An illustrated history of the state of Idaho, containing a history of the state of Idaho from the earliest period of its discovery to the present time, together with glimpses of its auspicious future; illustrations and biographical mention of many pioneers and prominent citizens of to-day, Part 3

Author: Lewis Publishing Company. cn
Publication date: 1899
Publisher: Chicago, The Lewis publishing company
Number of Pages: 1014

USA > Idaho > An illustrated history of the state of Idaho, containing a history of the state of Idaho from the earliest period of its discovery to the present time, together with glimpses of its auspicious future; illustrations and biographical mention of many pioneers and prominent citizens of to-day > Part 3

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"In 1861 three candidates were nominated for con- gress-W. H. Wallace by the Republicans, Salucius Garfielde by the Douglas Democrats, and Judge Ed- ward Lander (brother of the General) by the Breckin- ridge wing of the party. They traveled over the (then known) eastern part of the territory in company with your father, Hon. Gilmore Hays, making speeches whenever they could get a crowd together. When they arrived in Pierce City I invited them to camp at my place (everyone carried his own blankets in those days), I being personally acquainted with Wallace and Garfielde. They accepted the invitation. While there I proposed a division of the territory, as I thought we were a long distance from Olympia. They agreed that whoever was elected would favor a division. Then the question of name came up, and I suggested the name of Idaho. I had seen the name on a steamer built by Colonel J. S. Rockwell to run between the Cascades and the Dalles, in connection with the steamer Moun- tain Buck, which ran from Portland to the Cascades before the organization of the Oregon Steam Naviga- tion Company. The old Idaho is now on Puget Sound and owned by Captain Brownfield, and still makes a good appearance. All the above named gentlemen said that was the name.

"W. H. Wallace was elected. I voted for Garfielde, and on the 3d of March, 1863, the new territory was created and named Idaho. Lincoln appointed Wallace the first governor and he was elected the first delegate to congress.

"So I believe if there is any credit due for naming the state I am entitled to it. A controversy came up about it, I think, in 1875, and I caused an article to be put in the Owyhee Avalanche, which was corroborated by your father. I hear that Judge Lander is still liv- ing, and if I knew where a letter would reach him I would write, as I think he might remember this affair on the frontier thirty-two years ago.

"GEORGE B. WALKER,

"West Seattle, King county, Washington."

CHAPTER II.

GEOLOGICAL AGENCIES.

I N GENERAL it may be said that the moun- tain ranges of Idaho are volcanic upheavals, -the mighty bending upward of the crust of the earth's surface when its inborn fires were lashed to unwonted fury in some stormy age of old eternity. The valleys were doubtless formed by this upheaval of its enclosing ranges, leaving the floor of the surface here comparatively undis- turbed. This really rests on a foundation of aqueous rock of unmeasured thickness, on which the alluvial matter that forms its soils has been deposited. With this there are, in many places, deep deposits of water-worn pebbles and strati- fied sand, which were made at an era much more modern than that of the underlying sandstone. It is useless to endeavor to identify these changes chronologically, as creation in its being and in its mutations writes its historic days in millennials of age, and thus puts our conception of time, drawn as it is from human experience and human history, entirely at fault.

Of course, in indicating the forces that formed the now verdant valleys, glacial action must not be forgotten. Far extending moraines and wide glaciated surfaces tell the story of the far-away eras when these mighty ice-plows furrowed and planed down the broken face of the earth's crust, and smoothed it into its now beauteous vales.

Enough has already been said to indicate to the reader that the mountains of Idaho are of volcanic formation. The great snow peaks are all volcanoes. They are called extinct, though some of them still give distinct evidence of an internal unrest born of pent-up fires. Buffalo Hump has been in active eruption within the memory of the present generation. The great summit intervals between these peaks are gener- ally granitic rock, covered with a deep vegetable soil, intermixed with decayed granite. In fact, there were many successive overflows, as on the broken faces of the cliffs clearly defined lines of stratification are presented more numerous as we

