Part 10 (1/2)
I was kind o' creepin' along cautious, an' the first thing I knew there was an Injun had me on each side, an' they jest marched me up to Jo's tent, to know what they should do with me. I wa'n't a mite afraid; I jest looked him right square in the eye. That's another thing with Injuns; you've got to look 'em in the eye, or they won't trust ye. Well, Jo, he took up a torch, a pine knot he had burnin', and he held it close't up to my face, and looked me up an' down, an'
down an' up; an' I never flinched; I jest looked him up an' down's good's he did me; 'n' then he set the knot down, 'n' told the men it was all right,--I was 'tum tum;' that meant I was good heart; 'n' they gave me all I could eat, 'n' a guide to show me my way, next day, 'n'
I couldn't make Jo nor any of 'em take one cent. I had a kind o'
comforter o' red yarn, I wore round my neck; an' at last I got Jo to take that, jest as a kind o' momento.”
The old man was greatly indignant to hear that Chief Joseph was in Indian Territory. He had been out of the State at the time of the Nez Perce war, and had not heard of Joseph's fate.
”Well, that was a dirty mean trick!” he exclaimed,--”a dirty mean trick! I don't care who done it.”
Then he told me of another Indian chief he had known well,--”Ercutch”
by name. This chief was always a warm friend of the whites; again and again he had warned them of danger from hostile Indians. ”Why, when he died, there wa'n't a white woman in all this country that didn't mourn 's if she'd lost a friend; they felt safe's long's he was round. When he knew he was dyin' he jest bade all his friends good-by. Said he, 'Good-by! I'm goin' to the Great Spirit;' an' then he named over each friend he had, Injuns an' whites, each one by name, and said good-by after each name.”
It was a strange half-hour, rocking and jolting on this crowded car platform, the splendid tossing and foaming river with its rocks and islands on one hand, high cliffs and fir forests on the other; these three weather-beaten, eager, aged faces by my side, with their shrewd old voices telling such reminiscences, and rising shrill above the din of the cars.
From the upper cascades to the Dalles, by boat again; a splendid forty miles' run, through the mountain-pa.s.s, its walls now gradually lowering, and, on the Was.h.i.+ngton Territory side of the river, terraces and slopes of cleared lands and occasional settlements. Great numbers of drift-logs pa.s.sed us here, coming down apace, from the rush of the Dalles above. Every now and then one would get tangled in the bushes and roots on the sh.o.r.e, swing in, and lodge tight to await the next freshet.
The ”log” of one of these driftwood voyages would be interesting; a tree trunk may be ten years getting down to the sea, or it may swirl down in a week. It is one of the businesses along the river to catch them, and pull them in to sh.o.r.e, and much money is made at it. One lucky fisher of logs, on the Snake River Fork, once drew ash.o.r.e six hundred cords in a single year. Sometimes a whole boom gets loose from its moorings, and comes down stream, without breaking up. This is a G.o.dsend to anybody who can head it off and tow it in sh.o.r.e; for by the law of the river he is ent.i.tled to one half the value of the logs.
At the Dalles is another short portage of twelve miles, past a portion of the river which, though less grand than its plunge through the Cascade Mountains, is far more unique and wonderful. The waters here are stripped and shred into countless zigzagging torrents, boiling along through labyrinths of black lava rocks and slabs. There is nothing in all Nature so gloomy, so weird, as volcanic slag; and the piles, ridges, walls, palisades of it thrown up at this point look like the roof-trees, chimneys, turrets of a half-engulfed Pandemonium.
Dark slaty and gray tints spread over the whole sh.o.r.e, also; it is all volcanic matter, oozed or boiled over, and hardened into rigid shapes of death and destruction. The place is terrible to see. Fitting in well with the desolateness of the region was a group of half-naked Indians crouching on the rocks, gaunt and wretched, fis.h.i.+ng for salmon; the hollows in the rocks about them filled with the bright vermilion-colored salmon sp.a.w.n, spread out to dry. The twilight was nearly over as we sped by, and the deepening darkness added momently to the gloom of the scene.
At Celilo, just above the Dalles, we took boat again for Umatilla, one hundred miles farther up the river.
