddled his horse and the horse in line had misled the others into thinking he must be near, when a general alarm was sent out and a score of searchers went scouring the sand wastes; but Cox had worked over too far east and the searchers who went back over the [304] HIGHLAND CHIEFS FOUND EMPIRE trail had missed him. Cox never again disagreed with Clarke and the two became great friends. The new Spokane fort of the Astorians was rushed up before October; and Cox having been duly initiated, he was now entrusted to go on up east and establish another fort among the Flatheads. Ross says frankly that Clarke drove all his underlings too hard. As to the site of the Astorian fort on the Spokane, the early records confuse Indian with English names completely, but there is no doubt it was close to the little old house standing to-day. Clarke knew how to lure trade from the Montrealers and gave every chief cockades for gay hats and held hilarious dances. The Astorians' Fort Spokane had the usual big central house with common messroom, five rooms for partners, a kitchen and sleeping cabins along the palisades with bastions guarding corner walls and both bastions and picket walls loopholed for musketry. It was never dull where John Clarke was the central figure. Chief Illim Spo- kanee—Son of the Sun—was leader of the Indians and equally friendly with Montrealers and Astorians; and though Clarke was liberal of rum to his own men, he and the head of the Montrealers agreed to give no liquor to the Indians. They also agreed on prices—i gun for 15 beavers. The gun cost $2 or $3; the 15 beavers sold for $100 to $125; but recall again that during the War of 1812—and it was now the winter of 1813—beaver could not be sold at any price. Possibly one of the most ludicrous incidents of all Spokane history occurred at the junction of the two forts about a year later, It will be remembered that David [305] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE Thompson had left Finan McDonald, another Highlander, in charge here in 1811. For reasons learned later, in 1813 and 1814 the Astorians were acting in unison with the Montrealers. Finan was still in charge. Cox now took long horseback rides to both Okanogans to the west and Flatheads to the northeast; but he did not lose himself any more. He had reached Spokane on a hot August afternoon. Illim Spokanee—Son of the Sun—had welcomed the yearly brigade and all went well until Finan, the Highlander from Montreal, got into a quarrel over a gambling debt with one of the young buck chiefs whom he called a rogue and slapped in the face. Now Finan was a gigantic fellow, six feet four, with red flowing locks and red bushy beard and red-hot temper; and he regarded all the Spokane Indians as friends because he had a Spokane wife; so when he slapped the young buck chief and called him "enfant de chienne," the buck chief retorted quietly the "booshway" was taking advantage of his size as a man to insult some one smaller than himself. Finan roared he would fight him man to man in a duel with a gUn. The Indian answered no one would stand up before a gun to be shot like a dog—it was foolishness; but Finan had dashed for his gun and the buck chief stood twenty paces off with all the rest of the camp scampering out of bullet range; and when Cox and the other Astorians rushed out, here was what was filling the air: "Come on, now, you rascal! you toad! you dog! Will you fight?" "I will—but you're a foolish man. A chief should not be passionate. I always thought the white chiefs were wise men." "I want none of your jaw! I say you cheated me. You're a dog! Will you fight?" [306] HIGHLAND CHIEFS FOUND EMPIRE "You are not wise. You get angry like a woman; but I will fight. Let us go to the woods. Are you ready?" "Why, you damned rascal, what do you mean? I'll fight here. Take your distance like a brave man, face to face, and we'll draw lots for the first shot, or fire together, whichever you please." "You are a greater fool than I thought you were. Who ever heard of a wise warrior standing before his enemy's gun to be shot at like a dog? No one but a fool of a white man would do so." "What way do you mean? What way do you want to fight?" "The way that all red warriors fight. Let us take our guns, and retire to yonder woods; place yourself behind one tree, and I will take my stand behind another, and then we shall see who will shoot the other first!" "You are afraid; and you're a coward." "I am not afraid; and you're a fool." "Come then, damn my eyes if I care." At this juncture, Montreal men and Astorians jumped between and wrenched firearms from both. "I see," said the chief reflectively, "there are fools everywhere." When coming down from Spokane in May of 1813 with his bales of furs packed on thirty-two horses Clarke was guilty of one of the greatest errors of his hair-trigger life. Horses were to be left among the friendly Palouse Indians between Palouse River and the modern Pasco and reloaded from cargoes of canoes and dugouts for Astoria. The cross-country traverse was covered in six days. Finding the canoes safe, Clarke presented the chief with ammunition and turned his horses loose. He took the chiefs into his tent, and with two silver goblets [307] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE the two leaders pledged health in wine. All the chiefs liked the look of that silver goblet. Next morning before the canoes shoved out, it was discovered one of the silver goblets had been stolen. Every tent was turned topsyturvy to find the goblet. It must be found. He sent for the chiefs and demanded the thief be delivered. The Indians held council—a chief came out, laid his blanket on the ground and the goblet on the blanket. "Where is the thief?" thundered Clarke. Now to the Indian theft is not a crime. Before the white man came, theft was a vocation. It was only a crime when committed within the tribe. Never anticipating what Clarke would do, the chief pointed to a young fellow, who was a sort of slave or outlaw. "I swore he should die," shouted Clarke, "and white men never break their word." The young fellow kept smiling, probably knowing very well who had stolen the goblet; and restoration for the Indian is restitution. The youth was seized. The Indians could hardly credit their senses, for they could have exterminated the whites. A gallows was quickly rigged of the accused buck's lodge poles. The Indian women now began to run. The warriors rose in alarm. Arms and legs of the youth were roped; at eight in the morning of June i, after a hypocritical speech explaining that forgiveness had been abused by increasing thefts, word was given. The young fellow was now screaming with terror—probably screaming to the chief to tell who had ordered that theft—then his lifeless body hung from the beam rigged between two posts. The chief threw his blanket on the ground in a fury and began rallying his warriors. Bucks mounted fleetest horses and rode like the wind over the rolling hills. There was no mistaking such signs—it was a war-call, rallying the [308] HIGHLAND CHIEFS FOUND EMPIRE horse Indians to attack. Clarke launched at once and all hands paddled for dear life day and night in a flight that can only be described as a scuttle downstream for the Walla Wallas, who had not yet heard of the episode; but the old chief had followed on horseback. "What have you done, my friend?" he cried. "You have spilled blood on our lands." He pointed to clouds of dust where the warriors were riding across country to cut off the canoes in the great bend of the Columbia at Pasco. "Do you see them? What can I do?" Wheeling his horse, he dashed across the sand-hills to rejoin his tribe. Not a second was wasted. Pots and pans were hurled back into canoes and the company only breathed safely when on the 14th of June, they rounded Tongue Point and beached at Astoria. That act left a danger spot on the Columbia for ten years. The point on the map where countless fishermen hie to the Forks of the Flathead to fish in one of the great branches, usually going out of the Glacier Park area or Kalispell City, Montana, is close to the trail of David Thompson, the Montreal man, who was stopped in 1809- 10 from going on down to the Pacific and was chased back up the mountains by raiding Blackfeet and Piegans. These Piegans and Blackfeet must have come through that Maria's Pass south of Glacier Park, where Lewis, too, was driven back in 1806. Exactly where Thompson stuck up his claim to this trade for the British was never positively identified until the summer of 1926, but old foundations can now be picked out in the thickets of Pend d'Oreille Lake, where Thompson had a Kallyspell House in 1809. On the south side of Flathead Lake he had made camp in March of 1812. Thither then the poor little Irishman Cox is directed to [309] I CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE go in October of 1812, barely six weeks in from his awful ride between the Palouse and Spokane. This was a much more dangerous post than Cox could know; for from 1810 the Piegans and Blackfeet forcibly stopped even one pound of ammunition going through the mountains to the Flatheads. They had spies in every camp to stop the Montreal men from going on south. Henry of Grand Forks was stalled by them for weeks in the autumn of 1810, and only got off by launching his canoes at midnight. Every trader had to prove himself and a tenderfoot who could live on rose haws and chokecherries and grass for two weeks and come through unscathed with no weapon of defense but a club was considered proof against "dog diet." With Cox went Farnham, another young clerk, and twelve men with fourteen loaded pack- horses to build an Astor fort to oppose the Montrealers. Rafts had to be lashed together to float packs across the Flathead, the horses swimming, only one horse lost by a rider because he persisted in holding to the bit instead of giving the horse his head; but, of course, as the brigade advanced into the heavy forests here along Indian war trail no wider than goat path, the snow began to fall as the trail wound to higher levels. The regulation day was, up at sunrise, pack, out and mount: then breakfast between nine and eleven,fwith saddles off to rest horses; then up, mount and on to sundown where camp for the night was pitched wherever there were good water and shelter from prevailing winds. You will notice here when the horse brigades were doing hard work climbing mountain trails, they followed the same abstemious rules that governed canoemen—an empty stomach and reefed belt till night meal. Of course, the evergreens had mushrooms of snow on [310] HIGHLAND CHIEFS FOUND EMPIRE every branch and when the horses brushed these, there was a snow shower down backs and necks. Boiled rice, horse flesh and big-horn sheep steaks were the diet. Not an Indian was met; for the summer raids were over. And then came the Flathead Lodges round Flathead Lake—no more long houses like the Coast tribes but the tepee of buffalo hide and moose, and to the Astorians' unutterable delight—no more sand fleas! A log house was rushed up, but the roof fell in from weight of the snow; a new roof with steeper slant was put on. Then in December returned the Flathead warriors from a fight with the Blackfeet. They had lost heavily. Cox built a cedar canoe and took a glide down the Pend d'Oreille to Spokane. The river was full of log snags and he decided the horse brigade was safe, but he had New Year's dinner with Clarke, who now had walls and bastions up round Spokane Fort. Illim Spokanee—Son of the Sun— and his tribe were camped for the winter both on the site of the modern city and out on the Gordon farm. There had been a duel between a Montreal man and an As- torian, two Frenchmen this time—but the boys stood at good long range and all wounds were in coats and "healed by the tailor." When Cox got back to the Flathead country from Astoria the next autumn, he found the Astorian fort moved forty miles farther east. The Flatheads were just back from a raid on the Blackfeet and with the aid of white-man guns had given the Blackfeet a most terrible whipping and brought back as prisoners some bucks and squaws. Christmas of 1813 was spent in front of a blazing fireplace, with a feast of mountain mutton, wild rice and rum; but Christmas out in the warrior camp was a scene Cox could not erase from his memory all the days [311] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE of his life. The Flatheads were putting their captives to death. They had a young Blackfoot tied to a tree "after which they heated the old barrel of a gun until it became red hot, with which they burned him on the legs, thighs, neck, cheeks, and belly. Then they commenced cutting the flesh from about the nails, which they pulled out, and next separated the fingers from the hand joint by joint. During the performance of these cruelties the wretched captive never winced, and instead of suing for mercy, he added fresh stimulants to their barbarous ingenuity by the most irritating reproaches, part of which our interpreter translated as follows:—'My heart is strong.