approach the great summits that were their foun- tain. The molten iron sea rolled onward, over- lying the whole country, drinking up the rivers, shearing off the forests, and seizing a nightly holocaust of animal life in its devouring maw. For ages, how long no one can know, this great lava plain, first red and hot and simmering, then black and cold, and rending itself into deep chasms in its slow cooling, lay out under the stars without vegetable or animal life, almost without springlet or dewdrop, to cool or soften its black and rugged face. The fires of the vol- canoes at length burned low. The mountain sum- mits cooled. A few stray clouds floated over the tortured earth. A few drops of rain touched its iron surface with their imprisoned might. Show- ers followed. The springs that fountain rivers began to bubble from beneath the cloven lava beds, searching out an open way seaward through their broken chasms. And thus the changes of the ages went on. The basalts were ground to powder in the mills of the streams. The old surfaces over which the lava had once spread were cut into valleys, hundreds of feet deep. Fecund soils were deposited. Vegetation sprang forth again. Animal life found food and drink and shelter, and still the changes went on. Frost and snow and raindrop and stormy winds and burning suns wrought the miracle of a new genesis, leaving a field in which nature has writ- ten the most legible and astonishing records of her processes and her powers.

The mountain ranges present a wonderful con- glomeration of basalts, granite, slate, sandstone, with vast beds of stratified sand and water-worn gravel. In places one formation predominates, in other places some other formation, and then again several of them appear intermixed, or over- lying one another. It is evident that the heat attending the volcanic action that lifted the vast ridges to their present position was great enough to cause perfect fusion in only a few places; while

HISTORY OF IDAHO.

yet the forces below were mighty enough to cause the wonderful and weird displacements of the primitive rocks so often arresting the observant eye. One hour the traveler among these moun- tains will be passing over scoriated basalt, or along cliffs of basaltic columns, the next among great granite boulders or over gray granite pin- nacles, then over miles of aqueous deposits in the form of stratified sandstone or stratified beds of sand and gravel intermixed: or again slate slopes and hillsides will arrest his eye, until he is lost in the wilderment of his strange surroundings.

The Blue mountains margin on the west the great lava plains of Snake river valley. The vol- canic conditions, so plainly marked in the Cas- cade and Blue mountains, and the valley inter- vening between them, continue and are intensi- fied as we enter the great upper valley of Snake river, which lies mostly in the state of Idaho, which was once the mightiest scene of volcanic action on the American continent, if not in the world.

We should not dismiss the whole subject of the geology of this most interesting region, with these general statements for the lay reader with- out some more distinctly scientific record for the benefit of the more technical reader and student. For him geology would write about the follow- ing history of the conditions and changes of un- told ages and marvelous processes through which this wonderful Idaho world was being formed.

For an immense period before the existence of the Coast and Cascade ranges of mountains, the primeval ocean washed the western shores of the great Rock mountain chain, and throughout the palæozoic era and the whole Triassic and Juras- sic periods of the Mesozoic era numerous rivers kept bringing down debris until an enormously thick mass of off-shore deposits had accumulated. This marginal sea-bottom became the scene of in- tense aqueous-igneous action in its deeply buried strata, producing a line of wrackness, which, yielding to the horizontal thrust produced by the secular contraction of the interior of the earth, was crushed together and swollen upward into the Cascade and Sierra Nevada range at the close of the Jurassic period. The range thus produced was not of very great height. It existed for un- known centuries,-the scene of erosion and plant growth, roamed over by the now extinct fauna

of the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods. It was combed by forests of conifers and oaks. Then followed the great tava-flow and uplift of the mountain range of the modern Cascades. Be- neath the overlying lava, where the Columbia breaks through the barriers of this great range, there is found along the water's edge, and for nearly twenty feet upward, a coarse conglomerate of rounded porphyritic pebbles and boulders of all sizes up to six feet in diameter, held together by an imperfectly lithified earthy paste. Above the conglomerate is a very distinct, though ir- regular ground surface bed, in which are found silicified stumps with roots extending twenty feet and penetrating into the boulder material beneath evidently in situ. Resting directly on this forest ground-surface, and therefore inclos- ing the erect stumps, is a layer of stratified sand- stone, two or three feet thick, filled with beautiful and perfect impressions of leaves of several kinds of forest trees, possibly of the very trees about whose silicified bases they are found. Above this leaf-bearing stratum rests a coarse conglomer- ate similar to that beneath at the water level. Scattered about in the lower part of this upper conglomerate, and in the stratified sandstone, and sometimes lying in the dirt beneath it, fragments of silicified driftwood are found. Above this last conglomerate, and resting upon it, rise the layers of lava, mostly columnar basalt, one above an- other to a height of three thousand feet. From these facts the following order of events are de- duced:

