IN TACOMA HARBOR. From painting by Sidney Lawrence, by courtesy of Mrs. George Browne. "We had rounded a point, and opened Puyallup Bay, a breadth of sheltered calmness, when I was suddenly aware of a white shadow in the water. What cloud, piled massive on the horizon, could cast an image so sharp in outline, so full of vigorous detail of surface? No cloud, but a cloud compeller. It was a giant moun- tain dome of snow, swelling and seeming to fill the aerial spheres as its image displaced the blue deeps of tranquil water. * * * Of all the peaks from California to Fraser River, this one before me was royalest. Mount Regnier Christians have dubbed it in stupid nomenclature, perpetuating the name of somebody or nobody. More melodiously the siwashes call it Tacoma." — The Canoe and the Saddle, Chapter III. THE CANOE and THE SADDLE or KLALAM and KLICKATAT By THEODORE WINTHROP H* <#* TO WHICH ARE NOW FIRST ADDED HIS WESTERN LETTERS AND JOURNALS Edited, with an Introduction and Notes, By JOHN H. WILLIAMS Jiuthor of " The Mountain that Was 'God'," ''The Guardians of the Columbia, ' ' etc. WITH SIXTEEN COLOR PLATES AND MORE THAN ONE HUNDRED OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS TACOMA JOHN H. WILLIAMS 1913 F2V ■ V: Copyright, 1913, by John H. Williams DEC 24 1913 Press of Franklin- Ward Company, Portland, Oregon. V /oC % ©CIA361490 TO ELIZABETH WINTHROP JOHNSON NIECE OF THEODORE WINTHROP WHO KNEW AND LOVED HIM IN HER CHILDHOOD "Ah, did you once see Shelley plain, And did he stop and speak to you, And did you speak to him again ? How strange it seems and new!" Indian Graveyard on the Cowlitz Kiver; Illustrating Canoe Burial. EDITOR'S PREFACE Theodore Wintjirop's celebrated romance of frontier adventure has been out of print for some years, but the frequent calls for a new edition, properly illustrated, testify to its abiding charm and value. In undertaking such an edition, I have felt that a book which seems destined to remain the chief classic of our early Northwest deserves most careful editing and very generous illustration. The reprint here presented, with its addition of the author's letters and journals, cover- ing his entire stay on the Pacific Coast, and with illustrations selected from a wide field, will doubtless appeal to an even larger circle of readers than that which welcomed "The Canoe and the Saddle" on its first appearance, fifty years ago. In annotating the author's text, my aim has been, without over- loading the volume, to give such explanations and such quotations from the authorities as may be needed to render the book wholly in- telligible to distant readers, who may know nothing of the Siwash and his home, and little of Northwestern history. The illustrations are of several sorts. First of all, the book is a picture of the great stage set by Nature for the drama of state-building. Hence many of the pictures are of noble scenery. That the book might show Winthrop's route from Western to Eastern Washington, as well as the famous "Citi- zens' Road" which so greatly interested him, I made a trip during the last summer across the Naches Pass with an expert photographer. We were fortunate in obtaining a number of remarkable views of a region never before photographed, — views of mountain, canyon and forest that will aid readers to travel with Winthrop through a wonder- ful district now almost unvisited. But "Canoe and Saddle" is more than a nature book. As a brilliant snap-shot picture of frontier conditions, I have tried to illustrate it very largely from historical sources. The pictures of Indian life and historic places and persons will be found unusually full and valuable. In the table of illustrations, care has been taken to give credit to those who have kindly aided me in collecting these interesting pictures of pioneer days and leaders. I am greatly indebted to the author's family for tjieir kindness in placing his letters and journals at my disposal. Thanks are also due to General Hodges and Colonel Allen for their reminiscences, printed viii PREFACE. at the end of this volume; to Mr. George H. Himes, secretary of the Oregon Historical Society, Portland; Mr. W. H. Gilstrap, of the Wash- ington State Historical Society and Ferry Museum, Tacoma, and Mr. E. 0. S. Scolefield, of the Provincial Library and Museum, Victoria, B. C, for the valuable assistance they have given me in collecting illustrations and verifying data. The New York Public Library, which owns the Winthrop MSS., has kindly supplied desired fac-similes. The American Museum of Natural History, in New York, and the National Museum, Washington, D. C, have contributed many illus- trations of Indian life and antiquities. I have quoted freely, with acknowledgment, from the two most important works dealing with the early years of our State, — General Hazard Stevens's life of his father and Mr. C. A. Snowden's history, — and am also under obligations to these authors for counsel and aid in many other ways. Dr. C. M. Buchanan, of the Tulalip Agency, has greatly increased the value of the book by his advice in matters of Indian philology and lore. Save for a few typographical errors and obvious repetitions which Winthrop would doubtless have corrected himself had he lived to edit his manuscript, the text of "Canoe and Saddle" is reprinted in its orig- inal form. The spelling is not always that of to-day, especially in the matter of Indian names; but its quaintness is worth more than con- formity to modern standards. The spelling of Indian words was, of course, a phonetic go-as-you-please in his time, and has not yet become so clearly settled as to give us established forms for more than a frac- tion of such words. Thus in the text and notes will be found half a dozen different spellings for "Naches," with almost as many for other words. Until the publications of our Government adopt a standard, uniformity in these words cannot be hoped for. In the notes, I have used the forms which seem to be supported by the best current usage, but have not attempted to make over the spelling of the several con- tributors to the volume. It has seemed desirable to preserve Winthrop's own title, "Klalam and Klickatat." I have therefore used it in connection with the title substituted by the original publishers. The design on the cover of the volume is the coat of arms of the Winthrop family. Tacoma, Oct. 15, 1913. CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: WINTHROP IN THE NORTHWEST XIX THE CANOE AND THE SADDLE I. AN ENTRANCE 3 II. A KLALAM GRANDEE - 5 III. WHULGE - 20 IV. OWHHIGH 44 V. FORESTS OF THE CASCADES - - - 66 VI. "BOSTON TILICUM" - - - 90 VII. TACOMA 99 VIII. SO WEE HOUSE.— LOOLOWCAN - - 123 IX. VIA MALA - * - - 138 X. TREACHERY 150 XI. KAMAIAKAN 163 XII. LIGHTNING AND TORCHLIGHT - - 185 XIII. THE DALLES.— THEIR LEGEND - - 200 VOCABULARY 223 CALIFORNIA AND THE NORTHWEST I. CALIFORNIA - - - 229 II. THE NORTHWEST - 240 III. WINTHROP'S NORTHWESTERN JOURNAL - 267 APPENDIX 309 7 A&£ Fac-siraile of Winthrop's Title. This -was changed by the publishers to "The Canoe and the Saddle." ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOR * IN TACOMA HARBOR - Frontspiece. From a painting by Sidney Lawrence, owned by Mrs. George Browne, of Tacoma. Colored engraving copyrighted by J. H. Williams. MOUNT BAKER, FROM PORT TOWNSEND - Facing 20 Admiralty Inlet and Whidbey Island in foreground. After a pho- tograph by P. M. Richardson. THE OLYMPICS AND THE STRAITS OF JUAN DE FUCA 25 View from Victoria, B. C. After a photograph by Fleming Bro- thers. SEATTLE HARBOR AT SUNSET 32 After a photograph by Webster & Stevens. THE "SIWASH HOOIHUT" ... - 81 After a photograph by Curtis & Miller. WINTHROP GLACIER 92 Northeast slope of Mt. Rainier-Tacoma. Named in honor of Theo- dore Winthrop. After a photograph by Dr. B. R. Stevens. VIEW SOUTHWEST FROM PYRAMID PEAK, NORTH OF NACHES PASS 99 After a photograph by Curtis & Miller. INDIAN BASKETS 120 After a photograph by A. M. Potter of baskets owned by Mrs. Clinton A. Snowden and the Ferry Museum, Tacoma. NACHES CANYON 138 After a photograph by E. F. Colville. "LE PLAY HOUSE" 180 Ruins of the Atinam Mission. After a photograph by Curtis & Miller. YAKIMA RUG-MAKER - . - 185 After a photograph by Major Lee Moorhouse. MOUNT ADAMS, SEEN FROM SUNNYSIDE - - 193 After a photograph by Asahel Curtis, copyright. SUNSET ON THE COLUMBIA 204 After a photograph by S. C. Lancaster, copyright. OLYMAN CHARON AND HIS DUG-OUT AT THE DALLES 217 After a photograph by Benjamin