USA > Oregon > Pioneer days of Oregon history, Vol. I > Part 12
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pany's bark Vancouver, in 1848, a large case of drugs came on shore, near that place. Solomon H. Smith and myself concluded we would go down and buy the drugs and find out what we could from the old Indians about the wax and money vessels.
All they could tell us was that long before they were born the wax vessel was lost on the spit, and another anchored near the shore, and some people brought a chest upon Necarney Mountain and carried sacks of money and put them in the chest and killed a man, and put him also in the chest. Afterwards they marked a stone, or very large rock, rolled it on the chest, and went back to the ship and sailed away. We took an Indian, went to the mountain to look for the coin, but found no signs of a marked rock, so concluded it was only an Indian tradition and not reliable.
After the Nehalem country became settled by the whites, and coal was discovered, a corps of government engineers was sent from the surveying schooner, lying at Astoria, to survey the Nehalem River and bar. I, being acquainted with the country and routes, was hired, with horses, to take them down, and bring them back when they had finished the work. This was in 1868. This peninsula lies on the line of travel of all the coast, and the wax was scattered all over it, and the constant winds blowing the sands from the northwest in summer and the southwest in winter, has covered and uncovered it for ages, and the sun has softened it into different shapes and sizes. Some pieces were bleached nearly white. There was much dirt and sand in it, which stuck to it when softened by the sun. Here is where the Indians used to pick it up when crossing this waste. When the whites came here to settle they collected wax, and one, Baker, made a business of it, and found that the most of it, when exposed to view, was lying on a thin stratum of earth, like sediment of a river freshet (which I believe it was), and scattered all over the peninsula. Baker took his spade and would prospect the sand dunes. If the clay stratum was found, he would follow it up, and find large quantities of wax in all conceivable shapes and sizes, including many candles from one and a half inches to two inches in diameter, and where the sun had closed the end the wicks were perfect. I believe that some time after the wreck there was a very high freshet in the river, which spread the wax, logs and timbers all over the peninsula.
On these dunes, many of them, logs rotted and grass grew in places, and the drifting sands would sweep over them, thus protecting the wax and the stratum, for there were remnants of rotten wood in
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most of them. The one in which this large piece was found was near the centre of the spit. There was also found the remnant of a ship timber, with some rusty, wrought-iron nails, four square, thin at head, even taper from head to point, about six or eight inches long, and about five-eighths of an inch thick at the head. There was also a copper chain, about fifty inches long, with a swivel in the middle of it; links four or five inches long, and five-eighth-wire. It was brought from that place by J. Larsen, and changed ownership several times, being finally placed in the mining bureau in San Francisco by Mr. Charles Hughes.
I do not pretend to know where these remnants came from, but believe the vessel to have been English, or Spanish, from China, freighted with wax for some South American port for church pur- poses, as the large wax candles would indicate.
Mr. Thomas H. Rogers writes as follows :
I have been asked to tell what I know about the inscription-bearing rocks found on the side of Necarney Mountain. Many people believe they pertain to an immense Spanish treasure, which, according to legendary lore, is supposed to have been taken from the much-talked- about beeswax ship and secreted on the mountain side some time in 1700. Others believe this treasure to be the spoils of a pirate craft, which, after looting one of the Spanish king's galleons on the Manila and Acapulco route, put into the coast for safety, and, after secreting their ill-gotten gain and marking the spot, sailed away again, never to be heard of more.
My attention was first called to these stones while on a pleasure jaunt to the Nehalem country in September, 1897. Our first day out from Garibaldi took us to the residence of Mr. Lovell, who resides one and one-half miles south of Necarney. Our host was in a reminiscent frame of mind that night, and as we sat before the cheerful fire, he told story after story of the beeswax ship, whose strange cargo lies under the shifting sands of the Nehalem spit. Many of these wax cakes, so he said, bore inscriptions identical to those told about in Mr. Clarke's beeswax articles in the Native Son. This wax, Mr. Lovell informed us, is found as far north as False Tillamook Head, and as far south as Cape Meares. The main bulk, however, being unearthed from the sands near the former locality.