The region of the Columbia river was a forest, probably a valley, overgrown by conifers and oaks. The subsoil was a coarse boulder drift produced by erosion of some older rocks. An excess of water came on, either by floods or changes of level, and the trees were killed, their leaves shed and buried in mud, and their trunks rotted to stumps. Then came on a tumultuous and rapid deposit of coarse drift, containing drift- wood, which covered up the ground and the still remaining stumps to a depth of several hundred feet. The surface thus formed was eroded into hills and dales, and then followed the outburst of lava in successive flows, and the silification of the wood and fermentation of the drift by the percolation of the hot alkaline waters containing silica. Finally followed the process of erosion by

HISTORY OF IDAHO.

which the present streams, channels and valleys, whether main or tributary, are cut to their enor- mous depth. The great masses of sediment sent down to the sea by the erosion of the primary Cascade range, forming a thick offshore deposit, gave rise in turn at the end of the Miocene to the upheaval of the Coast range, the Cascade moun- tains being at the same time rent along the axis into enormous fissures from which outpoured the grand lava floods, building the mountains higher and covering the country for great dis- tances. This is probably the grandest lava flow known to geology, covering as it does an area of not less than two hundred thousand square miles. It covers the greater portion of northern Califor- nia and northwestern Nevada, nearly the whole of Oregon, Washington and Idaho, and runs far into British Columbia on the north. Its average thickness is two thousand feet, and the greatest (shown where the Columbia, Des Chutes, Snake and other rivers cut through it) four thousand feet. To produce this, many successive flows took place, and great periods of time elapsed during which this volcanic action continued. During the period of these Cascade eruptions, the Coast range was being slowly elevated, and became in turn the scene of local volcanic action, though not very severe.

At last the great fissure eruptions drew to a close. The fissures became blocked up. The volcanic action became confined to a few locali- ties. The period of crater eruptions followed. This continued for a long time-almost to our own day. These crater eruptions built up the great snowy peaks.

By the formation of the Cascade a great in- terior basin was made, the waters of which col- lected into secondary reservoirs, some of very large extent, and which were at length carried off by the rivers which have cut their way front the interior to the sea. The Columbia and its tributaries drained the northern part of this im- mense basin, and at this period doubtless the great Salt Lake of Utah found its outlet to the sea by the Snake and Columbia rivers. Thence came the lava floods, whose great flows have since been worn away in places, exposing the tertiary and cretaceous beds, and revealing the former conditions of the region by the fossils found therein. At the end of the Miocene the lava flows from the Cascade fissures commenced, but it was long before they reached the entire extent of the great basins, which continued to exist and be endowed with life well into the Pliocene.

CHAPTER III.

EARLY EXPLORATIONS.

D URING the long period of time in which the Pacific coast of North America was being slowly brought to the knowledge of civilized man, the course of narrative shows that the Frenchman and Spaniard were the pio- neers of exploration in this region, both by sea and land. Spain led the maritime nations in dis- tant and successful voyages. The voyage of Columbus, under the auspices of Ferdinand and his noble queen, Isabella, whose reign over the united kingdoms of Castile and Aragon gave Spain so much glory in that adventurous and chivalrous age, had kindled every maritime Span- iard into a very knight of the seas, and inspired the whole nation with a burning zeal for dis- covery and conquest of distant lands. Her rulers were among the greatest and most renowned of all ages of the world. Ferdinand and Isabella were succeeded by Charles V., one of the most enlightened and powerful monarchs that ever sat on any throne. He was succeeded by his son Philip, who, though haughty and imperious, so carried forward the ideas and purposes of his great father that his kingdom reached the very zenith of power and influence in the councils of the European monarchs. The woe pronounced upon a "land whose king is a child" could not fall upon Spain during this period. Weak and lusterless as may now be the condition of the Spanish nation, and little as her power is felt or feared in the world to-day, then soon the Saxon asked privileges of the Castilian and measured his own power by the standard of the other's greatness.