A. Gifford, copyright. * Excepting the first, these are from water-color paintings by Jud- son T. Sergeant, based on photographs. xii ILLUSTRATIONS. THE COLUMBIA AND MOUNT SAINT HELENS - - 240 From near Portland. After a photograph by S. C. Reeves. SIWASH BOATMEN OF WHULGE - 276 After a photograph by Asahel Curtis, copyright. ONE-COLOR HALFTONES. THEODORE WINTHROP - - - Facing XIX Last portrait of the author, made after a serious illness during the winter of 1860-'61, and never before published; a photograph taken on metal by Lewis Rutherford, the astronomer. By courtesy of the Author's Family. CROSSING THE BAR AT THE MOUTH OF THE COLUMBIA 3 From a painting by Captain Cleveland Rockwell, owned by the Mer- chants' National Bank, of Portland, Ore. INTERIOR OF A CHINOOK LODGE 10 From Commodore Wilkes's Exploration of 1845. CLALLAM AND TILLAMOOK TWINED BASKETS - 17 By courtesy of the National Museum, Washington, D. C. AMONG THE SAN JUAN ISLANDS - 28 Photograph by Webster & Stevens. FORT STEILACOOM 35 By courtesy of the Library of the University of Washington. FORT NISQUALLY 37 From a drawing made about 1868 by Edmund T. Coleman, an Eng- lish landscape artist then living at Victoria, B. C. By courtesy of the Washington State Historical Society, Tacoma. ON THE GREAT PRAIRIE SOUTH OF TACOMA - 40 From a drawing made about 1868 by Edmund T. Coleman, showing this broad outwash plain almost treeless as a result of Indian fires set from time to time to keep back the forest and increase the growth of grass for the deer. By courtesy of Mr. D. W. Huggins. HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY'S FORT AT VICTORIA, B. C. 42 From a drawing made about the time of Winthrop's visit. By courtesy of the Provincial Library and Museum, Victoria. ON THE NISQUALLY PRAIRIE TO-DAY - - 49 Photograph by Andrew J. Stone. AMONG THE DOUGLAS FIRS - ... 60 Photograph by Curtis & Miller. LOWLAND CEDARS ALONG THE WHITE RIVER - 63 Photograph by Curtis & Miller. WHITE RIVER 66 Photograph by Curtis & Miller. NORTHWEST FACE OF MOUNT RAINIER-TACOMA - 75 Photograph by Curtis & Miller. JUNCTION OF THE WHITE AND GREENWATER RIVERS 78 Photograph by Curtis & Miller. ILLUSTRATIONS. xiii CAMPING AT BEAR PRAIRIE ... 85 Photograph by W. H. Gilstrap. A STALWART YOUNG CEDAR - - - 88 Photograph by Curtis & Miller. THE "BOSTON HOOIHUT" - 96 Photographs by Curtis & Miller. OVERLOOKING NACHES PASS (2) - - 102-103 Photograph by Curtis & Miller. SUNSET AMONG THE MOUNTAINS ON A RAINY DAY 109 Photograph by Curtis & Miller. MOUNTAIN MEADOW IN THE NACHES PASS - - 111 Photograph by Curtis & Miller. INDIAN SWEAT-HOUSE - - - . 126 Photograph by Major Lee Moorhouse, who writes: "This sweat- house picture was made on the Umatilla Indian reservation a few years ago. The sweat-house is universally used among all the North- west tribes of Indians. In fact, no well-regulated teepee is complete without a sweat-house near. It is the cure-all with the Indians for all kinds of disease and sickness, and is used as a means of ordinary cleanliness as well. "The sweat-house cure for the measles was one of the principal factors that brought on the Whitman massacre in 1847. Just prior to the massacre, the Indians at the mission and near by broke out with the measles, and Dr. Whitman administered medicine to them. They would take the medicine, then go into their sweat-houses, re- main as long as they could stand the heat, and then plunge from the sweat-houses into the icy cold waters of the Walla Walla river, and bob up dead. Hence Dr. Whitman was accused of poisoning them." JUNCTION OF THE NACHES AND YAKIMA RIVERS 144 Photograph by Curtis & Miller. WENAS VALLEY - - - - - 157 Photograph by E. F. ColviUe. AGED SQUAW OF "KLICKITAT PETER" AT FORT SIM- COE - - ..... 161 With apple-tree planted by Fathers d'Herbomez and Pandosy. Pho- tograph by E. F. ColviUe. YAKIMA VALLEY AND MOUNT ADAMS - - 172 Photograph by Curtis & Miller. THE "HORSE-HEAVEN" COUNTRY - - - 197 Photograph by A. J. Anderson. BAD LANDS OF THE COLUMBIA - - - 200 Photograph by Geo. M. Weister, copyright. OLD FORT WALLA WALLA - - - - 208 From Governor Stevens's Railway Report, of 1854; after a draw- ing by Stanley. INDIANS FISHING FOR SALMON AT CELILO FALLS 211 Photograph by Major Lee Moorhouse. PETROGLYPHS NEAR CELILO FALLS - - - 218 Photograph by Major Lee Moorhouse. xiv ILLUSTRATIONS. THE GRAND COULEE .... 221 From Governor Stevens's Railway Report, of 1854; after a drawing by Stanley. SAN FRANCISCO IN 1853 227 From an old print; by courtesy of Mr. Clinton A. Snowden. FRONT STREET, PORTLAND, IN 1852 - - 243 From an old photograph owned by the Oregon Historical Society. ASTORIA IN THE EARLY FORTIES - - - 244 From Wilkes's Exploration of 1845. FORT VANCOUVER IN 1853 - 250 From Governor Stevens's Railway Report, 1854; reproducing a drawing by Gustave Sohon. HAIDA BASKET MAKERS WITH LABRETS AND NOSE RING - ----- 259 Photograph by the National Museum, Washington, D. C. LOOKING DOWN THE COLUMBIA, AT THE LOWER CASCADES 261 Photograph by Geo. M. Weister. Copyright. THE SOUND AND ITS ISLANDS, FROM HUNTER'S POINT, NEAR OLYMPIA - - - - 264 Photograph by Collier. Copyright. BELLINGHAM BAY AND SAN JUAN ISLANDS - 266 The large island on the right is Lummi Island, that in the distance beyond is Cypress. Photograph by F. G. Hall. CAPTAIN SOM-KIN 271 Chief of Umatilla Indian Police. Photograph by Major Lee Moor- house. INDIAN TEEPEE VILLAGE, UMATILLA RESERVATION 286 Photograph by Major Lee Moorhouse. BLOCKHOUSE AND PORTAGE RAILROAD AT THE CAS- CADES OF THE COLUMBIA - - - - 289 Photograph by C. E. Watkins, 1867, owned by the Oregon His- torical Society. There were two blockhouses at the Cascades. This view shows the Middle Blockhouse, erected in the fall of 1855, between the Upper and Lower Cascades. Around it the battle of the Cascades was fought on March 26, 1856. It was washed away by a flood in 1876. The Upper Blockhouse was built the next November. THE DALLES, OREGON, IN 1865 - 292 Fort Dalles, where Winthrop was twice entertained in 1853, is seen on the ridge a mile back of the town, toward Mt. Hood. By cour- tesy of the Old Fort Dalles Historical Society. THE DALLES OF THE COLUMBIA - - - 297 Photograph by Geo. M. Weister. Copyright. BLUE MOUNTAINS OF CENTRAL OREGON - 300 View from Powder River Valley. Photograph by Geo. M. Weister. IMMIGRANT TRAIN OF "PRAIRIE SCHOONERS" - 304 From a contemporary lithograph. Courtesy of Overland Monthly. ILLUSTRATIONS. xv ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT.* INDIAN GRAVEYARD ON COWLITZ RIVER - VI From "Wanderings of An Artist," by Paul Kane, London, 1859. FAC-SIMILE OF WINTHROP'S TITLE - - X By courtesy of the New York Public Library. THEODORE WINTHROP - XXI After a portrait by Rowse. FAC-SIMILE OF WINTHROP'S MANUSCRIPT - - 2 By courtesy of the New York Public Library. PORT TOWNSEND IN THE EARLY SEVENTIES - 4 From drawing by "Porte Crayon," in Harper's Magazine, 1873. MASK USED IN TRIBAL DANCES, ETC. 6 From original in Ferry Museum, Tacoma. QUEEN VICTORIA: One of the wives of the Duke of York 18 From Nordhoff's "Northern California, Oregon," etc., 1874. MAKAH SQUAW GATHERING FAGOTS 23 From photograph by Curtis & Miller. SIWASH MOTHER FLAT-HEADING HER INFANT - 26 From Nordhoff's "Northern California, Oregon," etc. RETURN OF SIWASH FISHERMEN - 28 From photograph by Curtis & Miller. CASCADES OF THE COLUMBIA, with Indians Fishing from a Scaffolding over the water. - 29 From drawing by "Porte Crayon," in Harper's Monthly Maga- zine, 1873. SE-AT-TLH: Chief of the Duwamish and Suquamish Feder- ation, after whom the City of Seattle was named - 32 From photograph owned by Mr. C. B. Bagley. INCISED DESIGN ON STONE DISH - 43 By courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History. DR. WILLIAM FRASER TOLMIE, Hudson's Bay Factor in charge at Fort Nisqually - - - - 45 From a portrait made in the Fifties. By courtesy of Mr. John W. Tolmie. EDWARD HUGGINS, Last Factor of the Hudson's Bay Company at Fort Nisqually - 47 From a daguerreotype of the Fifties. By courtesy of Mr. D. W. Huggins. COLONEL MICHAEL T. SIMMONS: Indian Agent - 49 By courtesy of the "Washington State Historical Society, Tacoma. OW-HI, A Chief of the Yakimas - 52 From a drawing by Governor Stevens's German soldier-artist, Gus- tavo Sohon, 4th U. S. Infantry. Sohon was a highly intelligent * Save for a few reproductions of old wood-cuts, these are from drawings by Judson T. Sergeant and William A. Bull from originals or photographs. xvi ILLUSTRATIONS. and versatile man. To his