—You do not hurt me.—You can not hurt me.—You are fools.— You do not know how to torture.—Try it again.—I do not feel any pain yet.—We torture your relations a great deal better, because we make them cry out aloud, like little children.—You are not brave: you have small hearts, and you are always afraid to fight.' Then addressing one in particular, he said, 'It was by my arrow you lost your eye'; upon which the Flathead darted at him, and with a knife in a moment scooped out one of his eyes; at the same time cutting the bridge of his nose nearly in two. This did not stop him: with the remaining eye he looked sternly at another, and said, 'I killed your brother, and I scalped your old fool of a father.' The warrior to whom this was addressed instantly sprang at him, and separated the scalp from his head. He was then about plunging a knife in the heart, until he was told by the chief to desist. The raw skull, bloody socket, and mutilated nose now presented a horrific appearance, but by no means changed his tone of defiance.—'It was I,' said he to the chief, 'that made your wife a prisoner hist fall; we put [312] HIGHLAND CHIEFS FOUND EMPIRE out her eyes;—we tore out her tongue;—we treated her like a dog. Forty of our young warriors ' "The chieftain became incensed the moment his wife's name was mentioned: he seized his gun, and, before the last sentence was ended, a ball from it passed through the brave fellow's heart, and terminated his frightful sufferings." The torturing of the young squaws cannot be told. It was conducted by a Flathead priestess. Cox and his friends rescued one young girl aged fourteen by buying her—the priestess hag almost tearing her from their hands and spitting out that the whites were "cowards, fools, dogs with the hearts of fleas." I note these facts because they prove that every one who has resided among Indians in their primitive state knows—the Indians were doomed to pass because they had outlived their period as a race in the history of humanity. Scoundrels, many fur traders were. Blackguards of deepest dye, many renegade outlaw fur trappers were; but I have yet to know of one who killed his enemy by inches. And yet Cox says the Flatheads had fewer vices than any tribe he ever met. They were truthful. They were clean. They were kind to their wives. They were honorable in dealings with white men; but their vocation was man-killing. They did not flatten heads as the Pacific tribes did. How they got their name, the Astorians did not know.. With all this activity going ahead in the Inland Empire, what were the Highlanders of Astoria doing down on the Pacific? They were still straining anxious eyes for the Overlanders from the Missouri under Wilson [315] ■ CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE Price Hunt and McKenzie and Crooks when the first detachment proceeded inland to begin the Astor chain of forts, which were to span the country from the Missouri to the Columbia. Autumn of 1811 merged into winter. Christmas was greeted with the usual chansons of Old France and New Year's Day of 1812 welcomed with firing of salutes from cannon and musketry. Mountain traders themselves, these "Macs" of Astoria could not understand such Highlanders as old Donald McKenzie not crossing the Rockies safe and sound, which Lewis and Clark had traversed; and Mr. McDougal's fussy temper became more cross-grained and irascible; but to the infinite joy of Astoria there steered round Tongue Point the first week of January 1812—three different dates are given in the three accounts given of the Overlanders—Donald McKenzie with thirteen other men in two canoes—weathered, bronzed, beards in a bush, hair long and unkempt, clothes in tatters, gaunt and hardened as a wolf pack; and Hunt, who was now head of all Astor's Pacific operations came just a month later in like condition with thirty men, Pierre Dorion's little slave wife and her two children. The only leaders missing now from the Overlanders was that Ramsay Crooks, the best trader of Mackinac and St. Louis and his faithful Kentucky dead-shot, John Day. Crooks had been taken violently ill in the mountains and Day had remained with him. Both were encountered in May, 1812, by an inbound brigade of Astoria canoes on the banks of the Snake near the Columbia—robbed of every article they owned but their shirts, Day's mind unhinged between rage and famine, both men living skeletons. Perhaps we should balance that robbery against John Clarke's frightful severity over the silver goblet [316] HIGHLAND CHIEFS FOUND EMPIRE With Hunt in command, Astoria now hummed. He assured the despondent men of Astoria all was not lost because the Tonquin had sunk. Mr. Astor had another ship—the Beaver—on its way out; and the ship had come careening over the bar on the 9th of May, 1812, with Clarke and Cox and Ermatinger a relative of Astor's, whose founding of Inland Empire forts has been told. What with the new hands brought out by the Beaver and Hawaiian boatmen picked up en route by the 490-ton ship, Astorians now numbered between seventy and ninety men. This was the same Ermatinger, who had befriended Tanner, the boy slave, down on the Marsh Lands of Minnesota Border. It is the dove-tailing of such records as the Astorians' and Tanner's and Henry's which clarifies so much vague in the first records of the Astorians. Hunt now made one of the tragic mistakes that seemed to dog every movement on the Pacific till the very name Astoria became in his own words "a dagger in Astor's heart." He arranged for a party to carry despatches back overland to Mr. Astor. Then he hurriedly sailed north to trade. When his ship was loaded to the deadline with priceless peltries, he sent the Beaver on to China where the captain found—a dead market. Hunt had dropped off to winter at the Sandwich Islands. War had been declared between England and the United States. American cargoes, whether Chinese silks and teas or Pacific furs, dared not risk the voyage back round the world to American markets; and British markets were barred. The furs were stored in China at enormous loss to Astor; and Hunt waited in vain for Mr. Astor's third ship, the Lark, to come out in 1813. It was wrecked in a gale on the Islands; and Astor's fourth ship could not get out of New York harbor because of the war blockade. [317] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE Frantic with anxiety, Hunt chartered a fifth vessel, the Albatross, to get back to Astoria. More delay. On one of the Pacific Islands, he learned that British men-of- war were coming round to capture Astoria and divide its contents in goods and furs as prize money. A gulf of ruin seemed to yawn beneath every plan of Astor's. Hunt returned to Astoria in August of 1813. Stand at Wishram, a little sleepy town on the Great Northern as well as on the Columbia Highway to the Pacific. Bees drone in and out among the flower-beds surrounding the station. Travelers pause at the old- type wayside inn, to rest and thank their stars that in spite of an age of haste here is an oasis of dreamy peace in a hurrying modern world. The poplars and aspens shimmer in the heat, emerald-green in the noonday hush, sage-green as the morning and evening sea breezes toss up the silver side of the lazy leaves. Children and their nurses play in the park. Occasionally a town band sounds strains of music that sets the younger folk dancing. An old Indian may shamble past who bethinks Mm of other strains in a bygone age, when hides taut as metal stretched on hoops of willow resounded to the beat and three thousand warriors camped here with shields of bark and hide and arrows tipped in poison and whistles made of willow such as boys use to-day, to guard the Narrows of the Columbia gliding past in the race-horse gallop of a watery stampede, taking hurdle leaps of twelve to twenty feet over rocks in the rush to the sea. Perhaps his dimmed old eyes recall the hundreds of dugouts drawn up ashore here to hold the Narrows at the Cascades and the Dalles and the Falls as a toll gate, forever to prevent coastal tribes from bartering with moun- [318] FORT VANCOUVER, THE TRADING POST FOUNDED BY JOHN MCLOUGHLIN ^fesfer MISSION OUTPOST IN THE WILDERNESS BUILT AT THE DALLES ABOUT 184O tyL HIGHLAND CHIEFS FOUND EMPIRE tain tribes, above all to prevent white traders from the sea or from the mountains selling fire-arms for defense to any tribe but themselves. This was the great fishing station of the Columbia River Indians for years that went back beyond the memory of man. Food was in plenty always. Loot was in plenty always—an easy life, forever levying tribute on all passers-by till these white-man canoes came—frail craft for angry waters, almost certain to smash on the rocks—and loaded to the gunwales with firearms. These canoes, whether manned by two men or a hundred, had nearly always to make portage, when the river pirates would raid for plunder or offer to carry the goods along the river bank for buttons and muskets and then take care to drop packs in smashes; and when smashed packs roll down steep banks and cannot be rescued before morning—the old Indian smiles to himself—there was not much to pick up by morning; but of late these white men had been showing fight. One Casino usually acted as toll-gate man and set the price in blankets and muskets for safe passage up and down; but when the white-man canoes began ignoring Casino's levy, Casino's wife—an aged and evil-faced hag—back amid the trees lashed the young warrior bucks to frenzy by calling them "fleas, dogs, slaves, snakes." Then the war- drum beat—then the old Indian may sigh for the days gone by. The little town does not. It prefers its claims to high romance taken in the past tense rather than the present and bids tourists go on down near the river and see the monuments to all the heroes who fought here for passage to the Western Sea. Not a week in all the time from 1812 to the late 1840's did Wishram fail to provide such adventure as no legendary tale of Highland adventure could surpass; and [3^] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE yet^—and yet—we still deprecate the fact that, while it is grand and majestic and all that, our West lacks the human story. I will repeat only one such tale, because it is typical of all* Before Hunt sailed away, he had arranged for those despatches to be sent overland to Mr. Astor in New York. With this party went some of the brigades bound for Spokane and Okanogan and Wenatchee and Yakima and the Flathead and the Coeur d'Alene and the Pend d'Oreille, or Indians who didn't "bob their ears," but dressed their hair so that the ears looked as if they had been bobbed, for some of the traders called the Pend d'Oreilles "Bob Ears." The despatches were to be carried by John Reed, who had been scouting up the Snake, with Ben Jones, a hunter, and two Canadian voyageurs. To save the despatches from disaster in rapids, John Reed put them into a waterproof tin box, and to be sure they could not be lost, he strapped that tin box to his shoulders; and off they went up the Columbia, all set with seventeen men in two canoes, in March of 1812. All went well to the Narrows. It was April. The waters were not yet in flood from summer thaw, and portage had to be made over the shallow rocks and gravel beds. The Indians of what is now Clatsop Outlook loaned horses, and Reed led off the shore brigade with his tin box gleaming a lovely target in the sun, followed by five men armed from head to heel. As he rode, he seems to have dismounted, and as he dismounted he seems to have noticed some of the Wishram pirates scampering back into the woods with goods they were carrying and ripping boldly open. He waited for Robert Stuart, who was bound for the Okanogan, and talked it over; and the two reached Wishram just at dark. [320] *% HIGHLAND CHIEFS FOUND EMPIRE Sitting down, they kept guard all night and as the canoes came towing along, got back in the river boats at sunrise. In a trice, up from the mists rose the Wishram rabble with