USA > Oregon > Pioneer days of Oregon history, Vol. I > Part 8
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of them. Grey Eagle claimed to be a wonderful medicine. This warrior chief told his people he could swallow bullets as they came. As they drew near, this chief rode to the front to attract attention. Baptiste Dorion, interpreter, told Tom McKay of this boast ; Mckay responded: "Well ! Let him swallow this." He instantly fired and Grey Eagle fell dead from his horse, a bullet under his eye. Soon after Charley Mckay knocked Five Crows over with a charge from his double-barrel, not stopping to aim, firing off-hand, as many do. All the excuse the Indians could make was that the Mckays were too strong medicine for Grey Eagle and Five Crows. They thought it was supernatural skill.
Medicine men pretended to vast wisdom and supernal sci- ence. They did have some skill and knowledge as to the use of roots and herbs for medicinal purposes, and often suc- ceeded. While they commanded much respect, when their fame as medicine men was established, they were sometimes held responsible for the lives of their patients. Occasionally some one aggrieved, who had lost a friend, held the "medi- cine" accountable and killed the doctor to square the account.
In winter the same house would contain several families ; the roomy house would be so subdivided that each had their own premises. These houses were sunk a little in the ground, banked and covered with skins, and an aperture left open at the top to let the smoke escape. The stores of such a com- munity would be held in common. In spring they broke up and dispersed to hunt until June, when the fishing com- menced. There was a regular system in fishing and the fish were divided by the chiefs. Barriers were built in streams to control the movements of the fish, and all worked in har- mony. They fished four months, under absolute direction
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of the chiefs, then one-half went to hunt and the other stayed to fish. Half the women went to the root harvest and half to the berry fields. The fish were packed in bundles and the roots and berries in sacks made of rushes. At the fisheries they gambled, danced, raced horses and had all sorts of fun and frolic. When they hunted, later, they made parks and drove the game in, as has been described with the Clatsops. As the fall grew late they assembled again at the winter camp and made everything ready, bringing all the stores there to live on until spring came again. If supplies were in- sufficient, they sometimes suffered from short rations before the next season. There was constant work, for in the winter they made all sorts of utensils, garments, weapons ; to be successful an Indian had to manage well.
They cooked their food in kettles by throwing red-hot rocks into them from the fire, changing them until properly done. In summer they cooked roots and vegetables as they were gathered, making furnaces and baking on flat stones ; very ripe berries were dried in the sun. A dark moss, that grows on the pines, was gathered in autumn, pressed and cooked, then dried in the sun, to be eaten with fat of ani- mals, as we use butter. In this way their food was prepared in advance and ready to eat as wanted.
Mr. Ross says there were many points of virtue met with in Indian character; they were brave, generous, and often charitable ; less crime would be found in an Indian village of five hundred souls than in a civilized place of half that number. While most of the time at Okanogan, he offers that people as a fair type of the Indian tribes, though some were more savage. His conclusion was that the Indian is pretty much what the white man has made him.
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The Okanogans were so far inland and remote as to be free from conditions so prejudicial to the natives on the Lower Columbia. It is interesting to read the opinions of a well-bred man, and see that after many years he could de- scribe them so pleasantly as Mr. Ross has pictured the Okanogans, in the views we have quoted.
USE OF IRON AMONG INDIANS
Indians on Vancouver's Island were amused to see landed from vessels that came there black, rotten rock-as they called it. They expressed so much amusement that the offi- cers of the Hudson's Bay Company asked them what it was that so greatly amused them. They said they had sup- posed white men were a superior race, who knew everything, but had changed that belief since they were bringing to their country such a poor article of black rock, that was so soft it would not hold together. When informed that this black rock was to burn, that it would make a good fire, they said it was no use to bring it there from so far, as there was a plenty of it close by. Then they took them where coal cropped out of the earth and could be easily mined in large quantity. This was the first known of the presence of coal on Vancouver's Island, where are found some of the finest coal deposits on the Pacific Coast.
Excellent iron ore is also found there. The early history of the region shows that the natives possessed iron tools of their own workmanship, with which they hewed out canoes and did their building work. While this fact is well estab- lished, and was plainly told by those who recorded the events of early days, it seems singular that the same writers did
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not take more pains to learn particularly how those native workmen managed the ore to get iron for use, and by what process they worked the iron, when smelted, to forge their tools ; also, as to the extent to which those tools were used. That the Indians traded back and forth was well known, and possession of such tools at Vancouver's Island would have led to their use wherever they could have been obtained, as the value of iron was always above estimate with them. When traders came, and they could traffic with furs that seemed to cost them nothing for hatchets and axes, they abandoned their own crude tools and the manufacture became obsolete.