pencil we owe the well-known picture of Fort Vancouver, facing page 250. He accompanied Governor Stevens on his treaty-making expeditions, acting both as artist and as interpreter; and on these occasions sketched the great Indian leaders. Unlike most contemporary artists who attempted to depict the Indians, he made no attempt to dress them up in conventional war-paint and feathers. His drawings preserve for us all the promi- nent chiefs of the Columbia River tribes, of whom we have no other portraits. Some of them, notably this one of Ow-hi, admirably suggest the character of the subjects, as described by Winthrop and other writers. Gen. Hazard Stevens has very kindly placed these portraits at my disposal, and I have reproduced such of them as show the chiefs mentioned by Winthrop, with a few other leaders also prominent in the Indian War of the Fifties. TULALIP MAT-MAKER, CAMANO ISLAND - - 65 By courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History. INDIAN CANOE ON THE PUYALLUP RIVER - 69 By Judson T. Sergeant. CARVED WOOD TAMANOUS AND WAND - - 72 From original in Ferry Museum, Tacoma. Height, 4 feet, 6 inches. NISQUALLY CARVED WOOD FIGURE - - 77 From original in Ferry Museum, Tacoma. Height, 5 feet, 8 inches. BRIG. GEN. HENRY C. HODGES, U. S. A. - - 87 From photograph made in 1861. By courtesy of Gen. Hodges. POTLATCH HOUSE OF THE SKOKOMISH INDIANS 89 This house, at Inati on Hood's Canal, was forty by two hundred feet in size. The late Myron Eells, who spent many years among the Skokomish Indians, describes the Potlatch as follows: "The Potlatch is the greatest festival the Indian has. 'Potlatch' is a Chinook word, and means 'to give.' The central idea of it is a dis- tribution of gifts by a few persons to the many present whom they have invited. It is generally intertribal, from four hundred to two thousand persons being present. From one to ten thousand dollars in money, blankets, guns, canoes, cloth, and the like are given away. Three Potlatches have been held at Skokomish within fifteen years, and during the same time, as far as I know, the tribe have been invited to nine others. "The giving is carried to an extreme. In order to obtain the money to give, they deny themselves so much for years, live in old houses and in so poor a way, that the self-denial becomes an enemy to health, civilization and Christianity. If they would take the money, improve land, build good houses, furnish them, and live de- cently, it would be far better." After showing how the Potlatches commonly led to orgies of gambling, red and black tamanous, and drunkeness, Mr. Eells con- tinues: "When some Alaska Indians, seeing the prosperity which the Christian Indians of that region had acquired, asked what they must do to become Christians, the reply was: 'First, give up your Potlatches.' It was felt that there was so much evil connected with them that they and Christianity could not flourish together. Among the Twanas, while they are not dead, they are largely on the wane. Among the Clallams, they still flourish." — Ten Years of Missionary Work Among the Indians of Skokomish, by Rev. M. Eells, Boston, 1886. EDWARD JAY ALLEN: Leader of the Road Builders 94 From photograph about the time of the Civil War. By courtesy of Col. Allen. ILLUSTRATIONS. xvii YAKIMA STONE COOKING POTS - 98 From photograph by the American Museum of Natural History, New York. CARVED STONE IMAGE, from the Lower Columbia Valley 105 From photograph by American Museum of Natural History, New York. HIAQUA, the Wampum, or Shell Money, of the Northwest 108 TA-WITS-POO, a Squaw 121 Photograph by Major Lee Moorhouse. A SIWASH CRADLE 122 From Nordhoff's "Northern California, Oregon," etc., 1874. COSTUMED FIGURE CARVED FROM AN ANTLER - 134 By courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History. YAKIMA SCULPTURED AND INLAID STONE PIPE 137 Made of steatite with wooden stem. One-half natural size. From Smith's "Archaeology of the Yakima Valley." GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN ... 143 From a published portrait of the early Civil "War period. CARVED STONE CLUB HEAD, OR NET SINKER - 148 From Smith's "Archaeology of the Yakima Valley." One-third natural size. POTLATCH HOUSE OF THE LUMMI INDIANS - 149 Photograph by Harlan Smith. By courtesy of the American Mu- seum of Natural History, New York. WAKEMA: Aged Klickitat Squaw - - - - 157 From photograph by Major Lee Moorhouse. FATHER CHARLES PANDOSY ... 175 By courtesy of the Rev. P. Le Chesne, O. M. I. FATHER L. D'HERBOMEZ - - 176 By courtesy of the Rev. P. Le Chesne, O. M. I. KAM-AI-A-KAN: Head Chief of the Yakimas - - 179 From a drawing by Gustave Sohon. By courtesy of Gen. Hazard Stevens. "Kamiahkan of the Yakimas, was easily the greatest chief present," says Snowden of Governor Stevens's treaty council at Walla Walla. "He was to the tribes west of the Rocky Mountains what Pontiac and Tecumpseh had been to their people on the east- ern side, in their time." — Snowden; History of Washington, III 296. CARVED STONE PIPE, from Grave near Fort Simcoe - 199 By courtesy of American Museum of Natural History, New York. One-half natural size. SKLOO: a Chief of the Yakimas - 202 From a drawing by Gustave Sohon. By courtesy of Gen. Hazard Stevens. PU-PU-MOX-MOX: YELLOW SERPENT, Walla Walla Chief 204 From drawing by Gustave Sohon. Courtesy of Gen. Hazard Stevens. INDIAN HOUSE OF SLABS, on the Columbia - - 219 Photograph by Major Lee Moorhouse. xviii ILLUSTRATIONS. ANIMAL-SHAPED BOWL CARVED IN LAVA - - 222 From Smith's "Archaeology of the Yakima Valley." By courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History, New York. WAR-CLUB MADE OF THE BONE OF A WHALE - 239 By courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History. DR. JOHN McLOUGHLIN, Famous Hudson's Bay Factor - 246 From a daguerreotype made in 1856, a year before his death. By courtesy of the Oregon Historical Society. GEN. B. L. E. BONNEVILLE - - - - 247 From a photograph made in 1873, five years before his death. By courtesy of Mr. Clarence B. Bagley. GEN. ISAAC INGALLS STEVENS - - 258 After a photograph made in 1861, when Gov. Stevens was forty- three years old. By courtesy of Gen. Hazard Stevens. PETER SKEEN OGDEN ... - 259 By courtesy of the Oregon Historical Society. OLYMPIA IN THE SIXTIES - - - - 262 From a drawing by "Porte Crayon," in Harper's Monthly Maga- zine for 1873. MIDDLE BLOCKHOUSE AT THE CASCADES - 272 Built in 1855. From a photograph by Eaton. By courtesy of the Oregon Historical Society. SEATTLE IN THE EARLY SEVENTIES - - - 276 From Nordhoff's "Northern California, Oregon," etc. SHE-CA-YAH: a Cayuse Chief - 292 From a drawing by Gustave Sohon. By courtesy of Gen. Hazard Stevens. HAL-HAL-TLOS-SOT: THE LAWYER; head Chief of the Nez Perces - ... 294 From a drawing by Gustave Sohon. By courtesy of Gen. Hazard Stevens. CARVED SEATED FIGURE HOLDING DISH - 305 By courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History. WINTHROP'S GRAVE, in New Haven Cemetery - 308 Photograph by Leopold. ADMIRAL PETER RAINIER - - - - 312 From a portrait in the Rainier Club, Seattle; photograph by Curtis & Miller. MAP. WESTERN WASHINGTON AND NORTHWESTERN ORE- GON, WITH WINTHROP'S ROUTE - - - 228 ^^ INTRODUCTION. WINTHROP IN THE NORTHWEST. Sixty years ago this last August, an incident touched with the color of new lands and new eras took place on the west slope of the Cascades. In a camp of red-shirted frontiersmen, two young men lay under the same blanket, and talked half the night away in the enthusiasm of youth for the inspiring things planned and doing in the new Territory of Washington. The little community on Puget Sound, with few resources save the courage of inexperience, had undertaken to break the barriers which barred recruits for their commonwealth by building a highway across the range to the Columbia River Valley. And here was the little band of intrepid men sent out to achieve this incredible feat. One of the youths bivouacking under the stars, although only twenty- two, was the competent engineer and chief of the road-makers. His guest was a wayfarer, unknown but not unwelcome, who had strayed into their camp by the Greenwater at nightfall. The visitor shared their evening meal, joined in their camp-fire jollity, and divided their leader's bed of hemlock boughs. With sunrise, he was up and away, riding fast across the great Naches Pass to meet soldier friends at old Fort Dalles on the Columbia, and thence to hasten eastward, "over the lonely land," as he