Clarence Booth Bagley

“ It appears that the Oregon boundary is finally settled, on a basis more favorable to the United States than we had reason to anticipate . . . Business will, of course, go on as usual, as the treaty will not take effect on us for many years to come." In early years the Hudson's Bay Company established a house at Honolulu, shipped thence lumber, timber, salmon, grain, flour and such other articles as were in demand in the Sandwich Islands, and in turn brought back such products of the Islands as were serviceable at Vancouver. ”

“ While the actual loss in killed and wounded was not great, it required men of undaunted courage to penetrate the Indian country, surrounded as they were by hordes of Indians, who, had they combined, as there was always danger, could at any time have overwhelmed the Americans. ”

“ Baker City and the whole of Eastern Oregon were for many long years served only by stage. All the little towns of the Willamette Valley nestling near the foot- hills of the Cascades and the Coast ranges got their mail by stage or on horseback, once a week sometimes ; once a month at others. All over this whole region of today the daily mail and the rural mail delivery are accepted as a matter of course, and only a gray-haired man or woman here and there remem- bers the old days and the isolation and privations of pioneer life. ”

“ His every action toward those who entrusted themselves to his guidance and care was that of a pure-minded American gentleman. The years that have elapsed have verified his predictions. The young women who came have proved a blessing to the commonwealth. In public and at the fireside their teachings and their example have conserved the well-being of the people. ”

“ Many immigrant families were totally destroyed, the women and children suffering every outrage which fiendish imagination could devise. The amount of property destroyed by Indian attacks upon immigrants, settlers and government supplies, was enormous, and almost none of it was ever repaid to the people who suffered. ”

“ ON PUGET SOUND the scarcity of women in pioneer days was a serious matter. From time to time the newspapers mentioned the continued scarcity of women, but nothing practical was done to improve conditions in this respect until early in 1861, when a young gentleman, Asa S. Mercer, arrived in Seattle fresh from college. His elder brother, Judge Mercer, was one of the oldest and most influential pioneers in the territory. Judge Mercer often made it a semi-jocose comment that there was a dearth of young women. ”

“ The citizens of the United States are scat- tered for a wide extent of the territory without a single place of refuge. We have neither ships of war, nor of commerce, nor any navigation of the rivers of the interior." It asked for a distinct territorial government, for means of protection against Indians, for Indian agents, and the acquire- ment of the lands from the Indians ; for donations of lands to settlers then in Oregon and to come; for navy yards and marine depots on the Columbia River and Puget Sound (this was before an American settler had reached Puget Sound) ”

“ No one, with any knowledge of the facts, will deny that the Indians were oftimes wrongfully treated by the whites, but as General Sheridan wrote in 1870, "So far as the wild Indians are concerned, the problem to be decided is, 'Who shall be killed, the whites or the Indians?' Since 1862, at least eight hundred men, women and children have been murdered within the limits of my present command in the most fiendish manner, women ravished, and they and their little children horribly tortured, and then after suffering the pangs of a thousand deaths, killed and scalped." ”

“ In these days of wireless and other telegraphs, telephones, railroads and steamships, automobiles and flying machines, those who have no personal recollections of pioneer life cannot realize the privations and dangers, intensified by difficult and often total lack of means of travel and communication, among the people of Oregon in its early years. ”

“ The first Indian war began late in 1847, immediately following the massacre of the mission party at Waiilatpu, with Marcus Whitman at its head, and only a few of these murders occurred before that time, which at least doubled the annual number of fatalities after that time. As a matter of fact, the greater portion of the victims of Indian violence fell between the years 1850 and 1862, a period of twelve years, and during that time the annual loss was at least one hundred and fifty, a frightful drain upon a sparse population. ”

“ Efforts were made by the Cayuses to bring about a general uprising. Had they been successful in this it would have resulted in the annihilation of all the Americans in the upper country, armed or unarmed. These delays and negotiations continued to the end of the campaign. "Blood is thicker than water," and even the Nez Perces, most of whom were always the friends of the whites and deplored the massacre at Waiilatpu, as well as other friendly Indians, did not hesitate to employ artifices to delay the troops and thus enable the Cayuses to move their families and stock out of danger. ”