Next morning we were still among lava beds: on the Was.h.i.+ngton Territory side, low, rolling sh.o.r.es, or slanting slopes with terraces, and tufty brown surfaces broken by ridges and points of the black slag; on the Oregon side, high brown cliffs mottled with red and yellow lichens, and great beaches and dunes of sand, which had blown into windrows and curving hillock lines as on the sea-sh.o.r.e. This sand is a terrible enemy for a railroad to fight. In a few hours, sometimes, rods of the track are buried by it as deep as by snow in the fiercest winter storms.
The first picture I saw from my state-room windows, this morning, was an Indian standing on a narrow plank shelf that was let down by ropes over a perpendicular rock front, some fifty feet high. There he stood, as composed as if he were on _terra firma_, bending over towards the water, and flinging in his salmon net. On the rocks above him sat the women of his family, spreading the salmon to dry. We were within so short a distance of the banks that friendly smiles could be distinctly seen; and one of the younger squaws, laughing back at the lookers-on on deck, picked up a salmon, and waving it in her right hand ran swiftly along towards an outjutting point. She was a gay creature, with scarlet fringed leggings, a pale green blanket, and on her head a twisted handkerchief of a fine old Durer red. As she poised herself, and braced backwards to throw the salmon on deck, she was a superb figure against the sky; she did not throw straight, and the fish fell a few inches short of reaching the boat. As it struck the water she made a petulant little gesture of disappointment, like a child, threw up her hands, turned, and ran back to her work.
At Umatilla, being forced again to ”make option which of two,” we reluctantly turned back, leaving the beautiful Walla Walla region unvisited, for the sake of seeing Puget Sound. The Walla Walla region is said to be the finest stretch of wheat country in the world. Lava slag, when decomposed, makes the richest of soil,--deep and seemingly of inexhaustible fertility. A failure of harvests is said never to have been known in that country; the average yield of wheat is thirty-five to forty bushels an acre, and oats have yielded a hundred bushels. Apples and peaches thrive, and are of a superior quality. The country is well watered, and has fine rolling plateaus from fifteen hundred to three thousand feet high, giving a climate neither too cold in winter nor too hot in summer, and of a bracing quality not found nearer the sea. Hearing all the unquestionable tributes to the beauty and value of this Walla Walla region, I could not but recall some of Chief Joseph's pleas that a small share of it should be left in the possession of those who once owned it all.
From our pilot, on the way down, I heard an Indian story, too touching to be forgotten, though too long to tell here except in briefest outline. As we were pa.s.sing a little village, half under water, he exclaimed, looking earnestly at a small building to whose window-sills the water nearly reached: ”Well, I declare, Lucy's been driven out of her house this time. I was wondering why I didn't see her handkerchief a-waving. She always waves to me when I go by.” Then he told me Lucy's story.
She was a California Indian, probably of the Tulares, and migrated to Oregon with her family thirty years ago. She was then a young girl, and said to be the handsomest squaw ever seen in Oregon. In those days white men in wildernesses thought it small shame, if any, to take Indian women to live with them as wives, and Lucy was much sought and wooed. But she seems to have had uncommon virtue or coldness, for she resisted all such approaches for a long time.
Finally, a man named Pomeroy appeared; and, as Lucy said afterward, as soon as she looked at him, she knew he was her ”tum tum man,” and she must go with him. He had a small sloop, and Lucy became its mate. They two alone ran it for several years up and down the river. He established a little trading-post, and Lucy always took charge of that when he went to buy goods. When gold was discovered at Ringgold Bar, Lucy went there, worked with a rocker like a man, and washed out hundreds of dollars' worth of gold, all which she gave to Pomeroy.
With it he built a fine schooner and enlarged his business, the faithful Lucy working always at his side and bidding. At last, after eight or ten years, he grew weary of her and of the country, and made up his mind to go to California. But he had not the heart to tell Lucy he meant to leave her. The pilot who told me this story was at that time captain of a schooner on the river. Pomeroy came to him one day, and asked him to move Lucy and her effects down to Columbus. He said he had told her that she must go and live there with her relatives, while he went to California and looked about, and then he would send for her. The poor creature, who had no idea of treachery, came on board cheerfully and willingly, and he set her off at Columbus. This was in the early spring. Week after week, month after month, whenever his schooner stopped there, Lucy was on the sh.o.r.e, asking if he had heard from Pomeroy. For a long time, he said, he couldn't bear to tell her. At last he did; but she would not believe him. Winter came on.