beat of war-drum and pound of paddle; and when they had to land again at the Dalles, four hundred bucks surrounded them, eager to carry the goods again here. It was late. Stuart told them to go on and carry the canoes upstream. Behind the canoes, Reed and Stuart sent eight armed men. The pirates would have smashed the canoes, but old Casino—the beater of the war-drum— seemed to prevent that by a fiery yell. It was the goods the pirates wanted—not the canoes. Stuart suggested to trick the rascals by carrying the goods upstream themselves that night, by moonlight. Again all went well till dawn, when the Wishrams across the Columbia saw through the design and came paddling over. Reed and another man sat down on the packs while Stuart went back with men for the last load. Reed by this time was so tired he had forgotten to uncase his gun. Something smote him on the crown of his head, knocking him senseless. When he came to himself, a Wishram pirate had uplifted tomahawk above him, but the Kentucky sure shot sent a bullet into the pirate's heart; but gone was the tin box. It was too shiny a target in the morning sun; and that is the real reason there is so much difference among authorities as to the dates of the Overlanders' movements westbound. With that box went the daily report of Hunt. Two of the voyageurs fainted with fear. Stuart was so angry he had their garments torn off and tossed the men into the canoes almost naked, while the pirates mounted horses and rode pell-mell to catch the canoes at the next landing. Locking canoes abreast, the Astorians paddled on; but before landing at the next portage, they shot [32i] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE broadcast at every human figure clambering down the sheer rocks. Out came the drum beater with flag of truce. Instead of regret, he demanded presents to heal the hearts of the families whose two braves had been killed. A blanket healed the broken hearts; but there was no use going ahead. On the way back they picked up Ramsay Crooks and poor crazed John Day. Of course, Hunt, who had not yet sailed for the North, sent them back again; but this time sixty men went as guard; and, of course, with sixty men, the pirates let them pass, though one account says old Casino's priestess wife almost foamed at the mouth when such large parties went unplundered past Wishram. A hundred such tales could be told of what the Wishram monument commemorates. Some day, some one will gather them up in a book. Some day, some poet or artist will read that book. Then canvas or song will enshrine the wild runes of the river in a national art. Hardly had Astoria settled down from one shock when came another. Thompson the Montrealer had now been gone a year from the Pacific. Hunt had sailed away for that year of his sea wanderings in 1812-13, when round the lashing waves and tides of Tongue Point in January of 1813 raced the largest fur brigade yet seen on the Columbia, eight canoes and seventy-five men. It was John George McTavish from Montreal with word that war vessels were on the way out to capture Astoria. Poor McDougal's head must have whirled. No one will ever know what passed between McTavish and McDougal. They were old cronies of Montreal; but from the time of McTavish's visit, McDougal's enthusiasm to [322] HIGHLAND CHIEFS FOUND EMPIRE defend Astoria dropped far, far below the dead-mark of zero. He talked openly of saving Mr. Astor total loss by selling out to the Montrealers at what he could get; but John George was in no haste to deliver the contract. He seemed to expect a Nor'westers' ship out with his uncle Donald McTavish as British governor, when payment need not be made. McDougal then went panicky. The terms of sale are a dispute to this day. Certainly Astor's total loss could not have been less than $400,000, though the furs were invoiced at $200,000 plus ten per cent, over costs. This did not cover loss of ships and wages; but the danger in waiting was as great for McTavish as for McDougal. If the British warship arrived before the Montrealers' ship, the crews would seize Astoria and the Montrealers get nothing. At this junction Hunt returned—August, 1813. When he heard the terms they had taken, he was furious; but perhaps he, too, thought twice. He had found it almost impossible to charter a vessel to cross the Pacific. If the British man- of-war or the Montrealers' ship did arrive first, could he save one dime for Astor? He could have; though he did not know it. If the British man-of-war had seized Astoria, by the Treaty of Ghent which closed the War Astor would have had his fort restored and claims paid for all losses; but when the Montrealers had bought him out, they could still hold their fort under the terms of joint occupation. Anyway, the point must be emphasized —Hunt finally acquiesced in the sale and in October, 1813, the Stars and Stripes were lowered and the Union Jack run up. The story is told on the panels of the Astor monument. And then John George McTavish became the most energetic man in all Astoria. It was apparent why he [323] 111 CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE had come with eight enormous canoes and seventy-five men. He did not want that British man-of-war to seize any loot. He got all furs aboard and scampered for the inland side of Tongue Point and moored in hiding with goods safely protected under oilcloth and canvas; and there he waited developments. Developments came fast enough, sensation on the heels of sensation. Comcomly arrived on the 29th of November, his one eye bulging like a poached egg, with word there was a "King George" ship crossing the Bar; and he generously offered to lure the ship to wreck and cut all the crew's throats! It was the British sloop Raccoon under Captain Black, who was so disgusted either at missing the prize or finding he had been on a wild-goose chase, he uttered the words famous in Pacific Coast story—"Is this the fort I have heard so much about? Blank my soul, I could have battered it down in two hours with a four pounder." When he heard that John George McTavish had scampered with the rich plunder bought but a month before, his seaman's wrath knew no bounds. He now cursed the Montrealers, broke a bottle of port wine and with men under arms took formal possession for His British Majesty on December 13, 1813, and after two days of hard drinking while his ship repaired, sailed out again across the Bar. In the interval came that Alexander Henry who had helped Thompson across the mountains in 1810- 11, now to help John George McTavish get the Astorian furs up through the mountains and down the Saskatchewan to Fort William on Lake Superior. Only one day after—the two vessels must have saluted outside Cape Disappointment—in sailed the Isaac Todd, the Montrealers' vessel bringing old Duncan McTavish [324] HIGHLAND CHIEFS FOUND EMPIRE as governor for the purchased fort, "nearly all the gentlemen drunk" as Alexander Henry records; and the gay old governor, on the axiom that ancient punk takes fire easiest, was accompanied by a flaming demoiselle with blonde hah*, who had been a barmaid in England and now came seeking adventure on the Pacific. So far as is known, she was the first white woman at Astoria. Mrs. Barclay had preceded her in British Columbia. The sensation created by Jane Barnes may be guessed. More than the old governor in his cups fell victim to her charms. Alexander Henry and old Governor McTavish nearly fought a duel over her. Triumphant so easily—the Montreal men under a loose-handed, befuddled old man, the Astorians waiting for a ship to carry them away or about to go back overland with John George McTavish—and with constant access to rum kegs, all became utterly demoralized. Dice and liquor were the order day and night; but the younger fellows speedily recovered from their first infatuation over the gaily decked Jane Barnes, when they noticed she held books upside down because she could not read. Poor old Comcomly became strangely puzzled. He could not understand McDougal giving up property without a fight. He was ashamed of his son-in-law. Two or three times, he had had to rescue the new governor and his satellites from being swamped in crossing the Columbia from Chinook Point on the north to Astoria on the south, because all hands in the jolly-boat were drunk. Then came the final crash of the curtain-drop on all the adventures of Astoria—one beautiful Sunday in May of 1814. Governor McTavish and Alexander Henry with six voyageurs were crossing the Columbia. A gale was lashing tide and river. The traverse must have been [325] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE about eight miles across. The boat swamped and sank. Only one voyageur escaped by clinging to a snag. The others disappeared in a watery grave. McTavish's body was found and interred in what is modern Astoria. And yet we keep repeating that the American West lacks human interest, lacks history, lacks a background of romance. Does it? Note. No student of western history needs to be told that there are differences in days and weeks on many of the recorded episodes of Astoria. With the loss of Astor's despatch box at Wishram went definite dates and place names from Wyoming to the Snake. Of Ross, Cox, Franchere and Irving and Bradbury and Breckenridge, all published between 1828 and 1856, each had to relate a great deal from hearsay. Franchere was at Astoria; Ross was at Okanogan; Cox among the Flatheads and Spokanes, and Irving in New York. Bradbury and Breckenridge did not go beyond the Missouri. Of modern authorities there is a wealth—-Coues, Judge Carey, Holman, Chittenden, T. C. Elliott, J. B. Tyrrell, Bancroft and the special issues of each state's historical societies. These disputed points are, however, more for the student than for the general reader. [326] n PART VIII: Where Old and New Meet in Modern Portland. 1821-1846. PERHAPS the best way to realize what the winning of the Pacific Northwest meant to the new American Republic is to take Spokane as a center, describe a circle east to the main ridge of the Rockies, west to Seattle or Astoria—then lay the area inside that circle on a map of the eastern states. That area will cover from Maine to Carolina and from New York to Chicago. Dear old East, mother of many Western States that are empires in themselves, lining a narrow strip between the Alleghanies and the Atlantic and peacefully ensconced in rolling green hills dotted with happy villages every three or four miles, is likely to gasp. Seattle and Tacoma mark the north end of that circle; California, the south end. You can regard Seattle and Tacoma as the New York and Brooklyn of the Pacific Coast; for that is what their position on Puget Sound is bound to make them inevitably, fatalistically—if I may use the word—as the Hudson made New York. Now whether you regard Portland as the Baltimore or Boston of the Pacific, does not matter much. It has the stamp characterizing both Eastern cities—the New England and English ancestry; the clean blood undiluted by such water-front origin as you always find in purely coastal cities; the more leisurely way of pursuing high ends and taking ideals casually for granted, not spouting too much [327] ill CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE about them; the supreme art of living which the English have developed—not chasing phantoms in frantic haste to drop with a life half-lived, like a pup chasing its caudal appendage and ending just where it began with its mouth full of the fur of its own tail; the same almost English drawl with a long a (but English undefiled) you hear in old Baltimore or Boston. I shall not give the figures proving progress. Any facts I could give to-day would be discounted by the figures of to-morrow. Let me give just one example of that— the population of Portland, though I could quote similar figures of Tacoma or Seattle or Spokane. If you begin with Portland in 1870, you will find that its population has doubled every twenty years. Skip the next few lines if you dislike figures. (20,000 in 1870; 40,000 in 1890; 80,000 in 1900; 200,000 in 1910; 340,000 in 1927, or on the way to 400,000.) Whether it will keep up that rate or not, one cannot know. I hope not; for there is something better than Big with a capital B. There is Fine with a capital F; and Fine wins in the long run. Of this New York is the best example I know in the world. When a building housing 500 people gives place to a building housing 5,000 to 10,000—as many do in the Wall Street area or in the newer Forty-second