“ Asa Shinn Mercer to Miss Annie E. Stephens, of Baltimore, Md.
The following is from a record of the trip kept by Miss Harriet F. Stevens: "The steamer, with lessened quota of passengers, left New York January 6, 1866, and ran at once into a storm, which lasted two days. As we recovered our normal condition we began to look about us. With great satisfaction we found that we had a party of intelligent, amiable, sprightly people. The unmarried ladies are mostly from New England, and can boast a fair share of beauty and culture, which characterize the best society of that region. ”

“ In January, 1852, the Oregon Legislature passed a resolution asking the delegate to secure the location of a postoffice in each county seat and that a mail route be established to each one of them ; also that he "request" the Pacific Mail Steamship Company to comply with the terms of its contract, obligating it to leave mail at Umpqua City on the upward and downward trips of its steamships between San Francisco and the Colum- bia River. For 40 years that company observed no law, regu- lation or contract that was not to its liking. ”

“ It is distressing to go into a lodge of some ten or twenty fires, and count twenty or twenty-five, some in the midst of the measles, others in the last stages of dysentery, in the midst of every kind of filth, of itself sufficient to cause sickness, with no means of alleviating their inconceivable sufferings, with perhaps one well person to look after the wants of two sick ones. ”

“ The company bought government stamped envelopes and put its own stamps on them and charged more than one hundred per cent profit for the service, the government mail service at the same time escaping the charge for carrying an immense amount of mail matter that it col- lected full postage upon. Individuals engaged in carrying letters and light packages overland from Oregon to California in the early '50s and as a reward for their arduous and dangerous task received 50 cents an ounce for the contents of their pouches. ”

“ The Hudson's Bay people could have had no object in causing trouble between the whites and Indians at that late day. The treaty settling the northern boundary of Oregon at the 49th parallel had been signed more than a year; the region about Walla Walla was never of value for the gathering of peltries, so that if white settlers had begun to occupy the lands adjacent it was a matter of small importance to the company, whose rights had been abundantly safeguarded in the treaty mentioned above. ”

“ Seventy men were lost on the way by death and desertion. They spent the winter at Oregon City.
In the meantime, Governor Lane had been carrying on negotiations with the Cayuse tribe for the surrender of those who participated in the massacre of Doctor Whitman and the others. The arrival of the soldiers of the regular army, which had long been threatened, and the increasing tide of immigration, opened the eyes of the Indians to the power of the Americans. ”

“ In 1855 the construction of a telegraph line from Portland to San Francisco was begun. The line was actually completed as far as Corvallis, and a few messages transmitted, at least as far as Salem. It went through Oregon City and to Salem on the east side, and at the latter place crossed over to the west side, and thence to Corvallis. The wire was light iron and the insulators the necks of common 'junk' bottles placed around straight iron pins or nails in the tops of poles. ”

“ The policy of the government was to encourage a vanguard of settlers to cross the constantly receding frontier. This began almost immediately after the close of the war of the Revolution. The government never provided protection for these people, but after most of them had been impoverished by frequent attacks from the Indians, accompanied by murder and outrage, an insufficient army would be sent out to overawe and perhaps punish the savages. ”

“ He appointed postmasters at Portland, Oregon City, Salem and Corvallis, but not until June, 1850, did a mail steamer come up the Coast, but even then the visits of steamers were few and far between until in 1851. The steamer Columbia arrived from New York with mails and passengers in March of that year. Her schedule between San Francisco and Portland was once each month. The carrying of mails in the early days was a matter of great expense and exceeding difficulties and by land was at- tended with danger from storms, floods, wild animals and Indians. ”

“ The great war period was a few years later, from 1855 to 1858. during which there was a general uprising of the confederated tribes of Oregon and Washington, in Eastern Oregon and Washington, in the Rogue River region of southern Oregon, and along the eastern shore of the upper Puget Sound.
Individual acts of violence and oppression on the part of white men, from time to time, induced acts of retaliation, but the criminal procrastination and indifference of the general government was responsible for most of the troubles between the settlers and the Indians. ”