Under this custom, when a leading man like Chenamus, Chief of the Chinooks, died, the body was carefully swathed in cedar bark wrappings; his war canoe or barge of state was used as his coffin, and his second best canoe, if he had two, was inverted and placed over the body as a defense against the weather or wild beasts; a small hole was made in the lower canoe and it was placed in a slanting position to facilitate complete drainage. No money reward would induce an Indian of the Lower Columbia to enter and labor in a canoe that had been thus used for the dead. Thus the best and generally all the property worth notice was rendered useless to the living. The wife in such a case might be owner of slaves in her own right, or of a business canoe, and in some cases of a small canoe used on the Lower Columbia root gathering, or by the husband or sons in hunting water fowl. Such a wife becoming a widow—supposing her dead husband a chief, succeeded by a son by another of his wives, or by a brother, unfriendly and jealous of her influence,—would not be a totally helpless outcast. She would have the means of gathering her own subsistence. This, however, was above the common lot of native widows. The same custom of destroying the property of the dead prevailed amongst natives of the Willamette Valley when the American home builders first came; and it was a common sight to come upon a recently made grave and scare the buzzards or coyotes from feasting on carcasses of horses slain to the departed, the grave itself being indicated by the cooking utensils and tawdry personal adornments of the deceased. Under this custom there was no property left for distribution by the average native. A chief, living with thrifty care for his family, might leave slaves to be divided among his sons or daughters, as some few did, but often when the heirs were sons or daughters of different mothers bitter family feuds were a natural result, and the law of might decided. There was no marriage record, no law to distribute fairly what might justly belong to the widow and the fatherless, no individual ownership of land, no definite boundaries to districts claimed by tribes. Thus the whole polity of the native race here limited the exertions of the people to seeking a present subsistence, or, at the most, enough to tide them over from one season to another. Diversity of seasons has a much more intimate relation to the food supply of the wild life than to a people who have arrived at the agricultural stage of evolution. Many wild animals and feathered game have sufficient of the instinct of the passenger pigeon and squirrel of the Atlantic seaboard to induce them to migrate from districts in which their food fails as a result of untoward seasons and go to others where there is plenty.[[5]] The native tribes west of the Cascade Range could not do that, and therefore must have often been reduced in numbers by bad seasons, before they were known to the white race.
The condition of the natives as to surplus food and the scarcity of large game in the Columbia Valley, as found by Lewis and Clark, shows that the normal season left the then population little they could spare. The party may be said to have run a gauntlet against starvation in their journey from the Rocky Mountains to the mouth of the Columbia. They saw few deer, and no antelope or elk. Salmon and dogs were their chief purchases from the Indians, and they ate of the latter till some of the men got to prefer dog flesh to venison. The salmon grew rancid and mouldy under the influence of the warm wet winter, and made the men sick. Their hunters, in what was forty years later the best elk range in Oregon, often failed to meet their daily wants, and sometimes killed their game so far from camp that it spoiled in the woods. So that when they learned that a whale had been thrown on the beach, at the mouth of the Nehalem, they went thirty miles, and with difficulty succeeded in the purchase of three hundred pounds of whale blubber.
They stayed at their winter camp until the latter part of March, 1806. The game had left their vicinity; they exhausted the surplus of the Indians near them, so they started on their return journey in order to reach the Chopannish “Nation,” with whom they had left their horses, before the natives would leave for their spring hunt for buffalo east of the Rockies.
Under date of March 31, their journal reads: “Several parties were met descending the river in quest of food. They told us that they lived at the great rapids (the cascades), but the scarcity of provisions had induced them to come down in hopes of finding subsistence in the more fertile valley. All living at the rapids, as well as nations above, were in much distress for want of food, having consumed their winter’s store of dried fish, and not expecting the return of the salmon before the next full moon—which would be on the second of May. This information was not a little embarrassing. From the falls (The Dalles) to the Chopannish Nation, the plains afforded neither deer, elk, nor antelope, for our subsistence. The horses were very poor at this season, and the dogs must be in the same condition, if their food, the dried fish, had failed.” These considerations compelled the party to go into camp, and send out their hunters on both sides of the Columbia, from its north bank, opposite the quick sand (Sandy) river. Their purpose being to obtain meat enough to last them to where they had left their horses, and this they did, with the addition of some dogs and wapatos they were able to secure from the natives by hard bargaining. The eight days they thus delayed they used to good purpose. Captain Clark, acting on information by an Indian of the existence of a large river making in from the south, which they had passed and repassed without having seen it, because of a diamond shaped island lying across its mouth, hired an Indian guide, and returning down the south shore, penetrated the Multnomah (Lower Willamette), to near the present location of Linnton, and saw evidences in ruined buildings of a much denser population than then existed there, and in the two hundred and twenty-five foot building already mentioned, saw the woman marked by smallpox. Here, also, were met Clackamas and other Indians from the falls of the Willamette.
Elk, deer, and black bear were the large game their hunters killed. Some of the deer were extremely poor. They do not mention having seen flesh of any kind in the hands or camps of natives, much less a successful native hunter of such game.[[6]] Neither do they mention seeing a horse west of the Cascade Range. The receiving of one sturgeon from a native is mentioned, and some dried anchovies (smelt). But the chief wealth of this richest part of the district—the most inviting to settlers in their estimation of any they had seen west of the Rocky Mountains, is the wapato—“the product of the numerous ponds in the interior of Wapato” (Sauvie’s) Island. This was almost the sole staple article of commerce on the Columbia.