That they had much use for tools we can understand, as they cut timbers for lodge poles, made bows and arrows, and most of all, in construction of canoes. They made flints do much of this work, and used to burn out the great logs with fire to make the hollows of the canoes. Any reader who understands the use of tools can appreciate what toil it must have been to create a shapely canoe from an unshapely tree, hollow it out true, and have it so light they could carry it around portages and preserve its bouyancy in troubled waters.
Captain Cook-in 1778-noticed what Perez had noted in 1773, that the Vancouver Indians possessed tools of iron and copper; he supposed they were procured from some trader. Developments of to-day show the existence of both iron and copper in that region, and give occasion to believe they may have had tools of home manufacture. The voyage of Juan Perez-in 1773-told the first known of Nootka, so it is reasonable to believe that it was tools of their own make that Perez and Cook found the natives using.
CHAPTER XV
FEATURES OF INDIAN LIFE
IN the days when the Fur Company men were the only strangers and the aborigines were in full possession, they had not forgotten the ancient customs nor laid aside the re- ligion of their fathers. One great people kept the ocean gateway and held sway along the coast for an hundred miles, and inland for fifty miles. Above them the Wakanississes ruled another wild region, while the Cowlitz tribes held that river and far back for an hundred miles to Mount Ranier. The beautiful and extensive Willamette valley was held by the Calipooias. There were four nationalities and four dis- tinct languages.
In 1885 a gentleman from the Smithsonian Institution visited Oregon to study ethnology ; he reported that he had become greatly interested in the study of Indian languages, and was astonished at the refined tongue spoken by the Wascos and Warm Springs tribes. He had been given to understand that the language of all Oregon tribes was crude and scarce more elaborate than a language of signs. On the contrary, he found the language of the Warm Springs and Wasco tribes to be in many respects complete and con- structed on true principles, capable of conveying thought with accuracy and force. There was, however, much differ- ence in Indian languages spoken on the Columbia River, as some had moods and tenses and good construction, while others were as crude as possible.
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Among the various tribes there was maintained a system of barter and trade that amounted to a commerce of no small extent. The Indians east and west of the Cascades differed greatly and intercourse was not common between the sections. When the fur trade was first established its followers were told traditions, one of which was that from prehistoric time The Dalles was important as a rendezvous for the eastern tribes, where they met in the fishing season for exchange of products and trade. The Wascos were powerful and owned the fisheries. Other tribes may have had rights, but the Wascos owned the adjoining territory by in- heritance. The Warm Springs, Tenninos, Klickitats and John Day tribes had immemorial privileges, but other tribes had to come and trade with these for salmon.
Besides dried and smoked fish they put up pemican, con- sidered the most valuable. This was salmon meat cleaned of the bones, pounded fine, and then packed in hempen sacks of their own make. A sack of pemican weighed eighty to ninety pounds and was worth as much as an ordinary horse.
Those who came to trade brought such goods as they had to dispose of ; the Nez Percés and Cayuses had bands of horses ; the Klickitats were famous as makers of weapons of war or for the chase; the Klamaths always had dried veni- son and bear meats, as well as skins and robes ; the big horns of the mountain sheep had value to manufacture into plates and dishes. After the fishing season had progressed so that the Indians had a stock to trade on, then the various other tribes commenced to arrive. They came with ponies loaded with their own stuffs and went away with even heavier loads than they had bargained for. There was a great deal of sharp trading and bargaining.
INDIAN BURIAL
This shows how Indians disposed of their dead and is a picture of an island known yet as Coffin Rock, though the scaffolds are now all gone that were numerous in 1850. Mimaloose Island, like it, is below The Dalles.
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The question is often asked-and never answered-what sort of religion did these people have? They did have a religion, though it did not amount to a belief. The story of the Great Spirit of good, and the happy hunting grounds, belongs to the other side of the Rocky Mountains, and seems never to have crossed the Continental Divide. Our Indians believed in evil spirits, and were continually trying to exorcise them. Settlers on Puget Sound have wit- nessed this carried on in the most painful manner. They set to work to drive this creature of their imaginations, and of the imaginations of their medicine men, who are their crafty spiritual advisers, to drive it or them away from their dwell- ings. For this purpose whole villages have been known to go through distorted manœuvres too trivial to describe, rat- tling poles up the openings of their lodges for days and nights together, thinking they were working great medi- cine.
