Thomas Nelson Strong

“ For unnumbered centuries the burden of the toil and responsibility of her people had been upon her shoulders, and so far as she had anything to think with, she was a thoughtful, earnest woman. Inarticulate and coy in the expression of her feeling to a degree that imposed upon people who did not know of the fires that glowed beneath, she was in reality alive and earnest and had great capacities for joy and suffering. ”

“ There are wives of the Indian blood now living on the Lower Columbia whose husbands are well-to-do, influential men, who are loved and respected of their husbands, who have the respect of the communities in which they are known, and who live handsomely and well, yet who will not to this day sit at their own bountiful and well-appointed tables with their husband and his guests. This native shyness and reserve it is almost impossible for the native women to give up, and it enhanced Dr. McLoughlin's dignity in the eyes of the natives that his wife treated him as a chief. ”

“ It is difficult for the white men and women of this day to conceive of the Indian code of morals or to appreciate how perfectly it fitted their wandering life or to understand how trustfully and innocently the young Indian woman met the white strangers when they came. No exploring or hunting party, however difficult or arduous the journey, ever lacked Indian women to go with it, and no white man had any difficulty at any time in obtaining a companion for his camp or home, nor from the Indian point of view was there anything indelicate or immoral in this. ”

“ An almost obliterated Indian trail went over the divide between the rivers, and so anxious were the white women to see each other that it was a very common thing for them to go over it. One hundred yards up the trail there was nothing to see but trees, and one mile in the woods was as far away from human help as the wilds of Siberia. ”

“ In four or five years the ground would still be green, but the carpet of verdure would be perhaps six or seven feet deep, and of the little tiny trees perhaps nineteen out of twenty would have been crowded to death, and so dense would be the surface of this green carpet that the lower limbs of the little trees, and many of the little trees themselves, shut out from all light, would be dying and falling away. ”

“ The present generation can never fully realize that Fort Vancouver was once in this Northwest country, the court of a King, and that poor Indians wandering chieftainless and alone looked to it as a center of power, culture and wealth. In the lodges of Cathlamet, the Indian mothers told their children of the wonderful place and of the wealth of red blankets, of gay silk handkerchiefs and of powder and shot and provisions that were to be found in its storehouses. ”

“ Long centuries of oppression made the Indian woman thankful for even a poor specimen of a man. Thrice happy was her lot when she was taken for wife by a decent white man. In her inarticulate way she greatly rejoiced and sacrificed herself for him gladly. There are many people in Oregon and Washington who have Indian blood in their veins, and few, very few, of them have ever had reason to blush for their Indian mothers. ”

“ Considering the great value of these canoes and the time it took to build one, it almost passes belief that they would be sacrificed to a simple belief in the future life. It is exactly as though upon the death of a multi-millionaire of our day all of his moneys, stocks and bonds should be buried with him, his heirs renouncing the use of all his accumulations. ”

“ The "madhouse" of the Lower Columbia and of Puget Sound was not in pioneer days a lunatic asylum or a female seminary, only a judicious combination of the two with unlimited whisky thrown in.
The Indian woman of the Northwest Pacific Coast was not a flower-garlanded maiden or a frivolous French soubrette or Light o' Love, as so many Indian romances depict her. There was in her from childhood up a certain gravity and sober earnestness which was the natural result of her sober, hard-working life. ”

“ Amongst them the rate of mortality was high, and they grew up with the dogs as best they could; were fed, and in a fashion clothed and sheltered, and that was all. As soon as the little Indian could run about he commenced to hunt and fish, and in mere love of slaughter would frequent the streams and maim and kill the salmon coming up to spawn. The little creek by Cathlamet was a favorite stream of the Fall salmon, and here the little Indians would gather and spear fish until they were weary of the sport, and would then in mere wantonness throw their captures on the rocks to spoil. ”

“ McLoughlin and Birnie and Roberts and the others would be again indulgent chiefs of their weak and erring people, and the Hudson's Bay Company would again enfold them with its protedion. The schooner victorious, big gun and all, would sail up the river amidst great rejoicing and promptly resume its peaceful business of carrying goods and furs. The chief instrument of discipline was the
store, for here every Indian was well known, and he could trade to such extent only as the factor allowed. ”

“ In the tribe, as a maiden, she obeyed without question the moral code such as it was, of her people. Married to an Indian husband she was his slave, and married to a white man and made acquainted with his moral law, for his wife, she would have passed through fire, torture and death before she would have gone one step out of the straight path in which he desired her to walk. ”

“ Cedarwood is almost indestructible, and no living Indians knew the name or lineage of the dead or resented the resurrection that the white children accomplished in searching for Indian ornaments.They tumbled the bones out of the bed of loam and leaves that had gathered over them, and they were the bones of a hundred years gone. In sport the children put them together and speculated upon what manner of men they were, and the Indian children joined in the game, for the dead were the old, old people. ”