Street area—how many more motor cars and trucks does it jam into streets already crowded to the point of the impassable? That adds terribly to the cost of time wasted, of hauling food and fuel and merchandise at the rates of $1 to $1.50 an hour for wages. It means an inevitable and unstoppable increase in the cost of keeping alive. (I did not say "living"; for you cannot Uve in a cave city—you can only exist.) So I devoutly and heretically hope the cities of the Pacific Empire will learn by our Eastern [328] n WHERE OLD AND NEW MEET mistakes and spread out in a multitude of lesser cities, which is the distinct trend to-day. You have only to examine the records of growth in cities like Wenatchee, Longview, Everett, Aberdeen,—I could name fifty—and you will find they, too, have doubled every twenty years. No family could sit down in any one of those cities, keep its accounts straight, live within its income, and save a little each year, and by the natural growth of those centers not find its equity wealth from twice to three times greater every ten to twenty years; and yet they are keeping as their aim Fine with a capital F, rather than Big with a capital B. You get that in the amazing expansions of university life, in the beautiful musical auditoriums—say, of a Portland or the University in Seattle —in the monuments to the founders of their empire, not as hero worship, but rather as ideals—torchlights for their future to keep the spiritual undimmed in such an amazing deluge of material prosperity that those ideals might be submerged if not held high. If asked to what we should ascribe such amazing growth and prosperity, one could literally suffocate the questioner in figures—yearly agricultural production equal to all Canada's or all Argentine's, mineral output equal to all Canada's, timber equal to all Canada's, a third of the nation's water power and the cheapest water power in the world, not only sixty per cent, of the nation's timber but the finest quality of timber left in the world; but when these facts are reduced to still finer analyses and compared with other sections of the world as I see it, I think you will find the amazing progress results from four basic causes: (i) climate (2) strategic position for transportation [329] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE (3) soil (4) above all, the character of the people. Again, if you do not like careful analysis of what makes for prosperity, skip the next few paragraphs. Climate! If you average up all the year round, I suppose there is no better climate in all the world than New England—never hot, never cold, never drought, never 400 below; but that is not the point. We have six to ten weeks' winter in New England. When coal was $5 a ton, that did not matter. When it is $16, it does. But leave out the coal bill. Consider the roads—now finely paved as city streets and traversed by almost as many motors. In the section where I live—-eighty miles from New York—on a holiday by actual count 30,000 motors passed in one day. Fine! Think of the joy of getting round a beautiful country on such roads; but the roads and the motors have abolished the horse. While one had the horse, one could revel in the idealistic winters of Whittier's "Snow Bound," or Lowell's "The snow had begun in the gloaming"; but with the horse off the road, one cannot. When the snow has been busy all the night edging trees and fences white; and there comes a thaw followed by a frost—imagine a big truck coming down a hair-pin iced hill in six-inch ruts, your own motor going up; buck, snort, and a jump to get out of the way; even if you do not rip a tire, knock off a wheel, or rupture, an axle, you are not keen to take your own car out for pure pleasure next day. Now the Pacific Empire may have three months off-and-on rain in winter, but it does not keep you in—whether you use shank's mare or Henry Ford's; and it has nine months of undiluted sunshine the rest of the year. I once asked an Englishwoman why the finest Englishman or Scotchman on earth has at times the [33o] ^4y&ib^^M ■*% WHERE OLD AND NEW MEET expression of a grouch—a face on the wrong side of a silver spoon—while the Latins of the Mediterranean or the Latins of our own Southwest are nearly always sunny, happy, singing, laughing. She answered—"That's easy! When you've been shut in by weather for a week, or paddled round in a fog thick as pea-soup, how happy do you feel? You get dumpy in spite of yourself." So I put the Pacific Coast climate as its first asset. It imparts the optimistic outlook that recognizes no difficulty as insurmountable. It lessens winter expenses and winter labor, whether town or country, by sixty to ninety per cent.; and if you think those figures overstated, write to some friend in Portland for his winter coal bill and compare it with your own; or ask some New England dairy farmer why in winter, when his milk prices are highest, the profits are so badly absorbed by extra cost for labor; or get from New York City the cost of clearing the streets after just one snowfall. Then get the same costs from a Pacific Empire farmer. Next, as to transportation. At this, the Westerners and Easterners may join in a chorus of explosions. Have we not been hearing for twenty years that transportation charges were strangling the West; that blanket rates giving the same charges from the Pacific Coast to Chicago as from the Pacific Coast to New York were an iniquity not to be endured? But wait a bit! Go deeper! Get facts! If the Westerner did not get those rates, could he beat the Eastern farmer right off his own market—say, in apples, in potatoes? As for rates, when Alexander Mackenzie tells us frankly the Nor'westers could not afford wheat flour because it cost $4.80 a bushel to carry wheat from Montreal to the Great Lakes by canoe, and it does not cost as much as 48^ to [331] ^^^^^ CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE carry a bushel of Western grain to Liverpool to-day— that rate question becomes the red-hot end of a poker. The same conditions exists to-day in China. It is cheaper for China to buy Western wheat shipped across the mountains by train and across the Pacific by ship to Chinese ports than to buy its own Manchurian wheat sent down the river and canal by wheelbarrow, barge, sampan. And look up the population of western states before rails came in—say, Minnesota 70,000 then: to-day two to three millions. Look up the value of lands—50^ to $2.50 an acre before rails came in: $25 to $100 after rails came. But to go back to the Pacific Empire, people have a thoughtless way of saying the rails tried to put the rivers and canals out of business by building the steel highway parallel to the waterway and then cutting rates. Ask a construction engineer about that. He can hardly be bothered answering an argument based on such ignorance, or oblivion to plain facts. Before there was a single rail paralleling the Mississippi and the Missouri, the freight rates from St. Louis to Fort Benton by steamer, water all the way, were 12^ a pound or $240 a ton. The single passenger fare one way was $300. Do you wonder the construction engineer can hardly bother to answer such arguments? The rails followed the waterway because, whether through mountain pass or across plain, it was the low grade; and low grade means cheap haul, fewer engines, more carloads. Then by straightening the curves round the waterway with bridges or tunnels through mountains, the rail path could shorten the waterway and beat it by distance, time, cost. But ultimately, give rail and water equal grade, the waterway is cheaper seven to one. It has no roadbed to keep up and, on the ocean, no stations every few miles to maintain; and now that Pan- [332] ^N "% WHERE OLD AND NEW MEET ama has opened a great cheap waterway to all the world, what cities will benefit most? Those on the ocean highway; so you have the amazing growth in these Pacific Empire cities within twenty years. Where Indian canoes once rocked on the Willamette opposite Portland there are to-day, not forty different ocean ships, but forty different ocean lines making regular port call. The same story could be told of Longview, of Gray's Harbor, of Astoria, of Seattle; but any figures I can give to-day will be discounted to-morrow; for the world commerce of these ports has only begun. The Columbia Bar, once, dreaded as a death-trap, is now as easily passed by countless ships as the entrance to New York. Instead of fighting the waterways, the Western rails are to-day preparing to hook up with them and so reduce costs for the shipper in getting his goods to world markets. A book could be written on this one feature of Pacific growth. But behind shipments must be a fertile soil—fertile in minerals, or forest growth, or cereals; and again a book could be written on each of these causes of Pacific Coast prosperity. I will mention only one fact—forest growth. People ask, "But will Pacific timber last? Will there not be the same old story of wasted forest growth as in the East and Lake region?" No—not on the Pacific Coast. Because of the winter rains, the amazing fertility of the soil, and the warm sunlight for nine months of the year, forest growth restores itself here in fifty years. This has been proved by actual practice in reforestation. If you doubt it, do as I did; and I confess I doubted it. Go out to old Fort Clatsop, where Lewis and Clark wintered more than a century ago. The site of that old fort is to-day so overgrown with giant evergreens—pines and firs—you will lose yourself in the thicket. There is the [333] I CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE stump of the old tree which they used as a dining table. There is a new tree just as big beside it. You can count its years' growth by the whorls of the drooping branches —one whorl a year with the tips pointing to the Sun, as the Indians worshiped the Sun-God. This tree goes back fifty years; that one goes back seventy-five years; the other, a hundred years, and though the storms may have thrashed the lower branches off—"natural pruning" is, I believe, the phrase—there are the trees and their ages can be told by the knobs. You know nature never lies about age, if one but has eyes to see. Forest growth will renew itself here. That is why the big lumber companies of the Pacific have no fear of their reserves ever being depleted on the Coast, where forest fires cannot make the headway they do inland. As to the fertile soil, here is a beautiful human story. The number of old Oregon Pioneers still living can be counted on the fingers of one hand. I am fortunate in counting two of them as my personal friends. One is a dear little lady who will never be old, eyes undimmed, hearing perfect, face aglow with spiritual light. I always want to sit at her feet; but unfortunately custom and my own longitude (and latitude) will not sanction that. Once I asked her a question something like this: "When you came here a bride over sixty years ago, how had you the courage to stay? You had no markets. You knew it would take a year to clear an acre of these big trees. You knew it would take another year to blow the stumps out. Then you knew it would take another year to turn the sour humus up and get it oxygenized or sweetened by the sun. How could you face clearing one hundred or one hundred and sixty acres? Why didn't you stay in the Middle West where conditions were easier and [334] 1 ^ trjjp**1^^ WHERE OLD AND NEW MEET all you had to do was turn the soil up and get a crop?" "I'll tell you," she answered. "When we came West, my husband and I planted a little handful of wheat. In the autumn, we counted how many grains came up from one seed. Do you know how many came up?" "Yes," I answered, "I do; and you are only the second person I've met in the West who does know that." "It was almost 4,000 from one seed," she said; "and we knew a soil that could do that would be one of the prosperous sections in the United States. That's why we stayed." She was right. Three weeks before, going up in the elevator to a commercial and transportation luncheon, I had passed one of those show windows with blue-stem and club wheat. I asked for a bunch of the wheat heads growing from one root. Like Ruth with the gleanings in her hand, I joined that luncheon and to see what the answers of avowed boosters would be, I asked all present to guess the number of kernels from one seed. Guesses ran all the way from seventy to five hundred; and the man who made the five-hundred guess said he might as "well be a fool; for it was a wild