The idea of some occult influence that had controlling power over the spiritual and physical world prevails wher- ever Indians live to-day without having achieved civilized progress. This is their religion, and it takes the painful form of fear of evil and of evil spirits. All along the coast they believed in the power of these "medicines" to kill the soul, and, strange to say, while they have no bodily fear, they have the most painful apprehensions of the terrors of a lost soul. It is one of the tricks of these "doctors" to terror- ize their victims. If a person is refractory, and does not comply with their demands, they will approach with ap- parent friendliness, and with a quick motion toward the person's heart pretend to seize something and put it into a box or bottle. Then say: "There! I have your soul, and
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shall keep it there, and after so many days-if you con- tinue to disobey my orders-I shall destroy it forever !" This is the most fearful ordeal any Indian can endure. In- stances are given where persons have been so terrorized as to fall dead with the agony of their fear. This gives the medi- cine man more reputation. Their superstition enters into everything they do and leaves them the prey to designing men.
Indian doctors prepare themselves for their profession with elaborate incantations and many singular rites. If there is any lonely spot where Nature has experienced some fearful cataclysm, such as the wonderful Crater Lake, in Jackson County, Oregon, that is the spot where they go to meet and combat with spirits and learn wisdom of the great medicines. It is claimed such encounter and overcome evil spirits, and, as reward, learn the wisdom of the great and wise who have lived before their time. Then they go forth to combat evil spirits so long as they may live. This was all the religion possessed by these tribes. There was no stated worship. The images on the prows of their war canoes were in some sort a representation of their God of War.
This brief sketch shows that the natives were industrious and pursued a system in providing for their wants. They possessed graceful and useful arts, and were not the irre- sponsible outcasts many have supposed. They had general information, and some lines of work that might be called trades. The industrious ones prospered, as did the Mult- nomahs-or Wakanississes-whose fate was a tragedy.
Gambling was a vice they did not have to learn from the whites. At these yearly gatherings they often gambled
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away every last thing they had. A brave would come there outfitted with great style ; his henchmen would drive there a large band of horses, often loaded with cargoes of value. Sometimes this same brave would bravely foot it home, if he couldn't borrow a horse to ride on. They would gamble off the very shirt on their backs. Horse racing was another strong feature of those times ; many men among the Nez Percés and Cayuses bred horses as well as our famous breed- ers to-day. They not only had pride in their stock, but showed science in breeding them, selecting the finest stal- lions for the stud and breeding the mares with much care. The science of horse breeding, and even the handling of racers on the track, was not all brought across the plains, but was known and practised by the Indians we so much deprecate centuries before our trotters and thoroughbreds came into the arena.
Such was the state of trade and commerce among the native races before our day. It is well enough to study life among these savages and learn to respect them for the in- dustry and perseverance they showed. Their lives were often well ordered; every month and year brought routine of duties and labors that imperatively demanded attention. The edict that went forth, "By the sweat of thy brow shalt thou earn bread," included the American Indian. "He that will not work, neither shall he eat !" meant dwellers on the Columbia and Willamette. It was always an unpleasant fact with the native race that their women were not as chaste as they should be ; it was handed down as a tradition of the "Dalles Rendezvous" that all ideas of morality vanished as the riot of gambling and horse racing became furious. The assemblage of tribes included mostly those who lived west of
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the Bitter Root Mountains, in what is now Oregon, Wash- ington, and part of Idaho.
It has been unsatisfactory, this effort to state the condi- tion of the native race upon the advent of the whites. His- tory comes in very uncertain guise and there is but little of it. The story is so interesting that we would like to do it much fuller justice. We can, however, console ourselves with the reflection that the first settlers along the Atlantic seaboard left little more or fuller trace and tradition, con- cerning the Indians of that coast, than we shall be able to give of the aboriginal nations whose homes were in the Pa- cific Northwest a century ago.