Our host told of several chisel-marked stones being unearthed in a
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neighboring pasture many years before, and the one lucky enough, in his estimation, to decipher the hidden meaning traced thereon, would ultimately find the great Spanish treasure. He advised us to hunt up Mr. P. H. M. Smith, who resided near, who had spent the past seven years in hunting for the treasure, as well as his father before him. This we did, visiting Mr. Smith next morning, who, contrary to expectations, was willing to talk upon the subject besides showing us several "genuine" marked stones found by himself in divers places, from the mouth of the Nehalem River to the little wind-locked cove north of Necarney, where the remains of an ancient vessel now lie.
We visited the pasture lot in which the chisel-marked stones were lying. These were immediately photographed by the writer, the cut of the "Glyphic Rock of Necarney" embellishing this article herewith. Many people have expressed surprise at this stone resembling a female head and wonder how it came about. This is easy, the plate being first vennetted of its background of fern and bushes and then half-toned as the reader sees it, leaving the stone as it really is. When found, these time and weather-beaten stones, four in number, were lying three or four feet deep in the ground in the shape of a huge cross, thirty feet in length by twenty feet in width. Since the first was found, some twenty years ago, they have been rolled around and sadly disfigured by some imagined smart fellow, for fun's sake, at the expense of Mr. Smith, to lead him astray in his search. The one shown herewith had evidently not been tampered with. Be these rocks tampered with or not, they were found and dug up directly west of a small stream which meanders down the mountain side to the sea, where, in the long ago, as the legends tell, a box of gold was buried, and a negro killed over it, and whose spirit is supposed to ever guard it from the curious.
These stones, Mr. Smith said, did not, in his way of thinking, relate to the treasure-the keystone having been found by him a quarter of a mile distant, buried to the depth of ten feet in the ground on top of a hill southeast. This keystone was also photographed, but for obvious reasons, Mr. Smith requesting it, it was not given pub- licity. This stone is not a put-up job on Mr. Smith, as many would like to make it, especially some would-be funny people, who take great delight, so I am told, in "pestering" the treasure-hunter, the ground having never been molested during the past century at least. From the top of this hill Mr. Smith pointed northwest, to where a dead
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spruce, old and time-eaten, rose above the underbrush, saying: "Over there, this keystone tells me, I will find another clue. When I find that one I will also find another; and so the quest will go on, from day to day, until I have unravelled the skein."
This keystone found by Mr. Smith has an intricate map traced upon its face, delicate almost as a spider's web. To photograph it, it was necessary to first pencil it, bringing out all lines as plainly as on the day the designer, be he Spaniard, pirate, or civil engineer, executed it. From the top of this hill we went back in the mountain, where the treasure-hunter pointed out a great hole made by a divining-rod enthusiast, who had delved for days and weeks and months in a place where the swinging plumb-bob had ceased its vibrations, and had come to a stop like the pendulum of a clock; and after weary, weary work, 'midst storms and blinding sunshine, he gave up the quest and went back from whence he came. Then we went to the top of the mountain overlooking the sea, and saw more work of other treasure-hunters, where they had blasted out great holes in the solid stone for this reputed wealth.
WRECKED BEESWAX AND BURIED TREASURE
Great interest has been taken in Oregon concerning pre- historic wrecks that occurred long before occupancy by the whites. The chief testimony as to them comes from aborig- inal sources and is sometimes lost in the mists of the primi- tive era. Pieces of obsolete wreckage have been resurrected from the sands and abundant evidence is found in masses of beeswax that is indestructible, found buried on the ocean shore south of the Columbia.
Beeswax is not given to romance, save, perhaps, when taking shape in Mrs. Jarley's waxworks, for commercial beeswax is one of the most unsentimental articles of com- merce. The original comb that holds the luscious stores of the preternaturally "busy bee" may touch on the romantic, or, as the taper used to illumine festive scenes before coal gas or fragrant kerosene and the electric lights of to-day became
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illuminators, might have been a theme to treat of, but the beeswax of Nehalem had pounded in the surf until battered and blackened out of all recognition, and had no essential claim for inspiration until its history developed to cause im- agination and fancy to wonder at its origin.
