The Dalles, Oregon

“ The company destined for the Dalles were chiefly from the late settlers. It took somewhat longer to move men located on farms far up the valley. They did move, however, with surprising quickness, considering the difficulties to be overcome.
On the day following the departure of the Dalles company, the legislature proceeded to elect officers for the army, the election resulting in the choice of Cornelius Gilliam, colonel commandant, James Waters, lieutenant-colonel, H. A. G. Lee, major, and Joel Palmer, commissary-general. ”

“ The town is built on a historic site. Old Fort Dalles was a milestone of pioneer travel, having been established here in 1838 and about the same time a mission was founded—not by Father Junipero, whose name always comes to mind in connection with the word in the west, but by the Methodist Church. The name was given by Canadian voyagers in the Hudson Bay service—The Dalles signifying gutter or trough, referring to the chasms between the great glacier-polished sheets of basaltic rock which break the river into the wild cascades opposite the town. ”

“ At Dalles City, the eastern terminus of navigation on the middle river, the tourist finds himself in an attractive town of nearly forty years' growth. Here he may with advantage make a brief stay, resuming his journey either by train or by steamer, the fine boats of the Oregon Railway & Navigation Company plying daily between this city and Portland. From the heights commanding the town, magnificent views are to be obtained, Mount Hood looming up in the southwest, and Mount Adams, another of the great peaks of the Cascade Range, in the north. ”

“ Thirty miles east is The Dalles with its old fur-trader’s station, its old United States fort, its mission station, its Indian wars, its early settlement, the most historic place in Eastern Oregon. From the old town, during all the years from the opening of the century, there descended the River the trappers, missionaries, immigrants, miners, soldiers, hunters, home-seekers, of a later day, adventurers and promoters of every species, to say nothing of the generations of Indians who lived and died along the banks. ”

“ A few miles below the Dalles the storm-tossed river gets itself together again, looks like water, becomes silent, and with stately, tranquil deliberation goes on its way, out of the gray region of sage and sand into the Oregon woods. Thirty-five or forty miles below the Dalles are the Cascades of the Columbia, where the river in passing through the mountains makes another magnificent display of foaming, surging rapids, which form the first obstruction to navigation from the ocean, a hundred and twenty miles distant. ”

“ In 1864, when I started to work for Bloch, Miller & Company, they had the only stone building in Oregon and also the largest store in the state. We handled general merchandise and miners' supplies and we also operated a warehouse for transferring goods by pack train to the mines. The Dalles had a population at that time of not less than 2,700, and it was always thronged with transients on their way to and from the mines. There was more life in The Dalles in a day than there was in Portland in a month. ”

“ Aside from the river itself there is little to interest one between Dalles City and Celilo, the upper end of the gorge of the Columbia. There are rocks all about in every direction, a little grass, a great deal of sand, and some very brilliant flowers growing out of it. There are also a few Indian lodges, with salmon drying inside, whose rich orange color shows through the open doorway like a flame; and a few Indians fishing with a net, their long black hair falling over their shoulders, and blowing into their eyes in a most inconvenient fashion. ”

“ But to get back to the period when the stud-poker fad got hold of us out in Oregon. I was a witness of a heart-disease finish of a game of that kind a few years back that caused me to decide that ordinary draw was good enough for my money right along. It was right after the big fire that ate up the best part of The Dalles eight years ago. As soon as the building contractors of Portland got word to the effect that The Dalles was being licked up by the flames, they hopped aboard trains and made for The Dalles with an eye to business. ”

“ At or near The Dalles there had been a solitary settler ever since the close of the Cayuse war; and also a settler named Tomlinson, and two Frenchmen on farms in Tygh Valley, fifty miles or more south of The Dalles. These pioneers of eastern Oregon, after the missionaries, made money as well as a good living, by trading in cattle and horses with emigrants and Indians, which they sold to the miners in California. After the establishment of a military post at The Dalles, it required a government license, issued by the sup. ”

“ I averaged to buy $50,000 worth of gold dust a month, which was sent direct to the mint in San Francisco. Most of the saloons and merchants at The Dalles accepted gold dust in payment for their wares and sold the dust to us. In those days The Dalles was a wide open town. It was never a tough town like Virginia City. George Clayton ran the biggest gambling house in eastern Oregon there. You could get action on your money through poker, faro, three-card-monte, or you could bet your money on the small horses. ”

“ The Dalles town-site claim was involved in doubt and litigation down to a recent period, or during a term of twenty-three years. That the methodists first settled at this point as missionaries is known to the reader; also that in 1847 they sold it to Whitman, who was in possession during the Cayuse war, which drove all the white population out of the country. Thus the first claim was methodist, transferred to the presbyterians, and finally abandoned. But, as I have elsewhere shown, a catholic mission was maintained there afterward for some years. ”

“ I., p. 143.
38 O. B. SPERLIN
can be duplicated many times over. Franchere, Henry, Cox, Ross, Irving, Thompson, Lewis and Clark all have their word of condemnation for the Indians of The Dalles or Cascades. The worst elements among the natives seemed to flock here, till the place became the emporium of vice. The mouth of the Columbia and many other places soon became vice-ridden after the advent of the traders; but The Dalles seems to have been so from the beginning. ”

“ Unlike the natives of the Willamette, those at the Dalles showed a willingness to be taught religion, assembling on Sundays, and listening with a sober demeanor to sermons preached through an interpreter, and this to the great encouragement of their teachers.
After several journeys by river to transport supplies, each of which took three weeks to perform, early in September Daniel Lee undertook the serious task of bringing cattle from the Willamette to the Dalles by an Indian trail over the Cascade Mountains, [12] being assisted in this labor only by the natives. ”