guess"; and all I regret is that we had not charged a dollar a guess and pooled the pot. Then we threw the wheat heads on the table and counted. They totaled over 3,500—after which one does not need to say much about the fertile soil of Inland Empire or Pacific Coast. But what fiber had the people who wrested the wealth from the reluctant soil—people who pulled up home roots in New England and the Middle West; who pitched caution and warnings to the winds; who crossed burning plains; who passed through mountain gorges where Indians on horseback could go only in single file; who ran [335] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE down rapids in scows; who brought with them on the trek of 3,000 miles, herds of 1,500 horses, 2,000 cattle, all household goods in the prairie schooner; and who left their dead on this trail, milestones in the march to the Western Sea? Look at their place names all over the Pacific Empire—New England and New York towns, Pennsylvania villages, Middle West family names, French-Canadian soil tillers back to the days of the Ancient Rigime—the very pick of the finest fibre, the most dauntless souls, in human stock. Families came to New England for religious and political liberty; the French came to Quebec for la gloire and missionary zeal. The same motives brought the Overlanders to the Pacific Empire of the Western Sea. These modern centers with the old place-names make one poignantly aware that behind their swift prosperity and progress were the high ideals of their founders. I have touched on this most sketchily because volumes could be filled with details of the Puget Sound region, where Vancouver and Gray and Don Quadra made rendezvous from 1789 to 1794. Also of Spokane and the Okanogan and the Flathead Valleys. But were there not frightful crimes in the progress? How about Martinez? How about Meares? Of course, there were frightful crimes. Were there not frightful crimes in the clash between savagery and decency on the Hudson, in New England, on the Indian frontiers of Quebec? And the crimes were on both sides. We must not forget that. The vultures always follow prosperity like a flock of winged scavengers wherever there is easy profit in sight. Did not the missionaries of New France fight the rum runners of the fur trade, and did not the fur traders fight back by charging the priests were playing politics? That clash be- [336] WHERE OLD AND NEW MEET tween right and wrong is part of the advance in progress; but there is no doubt which way the battle will go if the ideals are held high and are pursued. Come down to the American Vancouver City at the outlet to the Willamette on the Columbia. Here one could pause for months and pick up every day a true story of the heroism of those old days. You recall how Astor's plans on the Columbia were ruined by the sharp practices of the Nor'westers in the War of 1812, buying Astor out at 20^ to 40^ on the dollar before a British man-of-war could come round and capture Astoria as a prize, in which case Astor would have had his fort and furs restored and compensation for loss in the Treaty of Ghent which closed the war. But the Treaty did not restore Astoria to the Americans. The Pacific Empire was left for joint occupation by both nations; and Astoria, having been bought by the Montreal traders, continued to fly the British flag. But what we give, we get. The ball we toss against v destiny's wall has a horribly inevitable way of coming back the same ball into our own hands. The Montreal Highlanders doubtless stuck their tongues in their cheeks and smiled at the way they had outwitted Astor in getting possession of his rich Pacific Empire; but something was happening up in Canada. Just as they had waged fur- trade war on Astor's plans, so they had waged fur-trade war on the sleepy old Hudson's Bay Company. This fur-trade war used liquor, raids, forcible seizures as its weapons, and ran into such frightful massacres up on Red River (modern Winnipeg) that the British Government gave both companies a pretty broad hint they had better compose their differences and get together in one company; or both stood a fair chance of the trials then [337] imrmm CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE going on in the criminal courts terminating in two disasters—revocation of licenses to trade and the hangman's rope; so the Nor'westers in 1820 found themselves swallowed pretty much as they had swallowed Astor in 1813- 14. Their triumph over Astor was short-lived—just seven years. They became part of the Hudson's Bay Company. And now the question arose—what man was to be sent to the No-Man's Land of the Pacific Empire to rule an area larger than ten eastern states, or all of Middle Europe? This area would be from one to two years' travel distant from quick orders from headquarters in London, whether cargoes went round the world by sea and back again, or up the Ottawa and the Saskatchewan and down the Columbia. The new man must be absolutely free of all taint from the old fights. He must be a man of finest judgment, a master of men, one who knew and could speak the Indian languages, who could "eat dog" and run rapids and rush up forts and command the Indians by the only two weapons that can exact obedience —fear and love; justice and equity. There was only one such man on whom the choice could fall. John McLoughlin of Oregon had been born at Three Rivers, Quebec, about the time Gray was outfitting for his first voyage to the Columbia. He had studied medicine in Quebec City and had been employed as doctor by the Montreal traders. He had served at "the Soo," where he married the widow of that McKay who had perished on Astor's Tonquin. He had befriended that poor Tanner slave of the Marsh Lands of Minnesota. He had risen to a junior partnership at Fort William. He had been with Alexander Henry, who perished opposite Astoria, when Henry was at Pem- [338] WHERE OLD AND NEW MEET bina (modern Manitoba) and had been up the Saskatchewan as far as the Rockies in both Henry's and Thompson's day. He could speak Cree, for his wife was Cree; and he could speak Assiniboine and French and English. He knew the best voyageurs from Montreal to the Columbia; and though his hair, standing out in such an aureole that the Indians called him "the white eagle," was already snowy, he was still in the prime of life, stood six feet two, and had an iron constitution unbroken by a single vice. He neither swore nor drank, and though he did not smoke, was apt to flare up in excitement, when he would take snuff and expend his wrath by sharp raps of his gold-headed cane. His fearlessness and fairness and natural dignity of a born commander and knowledge of medicine gave him great prestige with all Indians. To Dr. John McLoughlin, then, fell the appointment, at $12,000 a year, to command the Pacific Empire of the fur trade. But the Pacific Empire of the fur trade was a vaster Pacific Empire than to-day's. It stretched all the way from the Spanish Sacramento of California to the Alaskan possessions, or from the modern Salt Lake in the south to the modern Liard in the north. It included among its tribes the Umpquas and the Rogue Rivers and the Madocs to the Columbia, and the Clatsops and the Chinooks and the Tatooshes and Clayoquots and Nootkas up the Pacific Coast; then in the mountains, the Bannocks and the Snakes and the Cayuses and the Walla Wallas and the Nez Perces and the Flatheads and the Okanogans and the Kootenays and the Bloods and the Piegans and the Blackfeet, and the Carriers and Babines of North British Columbia who have to-day receded to the Liard and are savage and intractable as when white [339] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE men first went among them. The Babines to-day may not murder trappers and prospectors, for they know that will bring the Mounted Police, though it may take a year to run the murderer down; but there are more ways to kill a white trader than to shoot or stab. The white intruder has to leave caches of food behind him, to get out when he turns south again. The caches are not rifled and robbed; that again would bring the Mounted Police; but they have a mysterious way of tumbling from trees where they were hung out of reach of wolves, or being scratched from under rock piles where they have been buried. The wolves do the rest. In the Klondike boom of 1898 and the fur-trade boom of 1920, intruders in the Babine fur preserves of the Liard left their bones a bleaching trail along their own death-road. I recall a young man, who had been only once in the Athabasca region, coming out and flamboyantly telling the world a good prospector could as easily go from the Saskatchewan to the Yukon during the gold rush as a postman could deliver letters. He could; but he could not get in or out alive; and not one of the gold seekers got across by that trail. The Babines must have firearms. Therefore they tolerate two fur posts—the upper and the lower on the Liard. For the rest, they bring their fur packs down to Stuart Lake above the Fraser or out to the Mackenzie River posts. If a company attempts to put on fur-trade steamers—as an English one did during the fur boom— it withdraws presently with report of disaster on sandbars, or no profits, and subsequent bankruptcy. This, then, was the Empire to which McLoughlin came in the prime of his manhood in 1821. Astoria, his far vision saw at once, was not the right spot for a capital of that Empire. The Clatsops and Chinooks—always [34o] WHERE OLD AND NEW MEET tricky, idle and degenerate—were dying off from their own vices. It should be remembered right here that between 1822 and 1829 more than 30,000 of the tribes from the Pacific to the Rockies perished in a recurrent epidemic of what we can diagnose to-day as influenza with white- man measles. The superstitious Indians recalled McDougal's threat at Astoria—to uncork the plague; and those surviving told their children tales that helped to culminate in the frightful disaster of 1847-48, when those children were grown warriors. Wilkes estimated the total population of Indians on the coast in 1840 as 20,000. Sea otter were decreasing every year. The best pelts came from the Cascades and the Rockies both north and south. If the area from the Columbia to the 49 ° parallel was to be one of joint occupancy, the Yankee skippers and the English free traders could come in with their rum; and rum meant danger always in the fur trade; so McLoughlin went farther up the river and picked the very spot where Vancouver and Lewis and Clark and the Overland Astorians had all predicted a great emporium would yet grow up—the outlet of the Willamette just below the site of modern Portland. Up this distance, eighty to ninety miles, the Columbia was navigable for ocean vessels and less liable to gales. There was another fine point about this site. From here he could control those scoundrel pirates of Wishram from the Cascades to the Celilo Falls. The pirates had to have firearms to defend themselves from raiding Walla Wallas and Nez Perces and Flatheads. McLoughlin issued the edict that for every hair of a white man's head harmed at the portage of Wishram, he would exact an Indian life and withdraw all supplies from the Wishrams; what is more, he kept his word, but he needed to do it only once. [341] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE At this junction of the Willamette with the Columbia, he built Fort Vancouver, of which the modern city can be seen on the journey to or from the Pacific Coast Tradition says the first site proved to have sandy bottom which flooded in the spring thaw, so the permanent Fort Vancouver was built farther back; and there McLoughlin took up his reign as king of Oregon—czar, baron, pope, potentate, aristocrat, or whatever you like to call him— for twenty-six years. His word was absolute law; and I do not think there has come to light a single case in which his word was not right, his law just and his judgment fair. He lived in state and he dressed in state and he was King of Oregon just as Kenneth McKenzie was King of the Missouri; but McLoughlin was of a higher type than Kenneth McKenzie. One example of this is enough— liquor for fur trade. When an independent Yankee skipper once sailed his cargo of rum right up under the nose of McLoughlin's cannon at Fort Vancouver, and defied arrest under terms of joint occupancy, McLoughlin forbade the Indians to trade one pelt to him; and the Yankee skipper had to sell all his cargo of rum to McLoughlin at cost. What did McLoughlin do with the rum? He