tells us, to his home on the Atlantic. They parted fast friends, host and guest; but neither knew the name of the other. No visiting cards circulated in the forest of the Greenwater. "It was not etiquette in those days on the frontier," writes the now venerable road- builder, "to ask a name when not voluntarily given;" and he did not learn the identity of the young genius he had entertained unawares until, ten years later, he saw the hospitable Boston tilicum and the marvelous snor- ing of the hooihut-builders set forth on the flashing pages of "The Canoe and the Saddle." The pleasant story, with its amusing suggestion of frontier custom, carries us back to the last stage of the westward march of our nation. What Winthrop saw here in 1853, and interpreted, was the opening scene in the final act of a drama in which his own forefathers had greatly played their parts two centuries before. The English colonists annexed the Atlantic Coast to Britain by conquering homes for themselves in the wilderness. So now Americans seized the Pacific Northwest, not by xx INTRODUCTION. armed force, or purchase, or any skill of statecraft, but by the hardi- hood of the often despised "settler." The modern study of history is mainly an examination of popular movements. We are discovering that states are founded less by profes- sional statesmanship than by the noiseless impulses of the masses. This has been the story of the entire American advance across the conti- nent. But for the unnoticed migration of the Scotch-Irish settlers into Kentucky and Tennessee before and during the Revolution, Great Britain would probably now occupy the land from the Ohio to the Pacific and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. There would have been no Louisiana Purchase by President Jefferson; no Mississippi Valley states; no great commonwealths beyond the Rockies. A few thousand humble emigrants changed the programme of nations. What happened in the East was repeated here. While the states- men at Washington slept, and Britain's great commercial arm, the Hudson's Bay Company, was left to rule the Northwest, Oregon was won for the United States by the dirt-tanned pioneer and his ox-team. Without Oregon, we should doubtless have no Pacific Coast to-day. But Oregon, won, made California inevitable. And now the Oregon- ians, pushing across the Columbia, had planted the seeds of a new state on Puget Sound. The Territory of Washington had just been created by Congress. Its first Governor, brave and capable Stevens, was com- ing across the plains and mountains, surveying the route of a northern transcontinental railway. It was a time of great dreams and equal deeds. Let us not mistake the pioneers for backwoodsmen. In the scattered handful inhabiting the new Territory were men strong enough to build a state, and fine enough to stand together for some remark- able enterprises in public service. One such expression of community effort was this road-building which our author stumbled upon in the Cascades. In its half-humor- ous but wholly sympathetic way, his book rightly makes much of it. The "Citizens' Road" is entitled to be remembered less for the service it actually rendered than as an example of pluck and resourcefulness against apparently insuperable difficulties. When the delay and red tape of Captain George B. McClellan held back even the paltry sum of $20,000 which Congress had voted to build a hundred miles of moun- tain highway, the struggling settlers decided with amazing nerve to undertake it with their own money and labor. The Boston Hooihut is an epitome of the history of the West. This West, with its promise of great forces and its freedom from threadbare conventions, made a powerful appeal to the young seeker after a career. "The free life these men lead," he says of his friends of the Army, "has great charms for me." And again: "This Oregon is a INTRODUCTION. xxi noble country! It offers a grand field for a man who is either a world in himself, or can have his own world about him." Looking back sixty years, it may now be said that Winthrop was probably better fitted to study and portray the West than any other Eastern man who attempted to describe it. He came prepared to under- stand and value it. His books and still more his private letters and journals show him wholly free from that tenderfoot superiority of tone THEODORE WINTHROP. found in most of the contemporary writings of Eastern men who visited the frontier. His personal charm, even more than the letters of intro- duction which he brought, made him welcome among the leaders in the new settlements. The few still living who knew him tell of his mag- netism. They recall the jovial appreciation with which he met alike the hardships and the inspiration of the frontier. But what especially fitted Winthrop to depict the West was his profound and well-reasoned Americanism. In an age when section- alism was fast driving toward civil war, his point of view is broadly xxii INTRODUCTION. national. His pride in his country as a whole had only been deepened by education and foreign travel. He had come home from Europe feeling the value to humanity of the struggle and opportunities pre- sented by the conquest of the new continent. In the rough battle with the forest, in the stumpy farms on the little clearings, in the crude road that would link the infant settlements with the outside world, he recognized the very processes that had laid strong the foundations of the republic to which later he so gladly gave his life. Ungainly as was the present, this descendant of the great governors of Massachusetts and Connecticut saw in it the promise of a splendid and beneficent future. "These Oregon people," he says, "carrying to a new and grander New England of the West a fuller growth of the American idea, under whose teaching the man of lowest ambitions must still have some lit- tle indestructible respect for himself, and the brute of most tyranni- cal aspirations some little respect for others; carrying there a religion two centuries farther on than the crude and cruel Hebraism of the Puritans, — with such material, that Western society, when it crys- tallizes, will elaborate new systems of thought and life. It is unphilo- sophical to suppose that a strong race, developing under the best, largest, and calmest conditions of nature, will not achieve a destiny." Most of our writers in the years preceding the Civil War were either occupied with sectional discussions and local traditions, or were looking to Europe and the past for their inspiration. Hawthorne knew no America save that of New England. Emerson sat aloof on the heights of his philosophy. Longfellow's lyre was tuned to the key of mediaeval romance. Whittier was absorbed in the great slavery con- test. Lowell was winning fame with his political ballads. For fiction, our people read "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and reprints of the English novelists. Our literature had not yet discovered the West. Winthrop's Western books, "The Canoe and the Saddle" and "John Brent," minted new ore. I recall a meeting with George William Curtis more than twenty years ago, memorable to me because the talk turned to Winthrop, who had been one of my boyhood heroes, and I was delighted to hear about him from one who had known him so well. Some chance remark recalled his name, and Curtis's face lighted. "Ah, there was a man we could ill spare!" he cried. "Winthrop's death was as great a loss to American literature as was that of Keats to English poetry. He was far ahead of his time in thinking continentaliy. Cut off before his prime, his books, brilliant as they are, are the books of a young man. But he had vision and power, and had he lived to improve his art, I have always believed that he might have become the strongest, because the most truly American, of our writers." INTRODUCTION. xxiii Much more was said of his friend's genial, thoughtful personality; of his brave defiance of ill health, and of his brilliant talk that ranged from philosophy to puns, and from the heated politics of the East to stories of the frontier. But I shall never forget the feeling with which the great editor told of Winthrop's faith in his country, and of his con- viction, when the war clouds broke over Sumter, that in all his varied experiences Life had been fitting him for some part in building the free and United America that was to come. It is this nationalism that gives "The Canoe and the Saddle" a place quite