One of the women grumbled a little and an investigation proved that it was, as her husband said, “Nothing but the tea-kettle” wedged in between the barrels.
Another lost a moccasin overboard and having worn out all her shoes on the way, went with one stockinged foot until they turned up the Willamette River, then went ashore to a farmhouse where she was so fortunate as to find the owner of a new pair of shoes which she bought, and was thus able to enter the “city” of Portland in appropriate footgear.
After such vicissitudes, dangers and anxiety, the little company were glad to tarry in the embryo metropolis for a brief season; then, having heard of fairer shores, the restless pioneers moved on.
CHAPTER III
THE SETTLEMENT AT ALKI.
Midway between Port Townsend and Olympia, in full view looking west from the city of Seattle, is a long tongue of land, washed by the sparkling waves of Puget Sound, called Alki Point. It helps to make Elliott Bay a beautiful land-locked harbor and is regarded with interest as being the site of the first settlement by white people in King County in what was then the Territory of Oregon. Alki is an Indian word pronounced with the accent on the first syllable, which is al as in altitude; ki is spoken as ky in silky. Alki means “by and by.”
It doth truly fret the soul of the old settler to see it printed and hear it pronounced Al-ki.
The first movement toward its occupancy was on this wise: A small detachment of the advancing column of settlers, D. T. Denny and J. N. Low, left Portland on the Willamette, on the 10th of September, 1851, with two horses carrying provisions and camp outfit.
These men walked to the Columbia River to round up a band of cattle belonging to Low. The cattle were ferried over the river at Vancouver and from thence driven over the old Hudson Bay Company’s trail to the mouth of Cowlitz River, a tributary of the Columbia, up the Cowlitz to Warbass Landing and on to Ford’s prairie, a wide and rich one, where the band were left to graze on the luxuriant pasturage.