stored it in his cellars. He knew that when Peter Skene Ogden set off up John Day's River, or the Des Chutes, or the Snake, for the mountain passes to the Three Tetons, with one and two hundred hunters in the brigade; or Tom McKay, his stepson, started for a two hundred mile trip to the Umpquas or the Rogues or the Shasta Mountain tribe; or Alexander Ross went across Hell's Gate for the Blackfoot land, or up the Okanogan for Sicamous and Kamloops—there would be days, yes, weeks, when they would run short of food, when they would be marooned [342] WHERE OLD AND NEW MEET in the mountain passes, shoveling across the snows waist- deep in slush. On such nights, they had instructions to give every soul in camp a cup of rum; but rum for trade —never! The consequence was that during the McLoughlin regime, down to 1847, there were none of the awful massacres that marked trade from Fort Union. It was only when fur-trade rule began to give place to civil rule that the massacres began west of the Cascades, at Walla Walla. Volumes of history have been filled with piffle as to McLoughlin opposing American settlement of Oregon. Yet there was not a man on the spot from 1832, when the American missionaries first came, to 1846, when immigration was in flood-tide, who does not deny this charge. Commander Wilkes was sent out by the American Government in 1841 and was on this coast from Puget Sound to Fort Vancouver off and on for two years; and he denies such charges in toto. McLoughlin not only did not oppose the settlers—he fed them; he clothed them; he sold them seed-grain and cattle and implements on credit. And it was when some of the settlers refused to pay debts amounting in all to $40,000 that McLoughlin had to choose between the settler and the Company, he resigned his position. From the first, he foresaw what any one should have seen. With the American fur traders pressing across the Blackfoot land into the Rockies, unrestrained as to firearms or rum, the region south of the Columbia must soon be trapped out; so he sent his biggest brigades south under Peter Skene Ogden to trap it out first. Once when Peter was on the headwaters of the Colorado he encountered these free traders from Fort Union and the Missouri. Tullock was leading them. They rifled him [343] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE of his furs and of his journals; and those are the only years lost out of Ogden's life. But another season, when Peter had a stronger brigade and ample food, he met this same gang from the Missouri. They had no food, no horses, no snow-shoes. They had been robbed by Crows and Blackfeet. Peter demanded all their furs and he got them and went back to Fort Vancouver feeling the score had been evened. Once, about 1829, when Jedediah Smith, another free trapper of the Missouri—robbed and stripped naked by the Umpquas and with the scalps of his men in the raiders' hands—came to Vancouver des- titude, McLoughlin took him in, clothed him, sent Tom McKay two hundred miles south with a brigade to give the Umpquas the whipping of their lives, rescued his rivals' stolen furs and paid $3,200 for them; but he would not supply rival fur traders with goods for trade. That was really at the bottom of much enmity to McLoughlin. Help a rival in distress? Yes! The white men must always present a united front to the Indians. But advance goods to enable that rival to outbid furs from the Indians? No! There McLoughlin was fur trader to the core; and as long as he was on the payroll of the Hudson's Bay Company, he was right in that attitude. Take the notorious Wyeth case. Wyeth had sent a ship round the Horn in 1832 from New England. It was wrecked. He Mrnself came overland and proceeded to establish Fort Hall on the Snake and another fort right under McLoughlin's nose at Vancouver. Joint occupancy. Why not? McLoughlin received him as a gentleman and a guest in his own home; but he put that rival fur fort out of business by holding the loyalty of the Indians to the Hudson's Bay Company at Fort Vancouver; and by establishing a Hudson's Bay fort at Boise in Idaho. [344] ■n WHERE OLD AND NEW MEET Wyeth retreated in 1836, ruined and embittered. Of two hundred and ten men, he had lost one hundred and sixty killed or deserters in the mountains. With Wyeth on his trip of 1834 had come the missionary Jason Lee and his nephew, Daniel Lee, both Quebec men, though Puritans, where McLoughlin was Catholic. McLoughlin had begged these missionaries not to settle among the wild Indians of the Inland Empire—too tricky, too treacherous; and history has approved his warning. Yellow Serpent, Five Crows, and Chief Joseph, the noble Nez Perce, half-brother of Five Crows and father of the Chief Joseph of 1877, might profess conversion and avow friendship; but let a grudge arise or the tomahawk come out again, and these chiefs could not control their riotous young bucks; and McLoughlin could not protect missionaries in the mountains. The Indian Wars of 1847-48 and 1877 verified both prophecies. Why not settle at Champoeg Plains just south of modern Portland, among the old voyageurs and hunters of Lewis and Clark's and Astor's day, now tilling farms on the meadow flats of Champoeg? There the missionaries would have at least white and half-white children for their schools. There McLoughlin could protect them. "Nay, gentlemen, did I not engage Mr. Wyeth's man, Sol Smith, as teacher for our own Fort Vancouver children?" And it was due to McLoughlin that those first missionaries did not go inland and perish in the awful mission massacres of Walla Walla in 1847-48. On going back overland in 1836, Wyeth had met these other missionaries coming in wagons by the Great South Pass and the Tetons and Fort Hall. He had doubtless imparted to them some of his own bitterness; for they came to Fort Vancouver suspicious of McLoughlin and resent- [34s] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE ful of the Hudson's Bay influence. They were Dr. Whitman and his bride, Narcissa, a fair-haired, beautiful, spiritual woman, who has become a sort of idyl and idol in Western annals; and Henry and Eliza Spalding, lank New Englanders, devoutly zealous as the Whitmans, but of a tougher fibre, more practical for the frontier before them. William Gray came along to drive their pack- horses. Joe Meek, the famous guide; Payette, the Hudson's Bay man at Boise; Peter Pambrum, at Fort Walla Walla—all rubbed their eyes over that wagon. It was a tremendous advance over canoe and pack-horse. What matter that in spots the rear wheels had to be taken off and the front wheels roped to keep from tobogganing down the shelving rocks? The wagon got through the mountains and the wagon was advance courier—as Joe Meek saw—of settlers. Again Dr. McLoughlin received the missionaries as friends, gave them quarters in Fort Vancouver, entertained them as his guests and again warned them against the Inland tribes; but aflame with zeal, the Whitmans went back up the Columbia to a point famous as Waiilatpu on the Walla Walla, twenty-five miles east of the Hudson's Bay fort, and the Spaldings went to Lapwai near modern Lewiston, Idaho. There were hidden dangers all about, though they could not realize those dangers as the fur traders did. There was the boy Elijah, baptized by Lee down on the Willamette, son of Chief Yellow Serpent; and when Elijah a few years later was cruelly shot in California in a row over stolen horses, Yellow Serpent drew his own vindictive conclusions about white men. There was young Dorion, son of the Dorion who had acted as interpreter for the Astorians—a surly, trouble-making buck who grew up to become a guide for Fremont, but at this time was at- [346] n WHERE OLD AND NEW MEET tracting a following among the young warriors by telling yarns of how the white man first came as trader among the Sioux and then began to take the Indians' land. There was Delaware Tom, educated at Dartmouth College in the East and now resentful that he belonged to neither white race nor Indian, telling the same tale of Indian displacement in the East. There were other young half- breed scamps, whom Sir George Simpson, Governor of all the Hudson's Bay Company, had educated in Red River (Winnipeg), telling the same thing—first fur trader, then missionary, then settler, then the Indian displaced from his own lands. Can we blame them? There was only one flaw in the argument. The Indian never acknowledged that any man could own land. It was to be free as air used for an existence by murder and raid. This all illustrates what history has proved in all contacts between higher and lower types—it takes one generation to effect a change in the physical outer life of disease, filth, vice, murder, in the inferior race; it takes two generations to educate the spiritual side of the rising or sinking race. And here is always the danger zone. This type feels above its old life and beneath the new. One example is enough. Five Crows was a young chief favorable to the missions. If all men were equal in the sight of God, why could he not have a white girl missionary for a wife? Fur traders married Indian girls. Why could he not marry a white girl? The thing became an obsession with the fellow. Then comes the third generation—when the inferior race has to rise by absorption or sink by extinction. But, aflame with zeal, the Whitmans and Spaldings were unconscious of all this. Within ten years of the coming of the Lees and Whitmans and Spaldings, more than fifty missionaries and [347 3 CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE assistants were sent to the Pacific and the Inland Empire. I grieve to say, as stated in the church mission reports, that from those efforts not one sincere pure- blood Indian convert could be recorded. The schools and little hospitals did fine work among the half-breeds and prepared them for the next rung up the Ladder of Progress; and I delight to add that in the fourth and fifth generations of those early tragic failures, yes, among the descendants of the murderers and cut-throats, are found to-day, from Montana to the Pacific, sheriffs, justices of the peace, leaders in every good cause. Who shall say that one grain of good effort ever falls to absolute waste? And always McLoughlin warned those workers they were going among treacherous tribes at the peril of their own lives and at worse than peril to the women. And always, when they ignored and resented his advice, his friendship continued: when the canoe express went up the Columbia, he would send them a barrel of apples or some other present from the warehouses of Vancouver. What manner of life did McLoughlin maintain at Fort Vancouver? The life of a feudal baron. Fort Vancouver itself had palisades twenty feet high. On the broad swing gates were brass locks and iron hinges. In the center of the large court was the main residence—whitewashed, with cannon on the grass and pyramid of cannon balls and Hudson's Bay Company flag. Warehouses, stores, bachelor quarters, a library, cabins for married servants, lined the inner walls of the fort. Apples, from seeds of Quebec and London, now grew both inside and outside the courtyard. There was a kitchen garden for vegetables and outside were nine [348] ■n WHERE OLD AND NEW MEET square miles of wheatfields and pasture. Wheat seed had been brought from California. There were sheep runs and dairy farms. The stock had been brought from California and interbred with fine Ayrshire and Guernsey strains imported from England. Peach orchards, quicker of growth than apple, were round every cabin door. The stones were brought from Juan Fernandez— Crusoe's Island. A flour mill had been built where "the turn-turn" (falls) broke the Willamette at Oregon City. McLoughlin could now supply flour and wheat in exchange for pelts from the Russians; and when the London ships were short of fur cargo, rather than have them go back in ballast at loss, McLoughlin followed the lead of the early Yankee skippers and of Meares—he sent back loads of lumber and spars for use in Hawaii, where, Wilkes says, they sold at $80 a thousand. In other words, under McLoughlin, Fort Vancouver became a self- sustaining unit that could exist independent of far headquarters. See now in what the wealth of the modern Pacific Empire consists—dairy farms, wheat, flour, fruit, timber. Was I wrong in saying that behind fine climate, strategic position for shipping, fertile soil, lay a deeper basic cause for progress—the character of the first founders of that Empire? Russia depended on pelts; and when the pelts decreased, Alaska