“ At the Dalles the immigrants had still the most difficult and dangerous portion of their journey before them, there being neither a road over the rugged mountains that separated them from the Willamette Valley, nor boats in which to embark on the river. It was too late to attempt opening a wagon-road into the Willamette Valley, a distance of sixty miles of extremely rough country, and there were few facilities for constructing a sufficient number of boats to convey the families and goods to their destination. ”

“ At the Dalles our party made another portage, paying our Indians as at Celilo Falls.
The Indians’ curiosity to look at the white women caused us a little delay at the falls, and also at the Dalles; in fact, numbers of them followed our boats in their canoes to the Dalles, to look at these two strange beings who had nothing to carry but their own persons, and were dressed so differently from the men.
We proceeded down the river for a few miles and met the Hudson’s Bay Company’s express canoe, in charge of Mr. Hovey, on its way to Lachine, going across the continent ”

“ The people of The Dalles, whose interests suffered by the frequent raids of the Indians, offered to make up a bounty in addition to the pay of the government. The company was raised, and left The Dalles July 19th, to patrol the road between The Dalles and the company of Captain Caldwell, which performed this duty on the south fork of John Day River.
In the summer of 1864 every man of the Oregon cavalry was in the field. Immediately after Lieutenant Waymire's expedition a larger one, consisting of companies D, G, and part of B, was ordered to Crooked River, there to establish headquarters. ”

“ About forty boats were built at The Dalles that year, from the pine trees along the shore of the Columbia.
At The Dalles Captain Magone still stayed by his party, to see that the last one got through. He had, indeed, made all the young men promise that they would stay by the families until all were at their journey's end. There were some, however, that never came through. A family named Wilcox contracted the measles early on the way, and owing to exposure in looking after cattle in the rain, the entire family, except two girls and a little boy, died. ”

“ There are now in the village about forty good lodges, built of split boards, with a roof of cedar bark, as before described. The Indians that live here seem much superior to those of the other villages; they number four hundred regular inhabitants....."
The map shows Niculuita or Wisham on the right, or Washington, side of the river, just above the word DALLES, and plainly at the head of the Long Narrows, as is evident from a comparison with the modern map shown opposite page 115. It is also evident that the word DALLES refers to the rapids. ”

“ In the autumn of 1839 the natives at the Dalles, by this time convinced that prayer did not place them on an equality in worldly goods with their teachers, became so intrusive and committed so many thefts that the missionaries began to fear for their lives; and Daniel Lee took the precaution to provide himself with arms and ammunition from Fort Vancouver, intending to garrison the mission house, and to resist any hostile attempts. To his relief and astonishment on returning to the Dalles he found Mr Perkins in the midst of a "work of God," among the Indians. ”

“ Of all the men ever on the River probably no one ever had more experience with canoe travel than David Thompson and his description of these Dalles is therefore interesting: "I have already mentioned the Dalles of the Saleesh and Spokane Rivers; these Dalles (of the Co- lumbia) were of the same formation, steep high walls of Basalt Rock, with sudden sharp breaks in them, which were at right angles to the direction of the wall of the River, these breaks formed rude bays, under each point was a violent eddy, and each bay a powerful, dangerous whirlpool ”

“ The boy always was given a plug of tobacco and the old chief several plugs. But if the old gent had sneaked off and tried to hide, the Indians would most likely have stolen his horse and maybe killed him. But this did not happen. After he got to The Dalles, father went on to Tygh Valley to look for a starting point for going through the Cascade mountains with his wagons. We had hired Steve Meek, brother of Joe Meek, to pilot the emigrants clear through to The Dalles, for one dollar a wagon and board. ”

“ Old Mother Hood rode all way from The Dalles to Oregon City on a cow's back. But most of the families went down the Columbia River on the Hudson's Bay bateaus. They left their wagons at The Dalles and often found them cut up by the Indians and the spokes of the wheels used for whip handles. Some few got their wagons down that fall on rafts to the Cascades and then hauled them from there down with teams, or got them taken down and up to Portland on bateaus. This cost them about all each wagon was worth. To return to the summit. The bulk of the men were at work building the mountain cache. ”

“ The large crowd that daily assembles on the wharf on the arrival of the steamer from The Dalles is an unerring barometer of the interest felt in the development of the upper country; and a conversation with the leading merchant of the city convinced me that the trade of the Willamette—where the returns to the merchants are in flour, grain, hides, and fruit,—is small and of minor importance compared to that whence their returns are by daily steamers and in gold dust. ”

“ Volunteering went on tardily through the winter, with headquarters at Vancouver. Eastern Oregon furnished but forty men, recruited at The Dalles by Captain Currey, and brought up to the standard by detachments from other companies . This was the first company in the field, a detachment being sent out early in March, by the commanding officer at The Dalles, to find and search a camp of Indians from the Simcoe Reservation suspected of murdering a party of miners on John Day River. ”

“ Moody, of the Dalles, afterward Governor Moody of Oregon, was building a small steamer on Pend d'Oreille Lake, and on his way home encountered these well diggers of the Touchet wagon road. They had dug through gravel to the depth of eighty-six feet without striking water, but Mr. Moody found them examining some fossil bones they had just found at this great depth. They, thinking they were human remains, turned to him for an explanation of the mystery and he promised to carry some of the bones to The Dalles, where he told them he had a friend who studied such things. ”

“ From first a house of entertainment for settlers locating further south, and next a blacksmith shop, gristmill, and post office, the seeds of a rural town were planted and rapidly grew, until the lands around and beyond from The Dalles were occupied, first for grazing, then for wheat growing. ”