“ Lying in the trail by the side of a log with the hole made by a rifle bullet through him, Chief Umtux was more dangerous dead than living, and instantly the battle lines were formed in earnest and for a few hours Chief Umtux lay upon the crimsoned soil of what it seemed would at last be a genuine battle-ground of Northwestern Oregon. Steadily the two forces stood against each other, but fortunately no other shot was fired and Western Oregon was spared an Indian war. ”

“ So strongly was the necessity for economy in powder and shot impressed upon them that a young Indian about fourteen years old, seeing one day a large cougar about to cross a stream on a log, did not fire at him from the canoe, but crept ashore and hid himself at the end of the log until the cougar nearly touched the end of his gun, when he fired, and, in the words of Western Ike,"Blowed a hole in that cougar that a bull bat could a' flew through without teching his wings on either side." ”

“ The Cascades on the Columbia and the Falls of the Willamette at Oregon City were great gathering places in the salmon season, but there were plenty of other streams where the salmon could be caught. It was preserved by drying and smoking, and from an Indian encampment in the olden time an odor used to float down the wind that was so pungent and characteristic that it could almost be seen. No real and truly pioneer who ever lived near the Indians can to this day catch the slightest whiff of ancient fish without seeing in fancy the Indian lodges. ”

“ This betting of a wife upon a gambling game was a rare event, not because of any disinclination on the part of the loving husband to put up the wife of his bosom on a wager, but rather to the disinclination of the other man to put up anything of value against such skittish property as Indian squaws. The Indian might be a gambler, but he wasn't always a fool, and to win an assorted lot of wives was not exactly the way to get rich or happy. ”

“ The building of one was the work of years. It was painfully hollowed out with fire and flint and beaver-tooth chisel, was steamed within with red-hot rocks and water, and was stretched to exactly the right proportion and kept in place by stretchers strongly sewed in. It was swift, beautiful and seaworthy. Its only weakness was in the places where the cedar wood was cut across the grain to give the lines of bow and stern. ”

“ Occasionally an Indian would kill a medicine man, or, as was once done by a sorrowing chief of the Klickitats, lasso the unsuccessful doctor about the neck and with the lasso fast to the saddle bow, ride his horse at full speed until the medical head was separated from the body, but no fault could be found with the sweat house, which maintained its credit as a sovereign remedy until many years after the coming of the whites, and this accounts for the fact that measles amongst the Indians was about as deadly as the smallpox. ”

“ Such girls would patiently live apart in some little hut or wickie-up and without a word of complaint would care for themselves as they best could. The pioneer white women were in the habit of taking out food and such simple remedies as they could think of to these poor creatures, and not knowing the nature of their illness or daring to come close to them, would place it upon a convenient stump to which the sick girl would come when her friend had withdrawn a little, and then the two would cheerfully visit together with ten or twenty yards of pure air between them. ”

“ Commencing at Cathlamet Head, the unbroken ridge sweeps easterly to a point back of Westport, and between it and the Nehalem River, for miles, the hunter travels in a great fir forest and up a gentle slope until he reaches an elevation of about three thousand feet, and sees the Columbia River to the north and east, the Nehalem River to the south and the Pacific Ocean to the west. Looking at it across the river from the hill in Cathlamet by the Birnie house, the sweeping outline of this long slope presents one of the most graceful and impressive scenes on the Lower Columbia. ”

“ WITH the white man came whisky and death hand in hand, and with him came the subtle laws under which nature punishes infractions of its moral code, and these laws struck at the very source of life of the Indian people. ”

“ One suggests that fever and ague came with the settlers, but the Valley of the Columbia was never a fever and ague country and the pioneers, however malaria stricken at the beginning, must have been thoroughly disinfected by their long trip across the plains. Others say that the turning up of the soil by the Hudson's Bay people at the farms at Fort Vancouver released malaria from the soil and this caused the epidemic, but the disease was here before the farms, and it was impossible that a disease which raged over hundreds of square miles could have come from so trivial a cause. ”

“ A few charges of gunpowder and shot would buy a fine wild duck or goose, a single charge of gunpowder would buy a forty-pound salmon, and an Indian would sometimes come in with his one-man canoe loaded with wild fowl, which he would sell for anything the white people would give for them.
The family grew larger, and as children were born to Mrs. Birnie and the young white wife, the white woman and the red would minister at each other's bedsides like sisters, and the friendships so formed never failed or changed so long as the two women lived. ”

“ To precipitate a conflict by striking the Indians unnecessarily would in the unprotected condition of the settlers have been a crime, while to let the Indians escape to carry on in unbroken force an Indian warfare would have been worse. ”

“ This is the seamy side of Indian life and the process of extinction of the Indian was grim in spots, but strange as it may seem, this period of fifty or one hundred years during which the natives of the Lower Columbia were passing away, was not on the whole an unhappy time for them. The Indian took life day by day and did not worry for the future. ”

“ One day when one of them with two of her little boys was on the trail in the midst of the woods, a large cougar suddenly appeared in it not forty yards away and stood looking at her. Now, the cougar is an uncanny beast, and in these Northern woods, a most formidable one. A man can live in the woods for years and never see one, and yet some day the supple yellow panther will stand in front of him on some woodland path as though he had come there by magic. ”