was sold for a song to the United States. Spain sought only gold and silver; and when the gold and silver could no longer be harvested with the conqueror's sword, all Latin America was let go in a series of revolutions that began in 1821 and convulse parts of Latin America to this day. McLoughlin based his Empire's progress on its permanent resources; and it exists to-day. [349] II11 CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE His residence was a feudal baron's. In it, he entertained celebrities from every quarter of the world. When Sir George Simpson came from London or Montreal, his own piper—Colin Fraser—stood behind him and played the bag-pipes as dinner was served by Hawaiian boys. McLoughlin sat at one end of the dining table, Simpson at the other; and the brigade leaders and clerks and other guests in order of rank. No women dined at this table of state, not because McLoughlin did not revere women but because the Indians did not; and Indian chiefs were frequently McLoughlin's guests. No approach to vulgarity in language or manners was ever permitted at that table. The Indian had to come garbed in spotless white or tan buckskin; and McLoughlin dressed in black and blue broadcloth, with white choker and black tie. In his private life were just two great heartbreaks— his son and his daughter. His son David had been educated in London and Paris for the medical profession. He returned to Vancouver, the darling of the fort; gay, happy, the favorite of Indian and white. A vessel came to the Willamette bearing the daughter of a captain. Young McLoughlin—so the story runs—fell deeply in love with her. The sea captain objected to his daughter marrying what he would perhaps call an educated half- breed, a man who would keep his daughter in the Back of Beyond all her life. Young McLoughlin had to go up the Willamette on business. When he came back to Fort Vancouver, ship and fiance had sailed away. From that day, the Indian became supreme in the young man—he became a drunkard, later to die a sot's death. McLoughlin's daughter was the apple of his eye. He had her educated at home. She married Glen Rae, the Fort accountant, a fine, educated Scotchman. At that [ 350 ] wmr 4m WHERE OLD AND NEW MEET time California was in the midst of one of her revolutions to throw off the power of Spain. Whether Rae, down in the presidio of San Francisco on business for the Hudson's Bay Company, backed the wrong revolutionist and could not face his father-in-law with a deficit on the Company's books, or whether he fell in love with a Spanish girl, will never be known. He blew out his brains. It broke the heart of McLoughlin's daughter and it also angered Sir George Simpson who had plans to buy California for the Hudson's Bay Company; and that anger alienated Sir George's sympathies from McLoughlin's policies. Catholic missions had also come to Oregon as early as 1838. Again there are charges that these Catholic missions, instigated by the Hudson's Bay Company, encouraged the Indians in their attacks on the Protestant missions. No one can examine these charges and not find them foundationless. The Protestant missionaries came from Puritan New England. The Catholics came from Catholic Quebec or France or Belgium. Both had bitter memories of the old Indian wars on the borderlands of the Colonies and New France, when each regarded the other as the instigator of fire and sword to exterminate. The Catholic missionaries, like McLoughlin, had warned the Protestants to beware of taking their wives and daughters to these danger zones; but again this warning was regarded as an effort to exclude the Protestants. Why, then, did the priests at Walla Walla refuse to go to the rescue of the girl missionary captured and dragged away by Five Crows of the Walla Wallas and Cayuses? For the same reason that Peter Skene Ogden did not precipitate the murder of captives by attack but [351] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE rescued them by ransom and later saw to the punishment of the murderers when the assassins were defeated. Because such efforts in the midst of a massacre might have brought attack on the Catholic missions; perhaps because these particular priests lacked the commanding courage and fervor of a De Smet or a Lacombe, to rush between the warriors and their victims and with cross upraised order the slaughter stopped. Peter Skene Ogden or McLoughlin could rise to such levels of heroism. Ordinary men could not; but because they could not, to accuse lesser men of conspiracy to massacre is to narrate what belongs to the realm of hallucination, not fact. Such are a few of the legends clinging to old Fort Vancouver in the days when Dr. McLoughlin ruled as king. Walk where you may round Fort Vancouver or modern Portland, the old memories are there in all their fragrance. Portland, as we know, owed its name to the flip of a coin. When American settlers had poured in behind missionary leadership, was the newer town up the Willamette to be called after Portland or Boston? The coin was tossed. The name Portland won. Gazing at the elevators pouring the wheat into steamer hulls, or the flour mills sending the bread of the Pacific Empire out to the markets of the world, or the Hawaiian and Oriental liners unloading sugar and hemp and tropical fruits, or the big lumber carriers rocking at the long docks—one can but try to recall how and when all this began. South of Portland, up the Willamette, are the "tum- tum" (falls) at Oregon City. Here McLoughlin, when he foresaw the handwriting on the wall—that beaver [352] mm WHERE OLD AND NEW MEET would be trapped out of the Pacific and Inland Empire and joint occupancy would inevitably end in American sovereignty—built for himself an old-fashioned white house, not so large as at Fort Vancouver, but much after the same pattern—the sitting room on one side of the hall, the library on the other, the dining room behind, the guest chambers upstairs, a fireplace in each room. Though a great water-power project later compelled the removal of the old house to higher ground, it was reverently moved without the change of a feature. There is the old rough-hewn floor, worn thin by padded moccasins, by pompous tread of distinguished foreign visitor, by airy footfall of the younger generation decked in the silks of China or the styles of London—two years old, where McLoughlin maintained the same dignity he had carried as King at Fort Vancouver. There he thought to pass his last years in peace; but he did not. Those settlers could never forget their unpaid debts. Those missionaries could never forget his warnings of failure that had come only too true; and the claim jumpers shaved off the lots he had set aside for himself, as he had set aside farms for retired fur traders. That he had chosen a good site for himself, where flour and saw mills must create a city, was offense enough to the envious. Only McLoughlin's poise saved his last years from bitterness; but by the better people he was loved to the end. That house is to-day one of the national shrines for thousands, who yearly visit the Pacific. Up the Willamette from Oregon City is Champoeg, the site of the first missions and the first settlement, where the Gervais, and Les Framboises, and Cannon of Lewis and Clark and Astor days settled down with the retired voyageurs and coureurs de bois in log cabins, [353] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE moss-chinked, with parchment windowpanes, wooden latches for door hasps, leather for hinges and hard clay for floors. These settlers did not see a piece of money until the gold rush to California began, but they were happy as kings. They knew no want and no care. They could trade their grain and pork and beef for clothing at Fort Vancouver. Their muskets kept their larders filled with game meats and wild fowl; and the fur warehouses down on the flats, when cleared of pelts, could always be used for dance and public meetings. There the French brought out their fiddles, and the Indians their tom-toms, and the English their concertinas, and the Scotch their bag-pipes. What though the big timber wolves howled a chorus for the pork inside the farmyards? The wolves' "string band"—as the settlers called it—could always be outplayed by the mingled orchestra inside. What though the Company charged from eighty to one hundred per cent, advance on its goods from London? The Company lost ships every year or two and had to wait for its returns for two and three years. No envy in those old days. Envy only came in with the roll of gold nuggets from California in the famous '48, when Champoeg was almost deserted by the younger generation in the gold rush south. The old folk who stayed could sell apples in San Francisco at the rate four barrels for $500, eggs at $1 each and other farm foods on a similar scale. One hundred and fifty families abandoned Champoeg for California in a single year. Floods washed away that section of Champoeg on the low meadows; and the old halcyon days passed forever, as they always pass where the dollar becomes paramount in place of man. You can motor to Champoeg up one side of the Willamette and down the other. Barbed-wire fences have replaced the old zigzag [354] WHERE OLD AND NEW MEET rails; but you can still camp under the old oaks that whispered above lovers' vows, or drink from the cold spring that filled the oaken buckets and water-proof basket-pots of the first settlers. Champoeg, too, has become one of the shrines of the Pacific Coast. Did Whitman save Oregon? The legend has gone down in mission annals and school histories for half a century that he did. If this means, did he by his famous overland ride in the winter of 1841-42 rouse New England and the Middle West to the value of the Pacific Empire, so that immigration came in floods, he did save Oregon. If it means, did he save Oregon from the machinations of the Hudson's Bay Company and England, he did not. The Hudson's Bay Company never could get the backing of the British Government, to buy either California for its bad debts or Alaska from the Russians. They discouraged every move of Sir George Simpson's suggesting expansion west of the Rockies, where they knew their charter did not extend. They discouraged such policy as to Oregon for the very best of reasons. They had not the shred of a claim that would stand in any court. If claim stood on first discovery, Gray, the American, was first discoverer of Oregon. If claim rested on first exploration, Lewis and Clark had settled that. If claim resulted from first occupancy, Astor had been first occupant. If claim was established by first settlement, Americans had been the first settlers. If claim rested on first careful examination of facts, Wilkes had come out for the American Government in [355] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE 1841-42. Parkes and Peel and Gordon came out for the British Government in 1846; and when these Navy officers found the feather-beds not to their liking in Fort Vancouver, and "the fish would not bite" nor rise to fly but seemed to prefer fishermen who used scoop nets, and the deer would not stand still "to be stalked" as in Scotland but had to be pot-shotted as it were "on the wing," they pronounced "all Oregon not worth one damn." These facts are now matters of record. Why dispute them? Nor should we be too hard on the snap judgment of the supercilious British officers. Senators in Washington stood up and proved on the floor that "Oregon was not worth one pinch of snuff." Most of us to-day think that pinch of snuff would come too high for general consumption. If England had cared, she would not have deferred her examination of the dispute for five years after Wilkes' examination for the American Government. As usual, a combination of circumstances forced final issue. Ewing Young, a Tennesseean, had died on the Willamette without making a will. His estate was small, but there were no courts to settle the unclaimed property. Wilkes, who went to Champoeg and examined the matter, was doubtful as to the wisdom of setting up courts for the settlement of one small estate. It would entail taxes on these tax-free settlers. He advised the Americans to go slow and leave the decision to the Washington Powers; but events were moving too fast for that policy. Settlers were pouring past the Whitmans' Walla Walla mission in thousands, in such myriads they almost ate the missions out of food; when they came to Fort Vancouver destitute and famished amid autumn rains, they taxed the Hudson's Bay Company's