unique among our books of humor and adventure. As a story of travel among the mountains and forests, it was the first of a long line of books that turned the eyes of the country westward to our great scenery. As a spirited yet truthful contemporary picture of the Indian and pioneer epoch, it records an important era which is fast passing into history; and this service is greatly broadened by the letters and journals now added. But it is more than a travel book, and more than an historical document. It is both a picture and a prophecy. Its especial value for its own day and ours is in its faith in the democ- racy that was to weld all the sections into a nation. Perhaps his finest expression of that faith is in his poem, "The East and the West," written shortly before the Civil War, first published in the Atlantic in 1863, and reprinted in the fascinating Memoir by his sister:* "We of the East spread our sails to the sea, You of the West stride over the land; Both are to scatter the hopes of the free As the sower sheds golden grain from his hand. ******* "And you, through dreary and thirsty ways Where rivers are sand, and winds are dust; Through sultry nights and feverish days Move westward still, as the sunsets must; "Where the scorched air quivers along the slopes, Where the slow-footed cattle lie down and die, Where horizons draw backward, till baffled hopes Are weary of measureless waste and sky. "Yes! Ours to battle relentless gales, And yours the brave and patient way; But we hold the storms in our trusty sails, And for you the life-giving fountains play. "There are stars above us, and stars for you, Rest on the path and calm on the main; * "The Life and Poems of Theodore Winthrop, Edited by his Sister" (Mrs. Laura Winthrop Johnson), New York, 1884. xxiv INTRODUCTION. Storms are but zephyrs when hearts are true, We are no weaklings, quick to complain. ******* "Man is nobler than men have been, Souls are vaster than souls have dreamed, There are broader oceans than eyes have seen, Noons more glowing than yet have beamed." Winthrop's visit to the Northwest gave full play to a love of action that was fundamental in his character. This trait counterbalanced his inherited tendency to introspection, perhaps inevitable in a youth whose veins carried the blood of that redoubtable theologian Jonathan Edwards, as well as of the D wights and Woolseys of Yale; it saved him, no doubt, from morbidness, and made him the sane, healthy- minded young American that he was. Like many another serious and precocious lad of that period, he had kept a diary during his col- lege career, putting into it, after the fashion of his years, much religious self-analysis. In this journal, soon after his graduation from Yale in 1848, when he was nineteen, he reproached himself for a "selfish boy- hood" in which he "did little but read novels," and "had doubts about free will!" But in the same pages we see the other side of his character: "Labor!" he says, "labor is the great thing. I have learned that no effort is thrown away." And now, ten years later, he wrote with keen appraisal of values about the West, where labor was indeed "the great thing," and where academic speculation had as yet no place. "It is a stout sensation," he says, putting the code of the frontier into words that show his sympathy, "to meet masculine, muscular men at the brave point of a penetrating Boston hooihut, — men who are mates, — men to whom technical culture means naught, — men to whom myself am naught, unless I can saddle, lasso, cook, sing, and chop; unless I am a man of nerve and pluck, and a brother in generos- ity and heartiness. It is restoration to play at cudgels of jocoseness with a circle of friendly roughs, not one of whom ever heard the word bore, — with pioneers who must think and act, and wrench their living from the closed hand of Nature." This visit also intensified a mental bent that had found expression even in the games of childhood, when he and his brother William, both of whom were later to respond to Lincoln's first call for troops, used to take the parts of soldiers. Nothing on the frontier interested him more than the work of the Army, in its preservation of public order and its dealings with the Indians. His stay here brought him in touch with many brilliant young officers who were then helping to lay the foun- dations of new states. He notes the opportunity for self-expression offered by the Army life; he accompanies a detachment to Fort Dalles; INTRODUCTION. xxv he regrets that he cannot join the McClellan reconnaissance of the Cas- cade passes, and help find a practicable route for the much-wanted railway. In this interest we may see the hand of destiny pointing him forward to the eager sacrifice of Great Bethel; and it is impossible not to feel that, had he lived for other battles, his daring, energy and capacity for leadership must have made him an exceptionally useful volunteer officer. Winthrop was fortunate, while on the Coast, to know the fine and able men whom the Hudson's Bay Company placed in charge of its "forts" in the West. Ogden, Tolmie and Huggins at once gave him their confidence and friendship; and through their eyes he was enabled to get a different view-point from that of the settler. To them especi- ally he was indebted for much information about the Indians and their speech, matters to which he gave close study, and which fill many pages of his book as well as of his letters and diaries. The Indian interested him, not as a subject for sentimentalism, but as a human being, primi- tive but still endowed with the same instincts and capacities as his white brother, and sadly subject to the same limitations. Our author risked his life with the Red Men, and probably would have lost it but for the presence of McClellan and his soldiers in the Cascades. He squared the account by making his native guides the subjects of character studies unexcelled in the pages of American humor. The bibulous Duke of York and Loolowcan the Frowzy, as figures in his siwash Odyssey, inspired a mock-heroic style that is both original and enjoyable. I have yet to hear of a reader who can find a dull page in that story of Indians sophisticated by the white man's blankets and whiskey. Even the Chinook Jargon, deadliest of stupidities, yields its amusement for this jester, to whom nothing human was foreign. Winthrop's life has been well told by his sister, in the Memoir al- ready mentioned, and by George William Curtis, in his delightful appre- ciation prefixed to Winthrop's novel of New York life, "Cecil Dreame." It is the story of an impressionable youth, molded by the influences of an admirable home, by outdoor life and study of nature, and by foreign travel. At Yale he took honors in languages, history and phil- osophy; was mediocre in mathematics, but distinguished himself even then as a writer. Graduation was followed by a year of further study, in which he read widely and well; but a sickly constitution drove him into the open, and he went abroad for two years, visiting most of Europe, learning its languages fluently, studying its art, and gathering in Swit- zerland, Italy and Greece that appreciation of natural beauty that was to serve him so well in his pictures of our western mountains. On his return to America in 1852, he entered the employ of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, then engaged in carrying fortune- xxvi INTRODUCTION. seekers to California via Panama, and we soon find young Winthrop at the Isthmus. From there ill health drove him north, and after a brief stay in San Francisco, which he well described in his letters, his wanderings brought him to the Northwest. Here his stay on the Colum- bia was prolonged unexpectedly, by reason of illness, and to this acci- dent we owe the visit to Puget Sound and the resulting book. The few years that followed were of little note, — the years of a youth trying to find the career that he knows to be his, first at the law and then at literature. Illness still hampered him, but in spite of it, he wrote much, rewrote most of it with care, but published practic- ally nothing. In the spring of 1861, his famous short story, "Love and Skates," was accepted by Lowell for the Atlantic, and there is a rumor that "John Brent" was accepted by one publisher on condition that Winthrop omit the closing incident, since it would offend pro- slavery readers. This he refused to do, preferring to abide his time. In "John Brent" he says with what is