I Made my first official visit to this agency in the latter part of September, 1869. Captain Charles La Follette was then acting agent.
The road from Salem was over a beautiful country, settled by white men, who had transformed this once wild region into a paradise. The first view of the agency proper was from a high ridge several miles distant. On the right and left were clustered the houses of the several tribes, each one having been assigned a location. Their houses were built of logs or boards, and rudely put together. Every board had cost these poor people an acre of land; every log counted for so much money given in compensation for their birthrights to the soil of the matchless valley of the Willamette.
As we stood on the dividing ridge separating this agency from the great valley I have mentioned, looking toward the west, we beheld, nearest on the left, old Fort Yamhill, with its snowy cottages, built for the accommodation of the officers of the army in the days when the gallant Sheridan was a lieutenant, and walked its parade-grounds with a simple sword dangling by his side and bars on his shoulder, holding beneath his military cap a brain power waiting for the sound of clanking chains and thundering cannon to call him hence to deeds of valor that should
compel the laurel wreath of fame to seek his brow, little thinking then, while guarding savages, that, away off in the future, his charger would impatiently call him from repose, and bear him into the face of a victorious enemy with so much gallantry that he would turn an apparent defeat into a glorious victory.
Immediately on our right were the huts of the people for whose especial intimidation the costly palaces and beautiful cottages had been built. The huts or houses were built on the hillside sloping toward the valley. They presented the appearance of a small, dilapidated inland town that had been “cut off” by a railroad; but they were peopled with Indians who were trying to imitate their masters.
Farther away on the left was another little group of houses, occupied by the chief of the Santiams and his people. The sight of this man’s home recalled a part of his own history, suggestive of romance, wild, it is true, but real, nevertheless.
Many years ago, this chief was a young warrior, and his people were at peace with the white race, and were not then “wards of the Government,” but were living on their native hills, in the vicinity of Mount Jefferson, standing sentinel over the snowy peaks of the Cascade mountains, on whose sides were sitting, like great urns, clear, cold lakes, sending forth little streamlets, murmuring and whispering, and sometimes leaping, like boys going home from play, joining other merry, laughing streamlets, rushing madly along through forests of firs and sugar-pines, whose dropping cones startled the wild game from their repose.
’Twas here this young warrior’s home was nestled,
beneath the outstretched arms of giant cedars, or sheltered by some quiet nook or cove. Here he had learned the arts of his own people, and passed the winters by, until alone he could chase the fawns or climb the mountain-peak, and gather trophies with which to ornament his neck or fill his quiver.
A pale-face man from distant Missouri had come to this far country to escape the familiar sounds of civilization, where he might imitate the Indian in his freedom and his pleasures. He brought with him his family, and built his cabin near a fountain, to which medicine men would sometimes come or send their patients for recovery.