hospitality to its [356] WHERE OLD AND NEW MEET limits. Bastions were filled with cots and pelts were flung as mattresses on the floor. McLoughlin stood bareheaded in the slashing rains, directing food and shelter. "Sir," the story goes of one clerk running to McLoughlin for orders, "the bastions are filled." "Put beds on the counters and on the warehouse floors." All night clerks and servants toiled in the rain to receive the destitute newcomers. "Sir," shouted the clerk, running to the tall, white- haired figure on the docks swinging his lantern and pointing this way and that with his cane, "every nook and cranny is full to the roof." "Put up tents in the courtyard," directed McLoughlin. And all the next week, McLoughlin and his clerks dealt out food and clothing from the Company shelves to save the settlers, taking only on their books the I. O. U.'s of penniless people in payment. These flood-tides of immigration continued to 1846, when McLoughlin resigned. It was not for helping the settlers that he was forced to resign. It was because of these settlers' debts on which he would neither force payment nor interest charges. How could he? There were no courts. The silent pressure of refusing credit would have caused starvation. But how did the Indians regard these floods of immigrants with their squeaky wagons and herds of horses and cattle coming down the Walla Walla to the Columbia? Delaware Tom, the Dartmouth graduate, who found himself a man without a country or a race, came sneaking to McLoughlin at Fort Vancouver. "Weren't settlers bad for fur trade?" The sinister hint carried its own threat. Would the Hudson's Bay Company give the Cayuses and Walla Wallas and Nez Perces arms? McLoughlin kicked the fellow from the fort. [357] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE "What did we tell you?" Pierre Dorion and Delaware Tom and the father of the murdered boy Elijah and Five Crows and the others eager for raid went whispering among the younger warriors. "First the white man comes to trade, then he comes as missionary, then the settlers come and seize the Indian lands. They marry our Indian girls. Do we marry their white girls?" The Whitman mission had ominous warnings for a year. During the Doctor's absence in the East, a ruffian had entered and tried to seize Mrs. Whitman. McKinley took her down to Walla Walla till the Doctor returned; but instead of cultivating the fields as they had before Whitman went on his famous trip, the younger Indians now trampled his potato fields and turned their horses loose in his wheat. McLoughlin would have thrashed such ruffians within an inch of their lives for such conduct. I doubt not De Smet or Lacombe would have done the same, but Whitman could not believe his converts were false. Nor were they all. Chief Joseph was not; but he could not control his young bucks. Then came one of those periodic epidemics of measles and influenza— possibly brought by the immigrants, possibly by the Indians' own filthy lives. Dr. Whitman worked among the lodges to exhaustion; but he could not prevent all his patients from dying. "Leave at once. Come down immediately to Fort Vancouver," McLoughlin implored. Instead of coming down to Fort Vancouver, Whitman: sent word to the incoming immigrants of 1847 to be on guard. The trouble-makers—Delaware Tom and Dorion—had faded to California or the back hills; and Whitman perhaps hoped the clouds would blow over. A chief had warned the Spaldings at Idaho to take refuge with friendly Indian camps. They wisely did so; but back at [358] WHERE OLD AND NEW MEET Walla Walla, where the mission numbered forty-six people in all, of whom eleven to fourteen were whites, Doctor Whitman had come in from attending the sick on the 30th of November. It was Spalding who heard the news first. He met a party of Catholic priests and nuns as he was returning to his Idaho mission after a conference with Whitman. They told him the people of the Walla Walla mission had been massacred. They urged that he flee from his mission at once and entrust himself and his family to the Nez Perces, who were more faithful than the notorious bucks of the Cayuses and Walla Wallas. More than that they dare not say; for their half-breed guide and interpreter with sinister look kept edging closer to listen. Spalding escaped back to his Idaho mission by traveling at night and abandoning his horse too conspicuously to Indian scouts. The Spaldings saved the lives of their helpers and themselves by taking refuge with the Nez Perces chiefs; but Spalding was a nervous wreck from the experience. The fact that the Spalding workers were saved by the priests' warning is answer enough to the old base slander. But what of the Whitmans on the Walla Walla? The Doctor had come in from burying an Indian. That burial was ominous. Few relatives of the Indian were present. Whitman ascribed that to fear of contagion. He came in wearily and sat down to read his Bible. Some Indians came for medicine. He handed it to them and sat down with the drone of the children sounding from the schoolroom; but the seekers for medicine had not gone out. As the doctor turned the pages of his Bible, a tomahawk struck him. He was stunned. Another blow, and Whitman lay almost lifeless on the floor. Shrieks now pierced I 359 ] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE the air from the school. The mission yard filled with Indians. Mrs. Whitman had rushed to a window. Framed in the window was the face of Joe Lewis, one of their half- breed pupils. "Is it you, who are doing this?" cried the dauntless Narcissa Whitman, whose beautiful voice had led many a school hymn. The half-breed's answer was a bullet in her breast. Legend says that when wounded she flung herself in protection across her husband's now chilling body. In the house were nine others. With Mrs. Whitman, they dashed for hiding to an inner room upstairs and barred the door. The Indians were rifling the house, a favorite pupil among the young chiefs was chopping Whitman's body to pieces. Mrs. Whitman, who was still alive, heard a chief calling her name. Knowing their only hope was to trust some savage, who might yet prove true, she staggered down on the arm of Rogers, a helper. At sight of her husband's mutilated body, she fainted. Such details of the massacre as have been told by the few who survived are much too horrible to be given. Fourteen perished in the onslaught. The Indians were no longer men—they were beasts of prey yelping the cries of animals tearing "the under dog" to pieces. I have heard fur-trade women, who went through another such raid, describe those beastly antics and howls. I do not like to recall them. By dusk, the fiendish work was over and the mangled bodies tossed and trampled in the mud of the yard. The Indian women were dancing in a wild orgy, howling their chant of triumph. Two of the Walla Wallas rescued a few of the children. Only two of the adult workers escaped. Osborne had the presence of mind to pull up a plank in the floor, under which he thrust his wife and slipped in himself. In the dark of night the Osbornes [360] "1 WHERE OLD AND NEW MEET escaped to Walla Walla fort; so the news went down to Vancouver. A carpenter escaped by feigning death in the bushes and then making a dash for Walla Walla. That the carpenter was coldly received by the trader at Walla Walla can hardly be ascribed to Catholic prejudice—as one writer puts it. Rather, it was that any man would escape when the young white women of the mission—his own wife and five children—were being dragged off to captivity by lewd scoundrels. Joe Meek's little daughter, Helen Mar, died of starvation. Five Crows had carried the eldest of the girl missionaries to his lodge. When the Protestant mission suffered such terrible fate on the Walla Walla, how did the Catholic mission over on the Umatilla escape? People who ask that question in accusation should recall that it was not the mission as such the Indians resented. They hated Whitman for leading in those settlers and making his mission their great rendezvous on the way down the Columbia. Also all priests are not De Smets and Lacombes, warriors for their Cross. The very care Peter Skene Ogden had to exercise in rescuing captives without causing their massacre proves the awful danger. Ogden and Tom McKay were sent up the Columbia to the rescue and paid ransom of $500 in goods. If Tom McKay did not kill Five Crows, the leader of the raiders, who had carried off the girl missionary, he at least had the satisfaction of breaking the miscreant's arm by a well- aimed shot; and tradition has it, that of the other leaders in the massacre, now fading into the impenetrable canyons south of the Columbia, more than sixty perished of the epidemic. Five of the raiders, surrendered by the tribes to save themselves, were sent down to Oregon, where they were hanged on June 3, 1850. At the hanging, the sheriff was Joe Meek, the guide whose little girl [361] CONQUEST OF OUR WESTERN EMPIRE had perished of starvation. This long-delayed justice showed features of an infinitely tragic type. The victims were surrendered by their own tribe as a sacrifice. When Joe Meek went to the White House and told his tale of the massacre to President Polk's wife, a relative of his, the reaction need not be described. Not in vain had the missionary blood been shed. The days of joint occupancy and provisional government were ended. Not only must civil courts be established for probate of wills and criminal courts for trial of scoundrels, white or red, but provision had to be made for a local militia and federal protection. The Pacific Empire with its 12,000 souls became part of the Union. McLoughlin died in Oregon City in September, 1857— just four years before McKenzie, King of the Missouri, died equally impoverished in fortune at St. Louis. The race to the Western Sea had ended. East and West had met on the shores of the Pacific Empire as they had met on the shores of the Atlantic, or at an earlier date on the shores of the Mediterranean. The Long Trek that had begun with Abraham 2000 B.C. from East to West, ended in 1846 a.d. when the West met the East on the shores of the Pacific. Each race, as it has expanded from tribe to clan and from clan to nation, has been custodian of some Light for the great Processional of Humanity. Those who failed to become Torch- bearers have seen all their greatness fall to ruin under wind-blown sand. History may be either a head-light or a tail-light. Viewing it as a head-light, what has the future in store for the Pacific Empire? The Mediterranean is bordered north and south, east and west, by nine or ten great nations and their dependencies, numbering in all very roughly 300,000,000 peo- [362] WHERE OLD AND NEW MEET pie. From this total should be cut perhaps two-thirds of the population as of the nations but not bordering the Mediterranean. On the Atlantic side of North America are states numbering again very roughly twenty-three to twenty-five millions. Will the Pacific Empire ever have as great a population? There can be only one answer: the Pacific Empire covers vaster areas than either the Atlantic seaboard or the Mediterranean; and it has the most genial climate in the world, with a people of similar origin, the same language, the same government, and the same inherent traditions of stability, freedom, law, religion, ideals. How fast will the growth come? Who can answer? I have quoted figures on Portland—a doubled population every twenty years; and we are living in an era of accelerated speed, of as greatly accelerated speed as the railroad train crossing the continent in six days is faster than the canoe in ninety days, or the schooner around the world in seven to nine months. What will be the type of civilization? As the root, so the tree; as the acorn, so the oak; as the seed, so the harvest. Has the curtain, then, been rung down on the drama of the Western Sea? No. It has only been rung up; but the present generation are now the actors. That is why they are honoring as torchlights to their future, these beacons of heroic lives in the past. [363]
Other copies: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1429810
Books
English
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
New York : Robert M. McBride & Company
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Original Format: University of British Columbia. Library. Rare Books and Special Collections. F5514.1 .L18 1927
West (U.S.)
Discoveries in geography
Pacific Coast (America)
The conquest of our western empire
Text