evidently an autobiographic significance: "Observation is the proper business of a man's third decade; the less a spokesman has to say about his results until thirty, the better, unless he wants to eat his words, or to sustain outgrown formulas. Brent discovered this, and went about the world still point- less, purposeless, minding his own business, getting his facts." Even Curtis, as I am informed, did not know Winthrop as an author when he wrote his exquisite sketch of Winthrop as a man and friend. Then came the call of great issues for which he had been waiting. At the first opportunity for service to his country, he left the widowed mother and his sisters, and went to the front with the celebrated Seventh Regiment of New York. When that regiment returned after its brief defense of the capital, he remained as military secretary to General Benjamin F. Butler, commanding at Fortress Monroe. The rest is soon told: how, in his eagerness to serve, he sought to rally the waver- ing lines in the engagement at Great Bethel, on June 10, 1861, and fell with a bullet through his heart. He was then thirty-two years old. Only two years before, as if Death had already marked him, Winthrop had written: "Let me not waste in skirmishes my power, — In petty struggles, — rather in the hour Of deadly conflict may I nobly die! In my first battle perish gloriously. "No level life for me, no soft smooth seas, No tender plaintive notes of lulling breeze; I choose the night, so I may feel the gale, Even though it wreck me on my foamy trail." THE CANOE AND THE SADDLE /sU S&U' &^c s*^l£t+ t4&€2^-*!imu; 3 ^h^C^^ ^Ct6ftU^ y ^u^^ tfd+4&> */d£r» 1-1 -d Ha W a — - £ 2 <3 3 WHULGE. 29 sees a ripple, and divines a fish. He darts his long wooden spear, and out it ricochets, with a banner of salmon at its point. But salmon may escape the coquettish charms of the trolling-hook, may safely run the gauntlet of the parallel canoes and their howling, tamanous-cap wearers; the spear, misguided in the drumly gleam, may glance harmless from scale-armed shoulders: still other perils await them. These Cascades of the Columbia, with Indian Fishing from a Scaffolding over the Water. aristos of the waters need change of scene. Blubberly fish may dwell through a life-long pickle in the briny deep, and grow rancid there like olives too salt, but the delicate salmon must have his bubbles from the briinnen. Besides, his youthful family, the parrs, must be cradled on the rip- ples of a running stream, and in innocent nooks of freshness must establish their vigor and consistency, before they 30 THE CANOE AND THE SADDLE. brave the risks of cosmopolitan ocean life. For such reasons gentleman salmon seeks the rivers, and Indian, expecting him there, builds a palisade of poles athwart the stream. The traveller, thus obstructed, whisks his tail, and coasts along, seeking a passage. He finds one, and dashes through, but is stopped by a shield of wicker-work, and, turning blindly, plunges into a fish-pot, set to take him as he whirls to retreat, bewildered. At the magnificent Cascades of the Columbia, the second-best water bit on our continent, there is more exciting salmon-fishing in the splendid turmoil of the rapids. Over the shoots, between boulders and rifts of rock, the Indians rig a scaffolding, and sweep down stream with a scoop-net. Salmon, working their way up in high exhilara- tion, are taken twenty an hour, by every scooper. He lifts them out, brilliantly sheeny, and, giving them, with a blow from a billet of wood, a hint to be peaceable, hands over each thirty-pounder to a fusty attaM, who, in turn, lugs them away to the squaws to be cleaned and dried. Thus in Whulge and at the Cascades the salmon is taken. And now behold him caught, and lying dewy in silver death, bright as an unalloyed dollar, varnished with opaline iridescence. "How shall he be cooked?" asks squaw of sachem. "Boil him, entoia, my beloved" (Haida tongue), "in a mighty pot of iron, plumping in store of wapatoo, which pasaiooks, the pale-faces, name potatoes. Or, my cloocheman, my squaw, roast of his thicker parts sundry chunks on a spit. Or, best of all, split and broil him on an upright frame-work, a perpendicular gridiron of aromatic twigs. Thus by highest simple art, before the ruddy blaze, with breezes circumambient and wafting away any mephitic kitcheny exhalations, he will toast deliciously, and I will feast thereupon, my cloocheman, whilst thou, working partner of our house, art preparing these brother fish to be dried into amber transparency, or smoked in a lachrymose cabin, that we may sustain ourselves through dry-fish Lent, WHULGE. 31 after this fresh-fish Carnival is over." Such discussions occur not seldom in the drama of Indian life. In the Bucentaur, after our lunch on kippered cod and biscuits, we had not tarried. Generally in that region, in breezeless days of August, smoke from burning forests falls, and envelops all the world of land and water. In such strange chaos, voyaging without a compass is impossi- ble. Canoes are often detained for days, waiting for the smoke to lift. To-day, fortunately for my progress, there was a fresh breeze from China-way. Only a soft golden haze hung among the pines, and toned the swarthy coloring of the rocky shores. All now in good humor, and Col. Colt in retirement, we swept along through narrow straits, between piny islands, and by sheltered bays where fleets might lie hidden. With harmonious muscular throes, in time with Indian songs, the three stoutly paddled. The Duke generally sogered, or dipped his blade with sham vehemence, as he saw me observing him. Olyman steered steadily, a Palinurus skilful and sleepless. Jenny Lind, excusable idler, did not belie her musical name. She was our prima donna, and leader of the chorus. Often she uttered careless bursts of song, like sudden slants of rays through cloudiness, and often droned some drowsy lay, to which the crew responded with disjointed, lurching refrain. Few of these airs were musical according to civilized standards. Some had touches of wild sentiment or power, but most were grotesque combinations of guttural howls. In all, however, there were tones and strains of irregular original- ity, surging up through monotony, or gleams of savage ire suddenly flashing forth, and recalling how one has seen, with shudders, a shark, with white sierras of teeth, gnash upon him not far distant, from a bath in a tropic bay. I found a singular consolation in the unleavened music of my crew. Why should there not be throbs of rude power in aboriginal song? It is well to review the rudiments 32 THE CANOE AND THE SADDLE. sometimes, and see whether we have done all we might in building systems from the primal hints. The songs of Chin Lin, Duchess of York, chorussed by the fishy, seemed a consoling peace-offering. The under- tone of sorrow in all music cheats us of grief for our own distress. To counteract the miseries of civilization, we must have the tender, passionate despairs of Favorita and SE-AT-TLH : Chief of the Duwamish and Suqamish Federation, after whom the City of Seattle was named. Traviata; for the disgusts of barbarism I found Indian howls sufficient relief. By and by, with sunset, paddle-songs died away, and the Bucentaur slowed. The tide had turned, and was urgently against us. My tired crew were oddly dropping off to sleep. We landed on the shingle for repose and supper. Twilight was already spreading downward from the zenith, and pouring gloom among the sombre pines. Grotesque SEATTLE HARBOR AT SUNSET. "According to a cosmical law that regulates the west ends of the world, Whulge is more interesting than any of the eastern waters of our country. Tame Albemarle and Pamlico, Chesapeake and Delaware, Long Island Sound, and even the Maine Archipelago and French- man's Bay, cannot compare with it. Whulge is worthy of the Scandinavian savor of its name, — a vast fiord, parting rocks and forests primeval with a mighty tide." —Chapter III. i, WHULGE. 