Under the impulse thus pervading the Spanish nation, her banner was pushed into every sea and her cavaliers led all armies of distant conquest,- especially in the New World. While the great- est historical interest attached to these early mari- time explorations along the Pacific coast of North America and had a potent influence upon the ulti- mate opening up of the far western country to civ-

ilization, the association with the specific history of the great state of Idaho is so remote, and has been so often and so ably considered, that it is not necessary to more than refer thus incidentally to the story of adventure in this connection. The development of the Oregon country came as the diametrical result of explorations by land, and it is not less than fitting that a brief record touch- ing the same be here entered.

While Spain led maritime discoveries, the facile and plastic Frenchman led the land explorations into the interior of the western continent. France had a strong holding on the eastern shore of America north of the St. Lawrence,-a point of great advantage in intro-continental explorations. In addition to this she had planted her colonies at the mouth of the Mississippi, and stretched a cor- don of posts southeastward from Quebec to the Ohio, thus hemming the English into a compara- tively narrow belt of country on the Atlantic sea- board, and leaving free to her adventurous roam- ers the vast, and as yet unknown regions that stretched westward and northward, no one coul-1 tell how far or how wide. The French pushed their advantages by land as did Spain hers by sea, and as early as 1743 their explorations had reached the heart of the Rocky mountains. From Canada and from Louisiana, up the lakes and up the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, the French- man's pirogue kept movement with the voy- ageurs' songs as these care-free men of France pushed their trade and travel into the middle of the continent. The French and English war of 1756, however, by giving England the opportu- nity to wrest Canada from the weakened grasp of France, put a sudden stop to her movements in the line of explorations from that province, and opened the same opportunity to England that France had previously enjoyed. But though the opportunity was before her Great Britain was so fully occupied with her European difficulties and the care of her American colonies, already grow-

Twin Falls of Snake River.

HISTORY OF IDAHO.

ing restive under the grievances of her misrule, demanded so much of the attention of her parlia- ment and rulers that she could attempt nothing further than to hold her "reign of vantage" securely, for at least a quarter of a century.

During the progress of this quarter of a cen- tury new conditions and combinations had arisen. England lost all her colonies on the Atlantic coast south of the St. Lawrence. France had sold Louisiana to Spain. Thus England's opportuni- ties were contracted, those of France were de- stroyed, and the new republic of America was as yet unable to enter the field of exploration and colonization. At this period the continental po- sition was this: Spain, after her purchase of Lou- isiana from France, had proprietary claim to all the country west of the Mississippi river to the Pacific ocean, with no very clearly defined north- ern limit to her claims. England held the country northward of the great lakes and the St. Law- rence river, extending indefinitely westward, above the forty-ninth parallel of latitude. The United States held actually the country east of the summits of the Alleghany mountains, includ- ing the six New England states and New York, and had ownership of all the country westward of the Alleghanies which England had conquered from France in the war of 1756. These were the powers that, after the American Revolution, stood looking to the yet unknown west as the place for the future aggrandizement of their re- spective fortunes, and this was the condition in which they looked to the future and prepared for its issues.

The advantages of the condition were with Great Britain. She had grown to be the leading power of Europe. Already the swing of conquest was in the movement of her legislation and her peoples. While the wars of the past twenty years had taxed, they had not paupered her. She was strong, consolidated, ambitious, courageous; and she was Saxon,-the blood of endurance and conquest.

Spain held her position in the south and west by a precarious tenure, and she so felt the feeble- ness of that tenure that she neither made nor cared to make any vigorous movements to extend her possessions or to strengthen her holdings in America. The United States, geographically, held the center of opportunity, but the almost

chaos of the era that followed the close of the Revolutionary war was over the face of her politi- cal history, and she needed time in which to gird herself for the strain of the future. But she had the strength to wait, for she, too, was Saxon. And so, with the parties in direct interest in the movements that were so surely to follow prepar- ing for the race of empire westward, we come to the real opening of the era of discovery by land westward of the great mountains.

These were begun solely by private enterprise for individual gain. They early reached the Ath- abasca and Saskatchewan. But the field was too great for individual resources, and besides the Hudson's Bay Company entered the field with a competition which could only be met by combi- nation. So the Northwest Company, of Montreal, was formed in 1784 for the express purpose of meeting and overcoming the competition of the Hudson's Bay Company, which had proved so ruinous to the individual traders who had ven- tured into the country before. In a very few years this became a most prosperous and power- ful organization, and its traders and explorers filled all the country east of the Rocky mountains as far north as the Arctic and as far south as the Missouri.