This bulb, the root of the arrowhead lily (sagittaria variabilis) is described by Lewis and Clark as “never out of season,” and as being “gathered chiefly by the women, who employ for the purpose canoes from ten to fifteen feet long, about two feet wide, nine inches deep, and tapering from the middle. They are sufficient to contain a single person and several bushels of roots, yet so very light that a woman can carry them with ease. She takes it into a pond where the water is sometimes as high as the breast, and by means of her toes separates this bulb from the root, which, on being freed from the mud, immediately rises to the surface of the water and is thrown into the canoe. In this manner these patient females will remain in the water for several hours, even in the dead of winter.”[[7]]
This first party of the white race, thirty-six in number, were thus detained eight days gathering a sufficiency of food to make it prudent to risk a journey of ten days through the heart of the great and fertile Columbia Valley, then so devoid of large game as to make it reasonable to assume that at some period not very remote from the time of their visit the population had slaughtered the elk, deer, and antelope, and driven the buffalo to the east side of the Rockies. The practice of large parties of the strongest tribes passing that backbone of the continent every summer to hunt this noblest of North American game is good presumptive evidence that it had at no remote period ranged in the valley of the Columbia. In 1806, then, we have the fact of a population, roughly estimated at forty thousand, ekeing out a hand-to-mouth living, from salmon chiefly, with the additions of wokas kouse (wapato and camas),—the latter much the more generally distributed from the Pacific Ocean to the summit flats of the Rocky Mountains—by going across those mountains annually for game. They had, of course, to go in parties sufficiently strong for defense against the hated, dreaded and destructive Blackfeet. The taking of such journeys proves their necessity. The tribes unable through weakness or situation to make such expeditions, as were all those of Western and Southwestern Oregon, had to gather their precarious living from the plants mentioned, grass seeds, the small native fruits, of crab apple, haw, huckleberries, cranberries, etc. Looking over a recent report of the Division of Botany, United States Department of Agriculture—a contribution from the United States Herbarium, Vol. V, No. 2, by Frederick V. Coville—I find one hundred plants described as used by the Klamath Indians, forty-six of which—as seeds, fruits or roots—were used as food by that tribe. No effort has yet been made to enumerate all the kinds of flesh, fish, and insect life used by the native race for sustenance. Lewis and Clark found evidence that the coast native sometimes resorted to searching the beach for fish cast up by the tide. The tribes on the south bank of the Snake River, and southward, used to fire the high, arid plains, where possible, and collect the crickets and grasshoppers thus killed. As late as 1844 these insects were dried and made into a kind of pemmican by pestle and mortar. The Rogue River natives used the grasshopper meal as a delectable food as late as 1848, and as late as 1878 the writer saw the chief medicine man of the Calipooyas collecting in a large mining pan the tent caterpillars from the ash trees within four miles of Salem. He asserted most emphatically that they were “close muckamuck” (good food).
For years before and after the last mentioned date the writer knew Joseph Hudson (Pa-pe-a, his native name), the lineal chief of the Calipooyas, who signed the treaty of cession of the east side of the Willamette Valley to the United States. He was the only native of Western Oregon the writer ever talked with who seemed to comprehend, or care for, the consequences to the natives of the appropriation of ownership of the soil by the white race. He had judgment to perceive that the latter had agencies of power and of progress with which his people could not have coped, even at their best estate—which family tradition had handed down to him. This pointed to a time when his people had numbered eight thousand, as he estimated, at which time and later, to the time of his grandfather, Chief San-de-am, his people used the circle hunt, driving the deer to a center agreed upon, by young men as runners, the point to drive to being selected as good cover to enable the bowmen to get close to the quarry. From him the information was gained as a family tradition that about 1818 eight men, carrying packs on their backs and coming from the north, reached his grandfather’s village, near where the town of Jefferson now is. They were set across, and, going southward, they conveyed to other natives that they had crossed San-de-am’s river. The whites shortened the name to Santiam, as they did Yam-il to Yamhill. These eight men returned after several months and brought the first horses the Calipooyas ever saw. They sold a mare and colt for forty-five beaver skins. Joe, as he was familiarly called, a man of truth and honor, could not but mourn the fate of his people. Being in a small way his banker for small loans (he working for me) I know he was kept poor by the general worthlessness of his tribe, as it was one of the functions of a Calipooya chief to help the weak and good for nothing members of his tribe. This man honestly performed any rough and common contract labor (he would never work for day wages), carrying his burden of sorrow for his people’s condition to where the wicked and low can no longer trouble. The writer received from him many hints and plain statements as to the mental capacity or mode of reasoning of the native race. Custom led them to appeal to him in troubles resulting from drunken rows. A young dandy of the tribe, getting into the power of the law for knifing a woman in a camp fray, would appeal to Joe, as chief, for financial help, with no more sense of shame than an Irish landlord who had wasted his property in riotous living would have in spunging off his former tenants to a green old age. There are many people of the white race who cannot help being participants in the results of the change of racial dominion which has taken place on the North Pacific Slope within the past century. They feel they are participants in a gigantic act of robbery. A lady whose writings on any subject it is a delight to read, in the June number of the Quarterly of the Oregon Historical Society, shows the origin of land titles so far as the English race of men have made them. It would be an instructive addition to her able paper if some one, well read on the effects of guarded land titles in sufficient area to support family life on each allotment, would describe their influences upon a community so blessed.
Already enough has been said to indicate that prior to the visit of Lewis and Clark, the native race was in a condition of decline; that in a normal or average season a body of forty men, or less, found it difficult to avoid starvation while moving from place to place in a country estimated to contain forty thousand.
It may be admitted, because it is true though shameful, that the licentiousness of trade had sown the seeds accelerating the decay of the native race in Western Oregon, from the Columbia River to the Umpqua, and from its mouth to Fort Hall. Within these bounds, but especially near the chief lines of commerce, the missionary even had as much need of a medical book as he had of his bible, as far as the people he had come to guide in the way of life was concerned.