33 masses of blanched drift-wood strewed the shore and grouped themselves about, — strange semblances of monstrous shapes, like amorphous idols, dethroned and waiting to perish by the iconoclastic test of fire. Poor Prometheus may have been badly punished by that cruel fowl of Caucasus, but we mortals got the unquenchable spark. I carried a modi- cum of compact flame in a match-box, and soon had a funeral pyre of those heathenish stumps and roots well ablaze, — a glory of light between the solemn wall of the forest and the dark glimmering flood. On the romantic shores of Whulge, illumined by my fire, I had toasted salt pork for supper, while the siwashes banqueted to repletion on dried fish and the unaccustomed luxury of hardtack, and were genially happy. But when, with kindly mind, I, their chieftain, brewed them a princely pot of tea, and tossed in sugar lavishly, sprinkling also unper- ceivedly the beverage with forty drops from the captured lumoti, and gave them tobacco enough to blow a cloud, then happiness capped itself with gayety and merriment. They heaped the pyre with fuel, and made it the chief jester of their jolly circle, chuckling when it crackled, and roaring with laughter when the frantic tongues of flame leaped up, and shot a glare, almost fiendish, over the wild scene. I sat apart with my dhudeen, studying the occasion for its lesson. "Would I be an Indian, — a duke of the Klalams?" I asked myself. "As much as I am to-night, — no more, and no longer. To-night I am a demi-savage, jolly for my rest and my supper, and content because my hampers hold enough for to-morrow. I can identify myself thoroughly, and delight that I can, with the untamed natures of my comrades. I can yield myself to the dominion of the same impulses that sway them out of impassiveness into frantic excitement. They sit here over the fire, now jabbering lustily, and now silent and drifting along currents of associa- tion, undiverted by discursive thought, until some pervading 34 THE CANOE AND THE SADDLE. fancy strikes them all at once, and again all is animation and guttural sputter of sympathy. I can also let myself go bobbing down the tide of thoughtless thought, until I am caught by the same shoals, or checked by the same reef, or launched upon the same tumultuous seas, as they. These influences are primeval, aboriginal, fresh, enlivening for their anti-cockney savor. Wretchedly slab-sided, and not at all fitting among the many-sided, is he who cannot adapt himself to the dreams and hopes, the awes and pleasures of savage life, and be as good a savage as the brassiest Brass-skin. "However, it is not amiss," continued my soliloquy, puffing itself away with the last whiffs of my pipe, "to have the large results of the world's secular toil in posse. It is sometimes pleasant to lay aside the resumable ermine. It is easy to linger while one has a hand upon the locomotive's valve. I will, on the whole, remain an American of the nineteenth century, and not subside into a Klalam brave. Every sincere man has, or ought to have, his differences or his quarrels with status quo, — otherwise what becomes of the millennium? My personal grudge with the present has not yet brought me to the point of rupture and reaction." Had I uttered these reflections in a prosy lecture, my fishy suite could not have been sounder asleep than they now were. They had coiled themselves about the fire, in genuine slumber, after labor and overfeeding. Without dread of treachery, I bivouacked near them. I was more placable and less watchful than I should have been had I known that the Kahtai Klalams, under the superintendence of King George and the Duke, were in the habit of murder- ing. They sacrificed a couple of pale-faced victims within the year, as I afterwards was informed. However, the lamb lay down with the wolf, and suffered no harm. From time to time I awoke, and rolled another log upon the pyre, and then returned to my uneasy naps on the pebbles,- — uneasy, not because the pebbles dimpled me somewhat WHULGE. 35 harshly through my blankets, not because the inextinguish- able stars winked at me fantastically through ether, nor because my scalp occasionally gave premonitions of depart- ure; but because I did not wish, when offered the boon of a favorable tide, to be asleep at my post and miss it. A new flood-tide was about to be sent whirling up into the bays and coves and nooks of Whulge when I shook up my sobered hero of the libellous teapots, shook up Olyman and his young men, and touched the Duchess lightly on the shoulder, as she lay with her red-chevroned visage turned toward the zenith. The Duke alone grumbled, and shirked the toil of launching the Bucentaur. We others went at it heartily, dragging our vessel down the shingle to the chorus of a guttural De Profundis. It was an hour before dawn. We reloaded, and shoved off into the chill, star-lighted void, — a void where one might doubt whether the upper stars or the nether stars were the real orbs. Our red fire watched us as we sailed away, glaring after us like a Cyclops sentinel until we rounded a point and passed out of his range, only to find ourselves sadly gazed at by a pale, lean moon just lifting above the pines. With the flames of dawn a wind arose and lent us wings. I succeeded in inspiring my crew with a stolid intention to speed me. A comrade-ry grew up between me and the truculent black- guard who wielded the bow paddle, so that he essayed unintelligent civilities from time to time, and when we landed to breakfast, at a point where a giant arbor-vitae stood a rich pyramid of green, he brought me salal-berries, and arbutus-leaves to dry for smoking; meaning perhaps to play Caliban to my Stephano, and worshipping him who bore the lumoti. The. Duke remained either "hyas kla hye am," in the wretched dumps, or "hyas silex," in the deep sulks, as must happen after an orgie, even to a princely personage. I could get nothing from him, either in philology or legend, — nothing but the Klalam name of Whulge, K'uk'lults. However, thanks to a strong following wind ,!i 36 THE CANOE AND THE SADDLE. and the blanket-sail, we sped on, never flinching from the tide when it turned and battled us. We had rounded a point, and opened Puyallop Bay, a breadth of sheltered calmness, when I, lifting sleepy eyelids for a dreamy stare about, was suddenly aware of a vast white shadow in the water. What cloud, piled massive on the horizon, could cast an image so sharp in outline, so full of vigorous detail of surface? No cloud, as my stare, no longer dreamy, presently discovered, — no cloud, but a cloud compeller. It was a giant mountain dome of snow, swelling and seeming to fill the aerial spheres as its image displaced the blue deeps of tranquil water. The smoky haze of an Oregon August hid all the length of its lesser ridges, and left this mighty summit based upon uplifting dimness. Only its splendid snows were visible, high in the unearthly regions of clear blue noonday sky. The shore line drew a cincture of pines across the broad base, where it faded unreal into the mist. The same dark girth separated the peak from its reflection, over which my canoe was now pressing, and sending wavering swells to shatter the beautiful vision before it. Kingly and alone stood this majesty, without any visible comrade or consort, though far to the north and the south its brethren and sisters dominated their realms, each in isolated sovereignty, rising above the pine-darkened sierra of the Cascade Mountains, — above the stern chasm where the Columbia, Achilles of rivers, sweeps, short-lived and ju- bilant, to the sea, — above the lovely vales of the Willa- mette and Umpqua. Of all the peaks from California to Fraser River, this one before me was royalest. Mount Regnier Christians have dubbed it, in stupid nomenclature perpetuating the name of somebody or nobody.* More melodiously the siwashes call it Tacoma,— a generic term also applied to all snow peaks. Whatever keen crests and crags there may be in its rock anatomy of basalt, snow *As to Winthrop's error here, see Appendix A. WHULGE. 