The great headquarters of this company was at "Fort Chippewyan" on Lake Athabasca, and were under the charge of Alexander Mackenzie, a very resolute and able man, whose enterprise in explorations stamped his name on the geog- raphy of all the west and north. In 1791 he organized a small party for a western explora- tion, intending to prosecute his journey until he reached the Pacific ocean. He had, two years before, discovered the river that bears his own name, and followed it from its source in Great Slave lake to where it discharges its waters into the Arctic ocean. Having thus ascertained the character and extent of the country to the north- west, he was determined to develop the character of that to the west by the expedition on which he was now entering. He left Fort Chippewyan on the Ioth of October, 1791, and with much difficulty ascended the Peace river from Lake Athabasca to the foot of the Rocky mountains, where the party encamped for the winter. In June of the following year he resumed his jour- ney, still following up the same stream, which he

HISTORY OF IDAHO.

traced to its source near the fifty-fourth parallel of latitude and distant about one thousand miles from its mouth. Only a short distance from the springs of the Peace river he came upon those of another stream flowing westward, called by the natives Tacoutchee Tessee, down which he floated in canoes about two hundred and fifty miles. Leaving the river, he then proceeded westward overland, and on the 22d of July, 1792. reached the Pacific ocean, at the mouth of an inlet in latitude 52° 10'. This inlet had, only a few weeks previously, been surveyed by the fleet of Vancouver; and thus Mackenzie had con- nected the land and water explorations of Great Britain on the Pacific coast.

Mackenzie reached the coast far north of the mouth of the river on which he had sailed in his canoes so far to the southwest. On his return to Fort Chippewyan, late in August, 1792, he learned of the discovery of the mouth of the Columbia by Captain Gray, when he at once con- cluded that the stream he had followed so far was the upper part of that river, and it was so consid- ered by geographers until 1812, or twenty years after Mackenzie's journey, when Simon Fraser, of the same company as Mackenzie, traced it to its mouth in the gulf of Georgia, a little north of the 49° of latitude. Since that time it has been known as Fraser's river. To Alexander Mac- kenzie doubtless belongs the honor of making the first journey down the western slope of the great Rocky mountain chain to the Pacific ocean; though it was made wholly north of the parallel that was subsequently fixed as the boundary line between the British possessions on the American continent and the United States.

It is a somewhat striking coincidence that the first important American movement for an ex- ploration by land of the country lying on the north Pacific coast was made the same year that Mackenzie accomplished his journey to the Pa- cific and that Captain Gray sailed into the mouth of the Columbia river. Thomas Jefferson, at that time the representative of the United States gov- ernment at the court of Versailles, became deeply interested as an American in this great western region. He proposed to the American Philo- sophiical Society that a subscription be raised for the purpose of defraying the expenses of an ex- ploration, and a person be employed competent

to conduct it. He wished it to "ascend the Missouri river, cross the Stony mountains, and descend the nearest river to the Pacific." His suggestion was acted upon by the society, and Captain Meriwether Lewis, on the recommenda- tion of Jefferson, was selected to lead the expe- dition; and Andre Micheaux, a distinguished French botanist, was chosen to accompany him. They proceeded as far as Kentucky, when Mr. Micheaux was recalled by the French minis- ter at Washington and the expedition was given up.

The next movement for the accomplishment of the same purpose was while the treaty was pending between Mr. Jefferson, then president of the United States, and Napoleon, then ruler of France, for the transfer of the claims of France to the whole northwest to the United States. On the 18th of January, 1803, the president trans- mitted a special message to congress in which he incorporated a recommendation that an official expedition be dispatched on the same errand con- templated in the one that had been abandoned. An ample appropriation was made, and again Captain Lewis, then private secretary to the pres- ident, was chosen to conduct it. He solicited William Clarke as his associate.

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An illustrated history of the state of Idaho, containing a history of the state of Idaho from the earliest period of its discovery to the present time, together with glimpses of its auspicious future; illustrations and biographical mention of many pioneers and prominent citizens of to-day, Part 3

Author: Lewis Publishing Company. cn Publication date: 1899 Publisher: Chicago, The Lewis publishing company Number of Pages: 1014

Author: Lewis Publishing Company. cn
Publication date: 1899
Publisher: Chicago, The Lewis publishing company
Number of Pages: 1014