Abundant reason had Dr. John McLoughlin (that living copy of the great heart of Bunyan’s matchless fancy) for giving welcome to the American missionaries. He knew the value of a clean mind or soul in keeping a clean and healthy body; though with a wise physican’s care he kept the hospital at Vancouver open to any white sick, whom the resident doctor the Hudson’s Bay Company maintained there recommended to it.
Doctor McLoughlin instituted the first hospital in Oregon for white people here prior to the overland immigration of family life from the Missouri border in 1843. The native race then were being removed rapidly by a disease they themselves called the “cold sick,” which had raged among them from 1832. Some of the symptoms indicated a malarial cause, but quinine and other ague remedies had no effect upon the Indian sick. Like the plague now raging in India, it was confined, seemingly, entirely to the natives; also, almost entirely to the fishing villages on the large rivers. I have long had a theory which I confess being unable to give an intelligent reason for; that that plague had its origin in eating filth. The natives themselves found that to thrust their arrow points through the putrid liver of a deer or elk would enable them to kill their enemies by a slight wound by blood poison. Is it not, then, possible that eating putrid flesh, or fish—the garbage cast up by the tide,—the spent salmon from the river shore, or those wallowing in death throes on its surface, could not be done with impunity?
In times of famine the natives, on the sea coast and on the rivers, did eat such food; as the inland tribes, like the Klamaths, sometimes sustained life by eating black moss, and the bark of certain trees. These latter foods, however, were not putrid.
To support the theory that this cold sick plague, which began on the Lower Columbia in 1832, and which kept the wail for the dead sounding along its banks till 1844, may have originated in poisoned food, we have the statement of Lewis and Clark’s journal that salmon pemmican which they purchased in quantity at The Dalles moulded, and made the men sick, in the damp and warm winter camp, near the sea. But, whatever the cause, the effect was to depopulate, or cause the abandonment of once populous villages.
In 1805, the central seat of the Multnomahs, near the east end of Wapato (Sauvie’s) Island, had a population of “eight hundred souls” noted, “as the remains of a large nation,” surrounded by kindred near-by tribes, aggregating two thousand two hundred and sixty souls. In 1845 the site was without human habitation. “The dead were there,” in large numbers, swathed in cedar bark, and laid tier above tier on constructions of cedar slabs about four inches thick, and often four feet wide,—causing the observer to wonder how the native, with such agencies as he possessed, could fell and split such timber. At this time so many as two hundred natives, could not be seen on the banks of the Lower Columbia, between the mouth of the Willamette and Clatsop Point, without special effort at counting the few living in the scattered villages, often separated by several sites once inhabited by large numbers apparently. This was particularly noticed on the south bank, at Coffin Rock, and the main shore, between that and Rainier. “The dead were there,” in abundance, but no life but the eagle, the fish hawk, the black loon, and the glistening head of the salmon-devouring seal, then very numerous. There was a village of the Cowlitz tribe on the south bank, below where Rainier now stands. The people looked poor, ill fed, and worse clothed. The chief had come to us in the stream to invite us to camp near, exhibiting a single fresh hen’s egg as inducement. We did so, and visiting their camp had the first sight of life in a native fishing village. Some of the children were nearly naked. Though it was midwinter, the adult females, with one exception, were dressed in the native petticoat, or kilt, as second garment, the other being a chemise of what had been white cotton; one was engaged in the manufacture of cedar bark strings used in the formation of the kind of kilt she wore. The exception in the camp was a young woman of extraordinary personal beauty, a daughter of the chief family of the Cathelametts. She had recently been purchased, or espoused, by the heir-apparent of the Cowlitz chief. She seemed to be indifferent to the life around her, and shortly after was, presumably, the cause of tribal war. She was permitted a few weeks later to pay a visit to her own tribe, accompanied by an old woman of her husband’s. They both joined a party of the women of her tribe in a wapato gathering expedition. The old duenna did not return,—her body was found next day near the wapato beds, horribly mutilated by a knife murder. The natural fruit of the Chinooks’ polity of marriage. A short tribal war resulted.