When Lewis and Clark wintered at the mouth of the Co- lumbia-a century ago-they learned the first we knew offi- cially of this flotsam of the seas, for they told of seeing it in the hands of natives. In 1814, one Henry, connected with the fur trade, who travelled and wrote of what he saw, published to the British world that beeswax had been dug out of the sands and was found drifting on the ocean shore, to his great wonder. It is thus evident that the memory of living man goes not back to the time when this beeswax was not known to the natives at the mouth of the great river.
My personal cognizance of it goes back to 1870, when my family made a summer trip from the Willamette to Tilla- mook, fifty or sixty miles south of the Columbia, and brought back small pieces of the beeswax, as also various traditions concerning the ancient wreck that might have left it there. The bones of two wrecks were then to be seen at the mouth of the Nehalem River, that enters the ocean a few miles north of Tillamook Bay.
The Indians then occupied their ancient fishing grounds and hunted in the coast range adjoining. Their story of historic wrecks varied. The sands of Nehalem seem to have rivaled Scylla and Charybdis in enticement to danger, for they rehearsed the story of a Chinese junk that met its fate on one side of the entrance, from which a number were saved. These lamented their fate and wept bitter tears as they looked over the sunset seas toward the shores of the
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Orient, where the waves were chanting the anthem of the "Nevermore," as friends unavailingly awaited their home- coming. But in time they made homes and found wives, leaving descendants, whose almond eyes tell of their Oriental origin to this day.
Many supposed that this beeswax, afloat and ashore, had been a Chinese product, and as time had broken up the frame of the vessel it had washed ashore. To give wider field for speculation, occasionally wax candles and tapers were dis- covered, but the pundits explained that the Chinese had use for wax tapers in the worship of Joss.
When placing a specimen of this wax in the hands of Professor Henry, of the Smithsonian, in 1872, this same legend accompanied it. But as time passed the stores of wax have increased. A fortunate ferryman, who plays Charon on the Nehalem, found stores of this same wax on his own land claim, above all ocean tides and an hundred yards or so distant from the beach. Here was a riddle worth unravelling!
This same beeswax has been found in blocks twenty by fourteen inches in size and three inches thick, and these blocks, it has been said by scientific men, bear cabalistic characters that no man can understand, though skilful artists have copied them. Thus the mystery grew ; and what made it even more mysterious, tradition did not limit Nep- tune's wreckage to that poor Chinaman, but told of other vessels lost here, no doubt belonging to western nations, as the men found dead on the sands were bronzed and bearded, as were the few who came ashore and tried to reach civiliza- tion by an overland route.
If this story of a white man's ship has any truth, then
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the beeswax story has greater room to bourge on and breadth to grow. Determined to investigate, about 1895, I went to Astoria and there met Mr. W. E. Warren, who proved to be a good witness. He had in his possession a block of this beeswax that his father received twenty-six years before from the master of a schooner he then owned that made trips out of the Columbia to near points along the coast. He had secured this great block of wax and brought it to his owner, whose son had kept it all this time as a message from the seas worth retaining until some solution might be had for the amazing story.
Though somewhat broken, this block was about the size alluded to, and must have weighed twenty pounds. On its upper face was a perfect capital N, cut wide and deep, at least five inches long, in exact shape of a Roman letter of this day. Over the N was a diamond of proportionate size.
At Portland, in possession of Mr. Adolph Dekum, is an- other block, also broken, with these same marks, also part of a capital figure 9, same size ; the block having broken off through this figure. Mr. Dekum also has the lower part of a great taper, two and a half inches at the base, ten inches of length remaining ; the top has been broken off. The wick in this is not all gone; usually the wicks have rotted and there is a cavity where the wick once was. He also has a ten-inch piece of a small taper.
Mr. Warren is much interested in all that is prehistoric, as well as in early history. He took me to Mr. Thomas Lin- ville, who also had a large block of same shape, much broken, with the letters I. H. very plain and large size. Close to the last letter the block was broken off ; he said there was an- other letter on the other piece. He had given this to a friend
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and went to get it to put the whole together, but his friend had sent it, as a curio, to his people in Philadelphia ; he re- membered that it had the letter N on it, and in the upper corner was a little S, with a stroke, like a dollar mark. The whole block had been marked I. H. N., with the small S and the stroke through it.
