Soon, runners were seen departing in every direction to bear the fatal news throughout the valley. Twilight fell on them; the stars came out; the moon rose and sunk; but the runners sped on, from camp to camp, from village to village. Wherever there was a cluster of Willamette lodges, by forest, river, or sea, the tale was told, the wail was lifted. So all that night the death-wail passed through the valley of the Willamette; and in the morning the trails were thronged with bands of Indians journeying for the last time to the isle of council, to attend the obsequies of their chief, and consult as to the choice of one to take his place.
The pestilence that had so ravaged the household of Multnomah was spread widely now; and every band as it departed from the camp left death behind it,—aye, took death with it; for in each company were those whose haggard, sickly faces told of disease, and in more than one were those so weakened that they lagged behind and fell at last beside the trail to die.
The weather was very murky. It was one of the smoky summers of Oregon, like that of the memorable year 1849, when the smoke of wide-spread forest fires hung dense and blinding over Western Oregon for days, and it seemed to the white settlers as if they were never to breathe the clear air or see the sky again. But even that, the historic “smoky time” of the white pioneers, was scarcely equal to the smoky period of more than a century and a half before. The forest fires were raging with unusual fury; Mount Hood was still in course of eruption; and all the valley was wrapped in settled cloud. Through the thick atmosphere the tall firs loomed like spectres, while the far-off roar of flames in the forest and the intermittent sounds of the volcano came weirdly to the Indians as they passed on their mournful way. What wonder that the distant sounds seemed to them wild voices in the air, prophecying woe; and objects in the forest, half seen through the smoke, grotesque forms attending them as they marched! And when the bands had all gathered on the island, the shuddering Indians told of dim and shadowy phantoms that had followed and preceded them all the way; and of gigantic shapes in the likeness of men that had loomed through the smoke, warning them back with outstretched arms. Ominous and unknown cries had come to them through the gloom; and the spirits of the dead had seemed to marshal them on their way, or to oppose their coming,—they knew not which.
So, all day long, troop after troop crossed the river to the island, emerging like shadows from the smoke that seemed to wrap the world,—each with its sickly faces, showing the terrible spread of the pestilence; each helping to swell the great horror that brooded over all, with its tale of the sick and dead at home, and the wild things seen on the way. Band after band the tribes gathered, and when the sun went down the war-chief’s obsequies took place.
Multnomah’s Death-canoe.
It was a strange funeral that they gave Multnomah, yet it was in keeping with the dark, grand life he had lived.