That letter settled the whole question as our open, moist autumn weather would surely at times destroy the crop, and would make it extremely hazardous to enter into the business and so the whole matter was dropped as well as $2,500.00 of expenses incurred. Subsequently, however, the business has been successfully established in the drier climate of the eastern part of Washington and Oregon.
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
THE HISTORY OF A HISTORY.
Before giving an account of the adventure incident to marking the Oregon Trail given in detail in chapters to follow in this volume, I will write of one more adventure following my return from the Klondike; that is, of my writing a book. The simple act of writing a book was in no sense either a venture or an adventure, though it took me over three years to do it. But when I undertook to have it printed (an afterthought), then a real venture confronted me. No local works so far had paid printers' bills and I was admonished by friends that a loss would undoubtedly occur if I printed the work. But their fears were not well founded, the work was printed, [20] the sales were made and the printer paid.
Four years ago today I arrived at the ripe age of three score years and ten, supposed to be the limit of life. Finding that I possessed more ambition than strength, and that my disposition for a strenuous life was greater than my power of physical endurance, I naturally turned to other fields of work, that condition of life so necessary for the welfare and happiness of the human race.
Many years before it had been my ambition to write our earlier experiences of pioneer life on Puget Sound, and not necessarily for the printer, but because I wanted to, but never could find time; and so when the change came and my usual occupation was gone, what else would I be more likely to do than to turn to my long delayed work, the more particularly being admonished that it must be done soon or not at all. And so, in a cheerful, happy mood, I entered again into the domain of pioneer life, and began writing. But this is not history, you will say. True, but we will come to that by and by.
I had, during the summer of 1853, with an inexperienced companion, in an open boat—a frail skiff built with our own hands—crossed the path of Theodore Winthrop, spending more than a month on a cruise from Olympia to the Straits and return, while that adventurous traveler and delightful writer had with a crew of Indians made the trip from Port Townsend to Fort Nisqually in a canoe. I had followed Winthrop a year later through the Natchess Pass to the Columbia River and beyond, alone, except a companion pony that carried my sack of hard bread for food, the saddle blanket for my bed and myself across the turbulent rivers, and on easy grades. If Winthrop could write such a beautiful book, "The Canoe and the Saddle," based upon such a trip, with Indians to paddle his canoe on the Sound, and with an attendant and three horses through the mountains, why should not my own experience of such a trip be interesting to my own children and their children's children? And so I wrote these trips.
Did you ever, when hungry, taste of a dish of fruit, a luscious, ripe, highly flavored apple for instance, that seemed only to whet but not satisfy your appetite? I know you have, and so can appreciate my feelings when these stories were written. I craved more of pioneer life experience, and so I went back to the earlier scenes, a little earlier only—to the trip in a flat boat down the Columbia. River from The Dalles to the first cabin, where Kalama town now stands; to the pack on our backs from the Columbia to the Sound; to the three times passing the road to and fro to get the wife and baby to tidewater—what a charm that word tidewater had for me with a vision of the greatness of opportunities of the seaboard—and I may say it has never lost its charm—of the great world opened up before me, and so we were soon again housed in the little cabin with its puncheon floor, "cat-and-clay" chimney, and clapboard roof; its surroundings of scenery; of magnificent forests and of constantly moving life, the Indians with their happy song and fishing parties.
All this and more, too, I wrote, every now and then getting over to the Indian question. How could I help it? We had been treated civilly, and I may say, kindly, by them from the very outset, when we, almost alone, were their white neighbors. I had been treated generously by some, and had always found them ready to reciprocate in acts of kindness, and so we had come to respect our untutored neighbors and to sympathize with them in their troubles. Deep troubles came to them when the treaty-making period arrived, and a little later upon all of us, when war came, to break up all our plans and amicable relations. As I began to write more about the Indians and their ways, a step further brought me to the consideration of our Territorial government and the government officials and their acts. It gradually dawned upon me this was a more important work than writing of humble individuals; that the history of our commonwealth was by far a more interesting theme, and more profitable to the generations to follow than recording of private achievements of the pioneer. It was but a step further until I realized that I was fairly launched upon the domain of history, and that I must need be more painstaking and more certain of my facts, and so then came a long rest for my pen and a long search of the records, of old musty letters, of no less old musty books, of forgetful minds of the pioneers left, and again I was carried away into the almost forgotten past.