Mr. Linville tells a very interesting story. Both he and Mr. Warren have been on the ground and have seen how the wax was stored and found. In 1885, seeking rest and health, Mr. Linville went to Nehalem beach, and spent a month, stopping with Mr. Howell, who kept a ferry across the Nehalem. No wagon travel was possible along that mountain shore, but he ferried over footmen, horsemen and live stock. He had lived there about fifteen years. The wax was discovered before that, but since his time some- thing near 10,000 pounds had been found and marketed at twenty cents per pound.
The Nehalem courses down from the coast ranges, touches the base of Necarney, then turns south for three miles, parallel with and quite near to the ocean, then is lost in the sea. It is all this distance separated from the sea by only a narrow ridge that no doubt has been thrown up as sea beaches. At the base of Necarney there is a small bay ; along the ridge trees grow, among which the Nehalems built a village and made their winter home.
The Indians have legends of several wrecks that occurred in the olden time. The identity of the one that had the bees- wax is the important question. So long as only indistinct marks were found it was imagined that the Chinese junk would do; but as soon as other markings were discovered, then I knew that the Chinaman was not an interested party.
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Mr. Howell's story was, that seven years before 1895, a high wind without rain blew away the loose sand on the ridge 300 yards from his ferry ; he saw something exposed and found it to be the corner of a block of beeswax. He dug it out and found a large block, the same as had been washed on the shore by the tides. He dug and found more ; kept digging and found several tons of it in all shapes, sorts and sizes. Some had been run into boxes or kegs ; a part was in the great squares or parallelograms. A number were marked with large capitals I. H. S. with a cross, evidently standing for In hoc signo (In this sign) ; others had the letters I. H. N. for the Latin In hoc nomen (in this name) ; some had only the letter N., surmounted with a diamond. This, with the perfect tapers of different sizes, place it beyond all doubt that the beeswax was intended as stores of the Catholic mis- sions that were on the coast an hundred and fifty years ago.
The most perfect block of all was sold to Mr. Marshall J. Kinney, the well-known canneryman in the salmon trade. It was unfortunately burned when his factory was destroyed by fire some years ago. A very interesting question arises as to when this wreck occurred? How this ship came on this shore so long ago? And, what use any mission or class of missions could have had for so enormous a quantity of bees- wax?
A clear story, of Indian descent, traces an Indian family to a red-haired white man saved from a wreck about the year 1745. The traditions of wrecks say they occurred very long ago. The presence of that quantity of beeswax, found in a sand bank that is at least ten feet above the high- est tides, and an hundred paces from the present shore, chal- lenges the records of time as to how long it may have been
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since this beach has risen out of the sea, and so locate the era when this wreck could have occurred. It is well known that this western coast is gradually rising from the sea, but that it could rise fifteen or more feet before the cargo buried in the sands should be unearthed, that must have required a term that spanned more than a century.
Another version of this beeswax wreck was given me by John Henry Brown, who said he received it from Captain Hobson, long known at Astoria as a bar pilot, who narrated it to a group of pioneers assembled for the annual meeting at Portland in 1895. He had made visits to the Nehalem country, and on one of these excursions met one of the very first settlers, who said that many years ago the oldest of the Indians told a tradition handed down of a vessel lost very long ago; that all on board were lost and the vessel went gradually to decay ; then the beeswax began to come ashore. They did not know what use to put it to ; some tried burning it and found it was good fuel, but wood was plenty, so it was not valuable. They had an idea it might be bad medi- cine; at any rate they quit burning it. This is the only tradition coming from Indian sources. Since 1806 white men have known of the Nehalem beeswax ; geologists tell that the west coast is rising from the sea ; that the Willamette valley was once a sound, as Puget Sound is to-day; this wax was spread along the coast for fifty or more miles ; therefore it is not unreasonable to believe that the total quan- tity at the beginning was far more than we have knowledge of. But the most interesting question is: how came any such mission craft to be in this latitude a century and a half ago?