In order to show the measure of manhood this system produced in a different phase from that of Chiefs Kalata’s and Chenowith’s, I will relate from memory a short visit at the lodge of the Cathelamett chief:
As one of a party of the employees of Hunt’s mill, making our way from Astoria to the mill, we were approaching Cathelamett Point, the village of the tribe, on the south shore. We were hailed from the shore and found ourselves near the women and girls of the tribe, having a good time gathering the newly risen stems of the common fern and preparing it for food in earth ovens over heated rocks. They voluntarily told us they had no prepared food, but pressed us to go on to their village, and “Lemiyey” (old mother) (pronounced in a tone that conveyed love and respect) would gladly entertain us. They made no mistake in this. The old lady seemed proud of the opportunity to act as hostess, and without ostentation put her help to work and gave us a bountiful meal of fresh salmon and wapatos, and afterward put on what had evidently been often used as a robe of state, and passed back and forward in illustration of scenes she had been part of. Her son, apparently utterly oblivious to the spirit of his mother’s eye and movement, continued repeating the offers to sell to us his tribal claim to the lands lying between Tongue Point and Cathelamett, that he had begun on our arrival. He was but a youth, not so tall as his stately old mother appeared in her robe (of what I afterwards concluded was badger skins, but may have been mistaken), and he seemed mentally incapable of appreciating the influences then forming around him and his people, which appropriated their lands, while not one of them had the spirit to assert a right or raise the question of justice against the action of the white race. This was, with perhaps one exception, the cleanest, most self-respecting body of natives left on the Lower Columbia in 1845, where Lewis and Clark had, only forty years before, enumerated, by information from the natives, thirteen thousand eight hundred and thirty below the cascades and between that and the ocean. I do not believe that thirteen hundred could be found within the same limits at the latter date. There was not in all that distance, to my knowledge, a single man of the race who had the intelligence and public spirit combined to appear before the authorized agents of the United States ten years later and plead for the rights of their people in the treaties made south of the Columbia. It is questionable whether there was one in all the country north of Rogue River who would have done so of his own motion, had not the humane General Palmer and J. L. Parrish, as agents, advised the Indians to act. It is not to be understood from this that all good and all beauty had departed from the native life. When J. L. Parrish was in charge of Methodist mission property, in 1845, a white man from Oregon City appeared temporarily at Solomon S. Smith’s to solicit the hand of a young woman named Oneiclam in marriage. The young woman civilly and modestly declined the honor, saying such a marriage could not secure the respect of either the man’s people or the woman’s, and would fail in conferring happiness. She was clean enough and good enough to secure the personal friendship and advice of Mrs. J. L. Parrish, which proved her a rare exception to her class. Such marriages soon ceased after the American home-builder assumed dominion over Oregon, the white mother thus arriving being strongly against inter-racial contracts. Doubtless the hopelessness of the struggle against race prejudice has borne heavily on the heart of many a man and woman on both sides of the race question, but the fight is over now and many a heart broken in the struggle (as I think was that of my friend Joseph Hudson, last Chief of the Calipooyas) is at rest. The responsibility for the red race is now the white man’s burden. He carries it well, while already the light of a brighter day than the red man of fifty years ago could forecast is piercing the prejudices and hates of that time. The white man brought the surveying compass, the book in which to record titles to land, another for the record of marriages, still another to record the rights of property to the results of wedlock. Schools are open to the native race and every generous mind wishes it well. But, while our sympathies may go out toward the ignorant or incompetent race in a conflict of power, we should not fail to note the services to all races rendered by the victor.
A glance at the changed conditions of life within the bounds of old Oregon: Instead of forty thousand persons ill-fed, ill-clad, living from hand to mouth, often bordering on famine, unable to support forty interesting visitors passing through their country, we have now, perhaps, fully one million, and the surplus of foodstuffs and clothing material they send out to the markets of the world, would feed well four millions. And, it is not extravagant to say that the territory to which the Oregon trail was made fifty-eight years ago will some day be made to support forty millions in comfort.
This paper, it will be observed, has dealt entirely with the native race in Northwestern Oregon, because this was the field of the race contest. The point to which the guiding minds of the white race looked as most desirable. Jefferson said, and Benton repeated: “Plant thirty thousand rifles at the mouth of the Columbia.” The first exploring party sent out by the former selected as the most interesting region in which to make excursions, the district now containing the first and second chosen commercial centers,—Vancouver and Portland.
The native race amid whom these were planted were described in their average manhood as mean, cowardly and thievish. Forty years later, to this description might be added ignorant, superstitious, and utterly without public spirit. The tribes east and south from this district were, excepting those located at the great fishing centers on the Columbia, less thievish, and much more bold and spirited in self-defense.