She had got a few boards together and built herself a sort of hut, near a house where lived an eccentric old bachelor, who finally took compa.s.sion on her, and to save her from freezing let her come into his shanty to sleep. He was a mysterious old man, a recluse, with a morbid aversion to women; and at the outset it was a great struggle for him to let even an Indian woman cross his threshold. But little by little Lucy won her way: first she washed the dishes; then she would timidly help at the cooking. Faithful, patient, unpresuming, at last she grew to be really the old man's housekeeper as well as servant. He lost his health, and became blind. Lucy took care of him till he died, and followed him to the grave, his only mourner,--the only human being in the country with whom he had any tie. He left her his little house and a few hundred dollars,--all he had; and there she is still, alone, making out to live by doing whatever work she can find in the neighborhood. Everybody respects her; she is known as ”Lucy” up and down the river. ”I did my best to hire her to come and keep house for my wife, last year,” said the pilot. ”I'd rather have her for nurse or cook than any white woman in Oregon. But she wouldn't come. I don't know as she's done looking for Pomeroy to come back yet, and she's going to stay just where he left her. She never misses a time, waving to me, when she knows what boat I'm on; and there isn't much going on on the river she don't know.”
It was dusk when the pilot finished telling Lucy's story. We were shooting along through wild pa.s.sages of water called h.e.l.l Gate, just above the Dalles. In the dim light the basaltic columnar cliffs looked like grooved ebony. One of the pinnacles has a strange resemblance to the figure of an Indian. It is called the Chief, and the semblance is startling,--a colossal figure, with a plume-crowned head, turned as if gazing backward over the shoulder; the att.i.tude stately, the drapery graceful, and the whole expression one of profound and dignified sorrow. It seemed a strangely fitting emphasis to the story of the faithful Indian woman.
It was near midnight when we pa.s.sed the Dalles. Our train was late, and dashed on at its swiftest. Fitful light came from a wisp of a new moon and one star; they seemed tossing in a tumultuous sea of dark clouds. In this glimmering darkness the lava walls and ridges stood up, inky black; the foaming water looked like molten steel, the whole region more ghastly and terrible than before.
There is a village of three thousand inhabitants at the Dalles. The houses are set among lava hillocks and ridges. The fields seemed bubbled with lava, their blackened surfaces stippled in with yellow and brown. High up above are wheat-fields in clearings, reaching to the sky-line of the hills. Great slopes of crumbling and disintegrating lava rock spread superb purple and slate colors between the greens of forests and wheat-fields. It is one of the memorable pictures on the Columbia.
To go both up and down a river is a good deal like spending a summer and a winter in a place, so great difference does it make when right hand and left s.h.i.+ft sides, and everything is seen from a new stand-point.
The Columbia River scenery is taken at its best going up, especially the gradual crescendo of the Cascade Mountain region, which is far tamer entered from above. But we had a compensation in the clearer sky and lifted clouds, which gave us the more distant snow-peaks in all their glory; and our run down from the Dalles to Portland was the best day of our three on the river. Our steamer was steered by hydraulic pressure; and it was a wonderful thing to sit in the pilot-house and see the slight touch of a finger on the s.h.i.+ning lever sway the great boat in a second. A baby's hand is strong enough to steer the largest steamboat by this instrument. It could turn the boat, the captain said, in a maelstrom, where four men together could not budge the rudder-wheel.
The history of the Columbia River navigation would make by itself an interesting chapter. It dates back to 1792, when a Boston s.h.i.+p and a Boston captain first sailed up the river. A curious bit of history in regard to that s.h.i.+p is to be found in the archives of the old Spanish government in California. Whenever a royal decree was issued in Madrid in regard to the Indies or New Spain, a copy of it was sent to every viceroy in the Spanish Dominions; he communicated it to his next subordinate, who in turn sent it to all the governors, and so on, till the decree reached every corner of the king's provinces. In 1789 there was sent from Madrid, by s.h.i.+p to Mexico, and thence by courier to California, and by f.a.ges, the California governor, to every port in California, the following order:--