Long before Sir Walter Raleigh settled Virginia, or the
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Puritans landed in New England, Spaniards were sailing up the Pacific. The course of Spain's commerce was by the northern route, but what such a vessel was doing there in the middle of the last century is a question not easily answered. In that early day there were English, Dutch and other ships, depredating on Spain's commerce, capturing treasure ships from Panama to China, as well as ships loaded with silks and spices from the Orient bound to Panama, where these cargoes were taken by portage to the shore of the Atlantic and rovers had captured this mission ship and left the beeswax in her hold, and when the vessel was wrecked the same came ashore as we have found.
Mr. Silas B. Smith, of Astoria, wrote for the Native Son magazine concerning the vessel with the beeswax, as follows:
I think it not too hazardous to identify this wreck as the Spanish ship San Jose, which had left La Paz, Lower California, June 16, 1769, loaded with mission supplies for the Catholic mission at San Diego, Upper California, and of which nothing was ever heard after she left port. Every circumstance connected with the vessel and . her journey favors this solution. Her course on her voyage was toward the north. Her mission supplies would include beeswax or some other kind of wax as an article that would be needed for images, tapers, candles, etc. We find that some of the blocks of beeswax from this wreck are inscribed with the Latin abbreviations "I. H. S." ("Jesus Hominum Salvator"), which abbreviation is, I believe, largely or commonly used in the Roman Catholic Church.
This vessel falling in, in all probability, with a storm at sea while on her northward course, was driven away from her point of destina- tion and found her fate on the sands at the mouth of the Nehalem River. The matter of the finding of the wax some 200 yards from the sea is accounted for by the fact that the crew, perhaps, endeavored to save the cargo, and carried a part of it there, which afterwards became buried by the drifting sands.
Of the other wreck, on Clatsop Point he says :
This wreck I believe to be a Spanish galleon. Gabriel Franchère
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tells in his "Narrative" that, on their first voyage up the Columbia River, in 1811, at an Indian dwelling not far below the Cascades, they found a blind old man-presumably blind from old age-who, their guide said, was a white man, and that his name was Soto. And Franchère goes on to say: "We learn from the mouth of the old man himself that he was the son of a Spaniard who had been wrecked at the mouth of the river; that a part of the crew on this occasion got safely ashore, but were all massacred by the Clatsops, with the excep- tion of four, who were spared, and who married native women; that these four Spaniards, of whom his father was one, disgusted with the savage life, attempted to reach a settlement of their own nation toward the south, but had never been heard of since; and that when his father, with his companions, left the country, he himself was quite young."
CHAPTER XXII
JAPANESE WRECKS
BANCROFT gives a list of known wrecks of Japanese junks on the shores of Kamtchatka and America that goes to show that ships from the Orient were adventurous and traded far, at least left their bones on distant shores. I quote as follows: One at Acapulco in 1617; Bantam Islands 1613; Kamtchatka 1694, 1710, and 1812 ; Aleutian Islands, 1784 ; near Sitka, 1805; adrift 1813, and dozens more of later date. If not more correct, however, than the statement that one was wrecked on Point Adams, at the mouth of the Colum- bia, in 1820, loaded with beeswax, it is not of much value. Whatever wreck had the beeswax on was not Japanese, and was considerably south of there. The beeswax was sold in quantity to the fur traders at Astoria in 1814. We know from these wrecks of Japanese junks so early, that the Japanese were adventurous sailors ; it is possible that they knew of the west coast of America before the rest of the world did.
Dr. Mckay told me that about 1834 his father was sent to rescue survivors from a wrecked junk lost on the coast near Cape Flattery. The expedition by land failed; a vessel was sent there that made the wreck and finally ob- tained the three survivors, who were sent to England and thence home. This was going considerably out of the way to rescue shipwrecked Orientals, but that was characteristic of McLoughlin. There were several such wrecks along the
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coast of Oregon and Washington, and on Vancouver Island, that we know of. That wreck on the Washington coast had on board fine porcelain ware, some of which the Indians brought to Vancouver ; so the wreck became known. Kelly told of a wreck from Manila, lost in 1772, Spanish, with beeswax aboard, on the north of the Columbia, whereas I have given the story of Cullaby, telling of a wreck about that time, at Nehalem, 50 miles south of the Columbia.
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