37 covers softly with its bends and sweeping curves. Tacoma, under its ermine, is a crushed volcanic dome, or an ancient volcano fallen in, and perhaps as yet not wholly lifeless. The domes of snow are stateliest. There may be more of feminine beauty in the cones, and more of masculine force and hardihood in the rough pyramids, but the great domes are calmer and more divine; and, even if they have failed to attain absolute dignified grace of finish, and are riven and broken down, they still demand our sympathy for giant power, if only partially victor. Each form — the dome, the cone, and the pyramid — has its type among the great snow peaks of the Cascades. And now let the Duke of York drowse, the Duchess cease awhile longer her choking chant, and the rest nap it on their paddles, floating on the image of Tacoma, while I ask recognition for the almost unknown glories of the Cascade Mountains. We are poorly off for such objects east of the Mississippi. There are some roughish excrescences known as the Alleghanies. There is a knobby group of brownish White Mountains. Best of all, high in Down- East is the lonely Katahdin. Hillocks these, — never among them one single summit brilliant forever with snow, golden in sunshine, silver when sunshine has gone; not one to bloom rosy at dawn, and to be a vision of refreshment all the sultry summer long; not one to be lustrous white over leagues of woodland, sombre or tender; not one to repeat the azure of heaven among its shadowy dells. Exaltation such as the presence of the sublime and solemn heights arouses, we dwellers eastward cannot have as an abiding influence. Other things we may have, for Nature will not let herself anywhere be scorned; but only moun- tains, and chief est the giants of snow, can teach whatever lessons there may ber in vaster distances and deeper depths of palpable ether, in lonely grandeur without desolation, and in the illimitable, bounded within an outline. There- fore, needing all these emotions at their maximum, we were I, 38 THE CANOE AND THE SADDLE. compelled to make pilgrimages back to the mountains of the Old World, — commodiously as may be when we con- sider sea-sickness, passports, Murray's red-covers, and h-less Britons everywhere. Yes, back to the Old World we went, and patronized the Alps, and nobly satisfying we found them. But we were forced to inspect also the heritage of human institutions, and such a mankind as they had made after centuries of opportunity, — and very sadly depressing we found the work, so that, notwithstanding many romantic joys and artistic pleasures, we came back malcontent. Let us, therefore, develop our own world. It has taken us two centuries to discover our proper West across the Mississippi, and to know by indefinite hearsay that among the groups of the Rockies are heights worth notice. Farthest away in the west, as near the western sea as mountains can stand, are the Cascades. Sailors can descry their landmark summits firmer than cloud, a hundred miles away. Kulshan, misnamed Mount Baker by the vulgar, is their northernmost buttress, up at 49° and Fraser River. Kulshan is an irregular, massive, mound-shaped peak, worthy to stand a white emblem of perpetual peace between us and our brother Britons. The northern regions of Whulge and Vancouver Island have Kulshan upon their horizon. They saw it blaze the winter before this journey of mine; for there is fire beneath the Cascades, red war suppressed where the peaks, symbols of truce, stand in resplendent quiet. Kulshan is best seen, as I saw it one afternoon of that same August, from an upland of Vancouver Island, across the golden waves of a wheat-field, across the glimmering waters of the Georgian Sound, and far above its belt of misty gray pine-ridges. The snow-line here is at five thousand feet, and Kulshan has as much height in snow as in forest and vegetation. Its name I got from the Lummi tribe at its base, after I had dipped in their pot at a boiled-salmon feast. As to Baker, that name should be WHULGE. 39 forgotten. Mountains should not be insulted by being named after undistinguished bipeds, nor by the prefix of Mt. Mt. Chimborazo, or Mt. Dhawalaghiri, seems as feeble as Mr. Julius Caesar, or Signor Dante. South of Kulshan, the range continues dark, rough, and somewhat unmeaning to the eye, until it is relieved by Tacoma, vulgo Regnier. Upon this Tacoma's image I was now drifting, and was about to make nearer acquaint- ance with its substance. One cannot know too much of a nature's nobleman. Tacoma the second, which Yankees call Mt. Adams, is a clumsier repetition of its greater brother, but noble enough to be the pride of a continent. Dearest charmer of all is St. Helens, queen of the Cascades, queen of Northern America, a fair and grace- ful volcanic cone. Exquisite mantling snows sweep along her shoulders toward the bristling pines. Sometimes she showers her realms with a boon of light ashes, to notify them that her peace is repose, not stupor ; and sometimes lifts a beacon of tremulous flame by night from her summit. Not far from her base the Columbia crashes through the mountains in a magnificent chasm, and Mt. Hood, the vigorous prince of the range, rises in a keen pyramid fourteen or sixteen thousand feet high, rivalling his sister in glory.* Mt. Jefferson and others southward are worthy snow peaks, *The heights of the several northwestern snow-peaks described in this chapter are given by the United States Geological Survey's "Dic- tionary of Altitudes," as follows: Mt. Rainier, 14,363; Mt. Adams, 12,470; Mt. Hood, 11,225; Mt. Baker, 10,827; Mt. St. Helens, 10,000. Early Oregonians, as Winthrop hints, held greatly exaggerated notions of the height of Mt. Hood. A member of the first party to reach its sum- mit, Thomas J. Dryer, editor of the Portland Oregonian, published an account of the ascent in which he asserted with fine exactness, if not ac- curacy, that the elevation was 18,361 feet ! This ascent was made August 4, 1854. The leader of the party was William Barlow, son of Captain Samuel K. Barlow, builder of the famous "Barlow Road" across the Cascades south of Mt. Hood, by which many thousands of settlers entered the Willamette Valley. Dryer had climbed Mt. St. Helens a year before. His published ac- count says he was accompanied by "Messrs. Wilson, Smith, and Drew." St. Helens was frequently in eruption during the first years of white settlement, and down to about 1842. This is noted in the journals 40 THE CANOE AND THE SADDLE. but not comparable with these; and then this masterly family of mountains dwindles ruggedly away toward Cali- fornia and the Shasta group. The Cascades are known to geography, — their summits to the lists of volcanoes. Several gentlemen in the United States Army, bored in petty posts, or squinting along Indian trails for Pacific railroads, have seen these monu- ments. A few myriads of Oregonians have not been able to avoid seeing them, have perhaps felt their enno- bling influence, and have written, boasting that St. Helens or Hood is as high as Blanc. Enterprising fellows have climbed both. But the millions of Yankees — from codfish of the Hudson's Bay Fort at Vancouver, and in the private letters and diaries of the time. These records show that the expulsion of ashes was sometimes so tremendous as to darken the sky at Vancouver for days at a time, and more than once ashes are reported to have fallen in considerable amount, as far away as The Dalles. Mt. Adams was first ascended in the same year as Mt. Hood, the successful climbers being Col. B.F.Shaw, Glen Aiken, and Edward J. Allen, the builder of the Naches Pass road. Fourteen years later Mt. Baker was climbed, after several unsuc- cessful attempts, by Edmund T. Coleman, an English landscape painter then living in Victoria. His party included Thomas Stratton of Port Townsend, David Ogilvy of Victoria, and a settler named Tenant. The highest and noblest of all these snow mountains remained longest unconquered. Dr. William F. Tolmie had made a botanizing trip to the upland "parks" in 1833, being the first white man to visit the peak. His visit resulted in the first discovery and announcement of the exist- ence of glaciers in the present territory of the United States south of Alaska. In 1857, Lieutenant (later General) A. V. Kautz, accompanied by several soldiers from Fort Nisqually, first attempted the ascent, and reached the crest of South Peak, a few hundred feet lower than the ac- tual summit. Thirteen years later, on August 17, 1870, this summit, now known as Columbia's Crest, was gained by Gen. Hazard Stevens, son of the Territory's first governor, who had himself served with dis- tinction as a young officer during the Civil War, and was then living at Olympia as United States collector of internal revenue; and Philemon Beecher Van Trump, of Yelm, Wash. General Stevens published a de- lightful account of their feat, "The Ascent of Takhoma," in the Atlantic Monthly of November, 1876. Widely acquainted with Indians of the territorial period, he says: "Tak-ho-ma, or Ta-ho-ma, among the Yakimas, Klickitats, Puy- allups, Nisquallys, and allied tribes is the generic term for mountain, used precisely as we use the word 'Mount,' as Takhoma Wynatchie, or Mount Wynatchie. But they all designate Rainier simply as Takhoma, or The Mountain, just as the mountain men used to call it 'Old He.' " 1 *ri'!.-*r- ^ R ° R ffi .2 9 & P< £