The original "Canoe and Saddle" tells only of its author's last days in Washington Territory. It recounts his swift trip by boat, with the celebrated Clallam chief, the "Duke of York," from Port Townsend to Fort Nisqually, and thence under other Indian guidance across Naches Pass to The Dalles. For the second part of his journey he had as his guide a treacherous young Indian whom he calls "Loolowcan the Frowsy," but who was in real life, as Mr. Williams discovered from an entry in the old "Journal of Events" kept by the Hudson's Bay Company at Nisqually, no less notorious a character than Qualchen, son of the chief Owhi. Both of these Klickitats, father and son, are remembered as trouble-makers in our territorial history, and both paid with their lives for the parts they took in the great Indian war of 1855-7. The role played by Qualchen in murdering the Indian agent, A. J. Bolon, and thus starting that war, is now well known.
It is proof of Winthrop's nerve that even after he saw the shifty nature of his guide, he refused to heed the warnings of Allen and his fellow road-builders, whom he met in the Cascades, but pushed ahead with him over the mountains to the Yakima country, where white men were scarcer even than on the Sound. Later, he may have realized that but for the presence of McClellan's soldiers on the Naches, and for the long arm of the Hudson's Bay Company, which had outfitted him for his trip, he probably would have anticipated the fate of Bolon. But he tells of his adventure as gaily as if he had felt no danger, and with a zest that make his own enjoyment of its incidents contagious.
"The Canoe and the Saddle" was the first book to put our Northwestern scenery into literature. Its account of Puget Sound, of the Cascades with their forests, canyons, ranges and snow-peaks, and of the Columbia basin, stamps Winthrop as a true poet and lover of nature. No better descriptive writing has yet been inspired by the Northwest.
The original "Canoe and Saddle" had a supplement describing Panama as Winthrop saw it in 1852 and 1854. Mr. Williams has very properly omitted this, since it had no relevancy to the book; and he has substituted Winthrop's letters and journals, which, with other new matter already mentioned, make up more than a third of the volume. This part of the book is of especial value to students of Western history, and of absorbing interest to the few remaining pioneers who, like the writer, crossed the plains in a "prairie schooner."
In 1852, our wagon train was part of the great migration westward over South Pass in the Rockies. From Fort Hall we came across the Blue Mountains to The Dalles. A year later Winthrop traveled homeward practically over the same route. His journals, with their brief but illuminating descriptions of people and scenes that presented themselves as he rode swiftly eastward, bring back memories of our five months' journey along the old "Oregon Trail." Most of his names of men and places, his notes of the great army of settlers pushing forward to California and the Northwest, his accounts of the British recruits for Mormonism, which he later expanded in his stirring Western novel, "John Brent," and his pen-pictures of the wild lands that are even now just beginning to yield to irrigation and settlement,—all this will be appreciated by every immigrant of that early day. Allowing for their personal appeal to me as a pioneer, I still feel that Winthrop's letters and journals add as much to the value of Mr. Williams's edition as they do to its scope.
Winthrop's monologues in Chinook are idiomatically correct, but the proof-reading of the original was done by persons unfamiliar with the "jargon," and a number of typographical errors occurred. Unfortunately, some of these have been perpetuated in the new edition. The Chinook vocabulary however, has been revised and materially improved by Dr. C. M. Buchanan, Indian agent at Tulalip.
The editor's notes are accurate, succinct and interesting. He has happily kept in view the Eastern reader who knows little of the West, but he has not on that account overloaded the book with notes. Several passages, indeed, would bear further annotation. The appendixes are valuable for the light they throw on the methods of McClellan, the building of the heroic road across the Naches, our Indian place names, and other matters of historic interest.
Mr. Williams's success in selecting the illustrations testifies to experience and much study, and would alone make the volume noteworthy. The pictures are of great historical value, and they really illustrate the text. There are sixteen magnificent plates in color and forty-eight half-tones. These show the Sound, the Columbia, the Cascades with all their snow-peaks from Mt. Hood northward; many scenes of Indian life, our coast cities in their infancy, the army posts and Hudson's Bay forts. More than sixty line etchings in the text give us portraits of the important personages of the book, white and Indian. Several of the illustrations are from celebrated paintings, others from rare books, or from early photographs treasured by our Northwestern historical societies and museums, the National Museum at Washington, and the great American Museum of Natural History in New York. Mr. Williams himself made a trip with a photographer across Naches Pass and obtained splendid views of Winthrop's route through a region now rarely visited.
This book is of the highest value to students of our Western history, and of such beauty and interest as make it a joy to all readers. I bespeak for it a place in every public and home library in the Northwest.
Clarence B. Bagley.