A compromise was effected. I was retained as Superintendent, and Hon. Ben. Simpson, Agent at Siletz, and Capt. Charles Lafollette, Agent at Grand Round also of the civil service policy. The remainder of the agencies were assigned to officers of the army. This mixing up of elements was somewhat embarrassing for a time.
I began again my official duties. From the records in the Superintendent’s Office, Salem, Oregon, I learned the location and something of the condition of the several agencies under my charge.
“The Coast Reservation,” covering three hundred miles of the Pacific coast, embraced several stations, or agencies, comprising not more than one-third the territory within its boundaries. It had never been ceded to the Government, neither acquired by conquest, but was set apart by an act of Congress for the benefit of the several tribes of the Willamette valley. It is partly timbered and generally mountainous. It abounds in resources suitable to Indian savage life.
Once this wild region had been peopled with deer and elk, whose plaintive call had led the cougar to his feast, or quickened the steps of the huntsman, whose steady nerves enabled him to glide through the tanglewood, bearing with him images of his children (who, dependent upon his archery, awaited his return); and of faithful clutchmen (squaws), whose eyes would kindle at sight of hunter, laden with fruits of the chase, that were to be food and clothing for her little ones. These forest trees had stood
sentinels, guarding its people, from the gaze of tamer huntsmen, and from the rough ocean winds that sweep the coast; or, uttering hoarser sounds, or sighing songs, warning of coming storms, that sometimes beat the white-winged ship, laden with merchandise, from foreign lands, against the rocky shore (whose caverns were the refuge of sea-lions), or, echoing back Pacific’s roar, were waiting for the debris from wrecks of stately crafts, or coming of sea-washed mariners.
Then, at such perilous times, the peoples of this wild western verge of continent would, in pure charity, build warning-fires on higher bluffs, at nightfall, and thus give signals of danger; or, mayhap, they sometimes built them to decoy, in order to avenge insult (or wrong, real, or imaginary) of some former seaman, who had repaid them for good will by treacherous act of larceny of some dusky maiden, or black-eyed boy, or stalwart warrior, carried away to other lands.
Tradition’s living tongue has furnished foundation for the pictures I have made. And many times to listening ears the story has been told, changed only in the name of maiden, or boy, or braves, as date or location gave truth to the sorrowing tale.
Living still, on a home set apart by the State, are two chieftains of a western tribe, whose people tell, in story and in song, how, at a certain sign of danger to a ship, they went out over the breakers in a hollow-tree canoe, to meet the white “tyee” of the “great canoe,” and in pity for the poverty of his knowledge of sea line had proffered him shelter in a quiet nook of land-locked ocean, until such time as
the Great Spirit might give evidence of anger past, by smiling on the boisterous waves that had made sport of man’s puny efforts to control his own going.
These chieftains, in dainty craft, had won the captain’s confidence, and, by consent of favoring winds and rolling seas, with trust he follows past lone rocks that stand above the sunken reef, and through the foamy passage, guarded by “headlands” on either side; past bars, unseen, that break huge rollers into waves of shorter measure; past, still past, the homes of fishermen on shore, until at last his sails flapped approval on the mast, the keel complains of unaccustomed touch, and anchors dropped in fathoms short to the bed of a bay that gives evidence of welcome, by sending its sands to surface, speckled with mica or sparkling with grains of gold.