CHAPTER XVI
GREAT ANNUAL FAIRS OF THE INDIANS
LONG ages before white men visited this Northwest of the Pacific, the life and customs of the Indians included the holding of great annual gatherings, or fairs, for purposes of trade. One of these meeting places was at The Dalles, occurring there as late as the early days of the fur trade. Another place was in the Yakima Valley, about one hundred miles north and east of The Dalles. Yet another was two hundred and fifty miles south of the Columbia, in the Sprague River valley. One of these Yakima gatherings was described by Alexander Ross as occurring under very critical conditions in his own experience, in 1814. The fair held at The Dalles was described to me in 1887 by Dr. Wil- liam Mckay ; the traditions of Yainax, in Sprague River valley, I received in 1873 from the Klamath and Modoc chiefs, whose tribal homes were there, or near there, whom I met at the Agency on the site of the ancient meet- ing ground. They seem to me to be among the most inter- esting of all the memorials handed down to us from the past. The narrative of Mr. Ross naturally takes precedence, and I will quote from his volume in his own words :
FAIRS IN YAKIMA VALLEY
About the year 1814, Alexander Ross, when on an expedi- tion to the far north, found that more horses were needed
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to carry his packs, and went to the Yakima country to pur- chase them. The Indians there were dangerous, because of fatal affrays that had occurred between them and the whites. Friendly Indians, from other tribes, took great trouble to send him word that their lives would be lost if they went there, but they went. He had with him Thomas Mckay, then a clerk, and two Canadians with their Indian wives- Cayuses and Nez Percés. Other warlike tribes had gathered there to dig camas and other roots, and for general traffic and pleasure. He found an immense town of native lodges, thought to extend six miles square, and to contain 3,000 men and families. To give an idea of these great native gatherings, and of Indian character as well, we cannot do better than state the case in Mr. Ross's own words. He says :
A camp of the true Mamaluke style presented itself, a grand and imposing sight in the wilderness, covering more than six miles in every direction. Councils, root gathering, hunting, horse racing, gambling, foot racing, singing, dancing, drumming, yelling, and a thousand other things going on which I cannot mention. The din of men, noise of women, screaming of children, trampling of horses and howling of dogs, cannot be described. We advanced through groups of men and bands of horses until we reached the centre, the chief's tent admonishing us to pay our respects. Our reception was cool; the chiefs were hostile and sullen. "These are the men who kill our relations and cause us to mourn," said they.
The moment we dismounted we were surrounded, and the savages, giving a few war whoops and yells, drove our animals out of sight. Without delay I commenced a trade for horses, but every horse I bought was driven out of sight with jeers and yells. I took no notice, but continued to trade while an article remained, taking no notice of their acts. Two days and nights elapsed without food or sleep. They refused us food and deprived ns of the last. The third day I dis- covered that the two women were to be killed or made slaves. Sur- rounded for miles on all sides, it was difficult to escape. I said to
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them: "Cross the mountains to the north, go down the first river to the Columbia, and there wait for us." We parted, not hoping to meet again. One of them had a babe at the breast to increase the danger. The fourth day we tried to cook something, but half a dozen spears bore off the meat in the kettle. A chief snatched a knife out of the hand of one of my men, who said: "I'll have my knife, life or death." On this the chief raised the knife to strike, and I grasped my pistol. We were desperate; an instant would have seen the robber chief dead, and our lives forfeited, when an inspira- tion came to me like a flash. I let go the pistol and drew instead a fancy-mounted knife, and presented it to him, saying: "There, my friend, is a chief's knife. I give it to you. That is not a chief's knife; give it back to the man." He took the knife, looking from one to the other, but sullen and savage. A multitude had thronged around us; the moment was critical; fate hung by a thread. All eyes were fixed on the chief. At last he handed the man his knife, and turning mine round and round, looked to his people and exclaimed: "Look, my friends, at the chief's knife!" He was delighted. All enjoyed the toy, and overjoyed, he harangued the multitude in our favor.
They were no longer our enemies, but friends. Others followed with speeches in our favor. The pipe of peace went round. I gave the six leading chiefs each a small looking-glass and a little vermilion, and they presented me with two horses and twelve beavers, while the women brought us a variety of food. I made a speech in turn, and asked how I should explain to the great chief about the horses I had bought of them. Their pride was touched and the chief undertook to see them collected. It was then sundown; he mounted his horse and I one just given to me, and the nocturnal adventure began. We visited every street, alley, hole and corner of the camp, going in every possible direction; the constant cry was, "Deliver up the horses!" There was gambling, scalp dancing, laughing and mourning; crowds were passing, flags flying, horses neighing, chained bears, tied wolves, all of them grunting and growling. To complete confusion the night was dark. I made a present after every speech, and began to think he made more than were necessary.
When finally Ross had his hundred horses ready it was almost impossible to get away on account of the jeering
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crowd of savages surrounding them. They finally succeeded and their escape seemed a miracle. When they reached the place where they expected to meet the Indian women, they found them waiting with a canoe to ferry them across. They had reached there only an hour before. At the Yakima camp they found horses they could ride, so reached the mountains, but had been three days without fire or food.
GATHERINGS AT YAINAX
A beautiful butte rises at Yainax, about one thousand feet high, in the valley of Sprague River, that empties into the Upper Klamath Lake, about fifty miles north of the California line. The valley is a few miles wide, surrounded by well grassed hills, with no forests in sight, nor growths larger than scattering junipers that fleck the hillsides. Here was the ancient seat of power for the Modocs, their kindred were near by on the waters of Klamath Lake. Not far, on the west, rise the bold fronts of the Cascade Range in the wildest form, for these mountains are equal in rugged grand- eur and savage wild to any on the globe. The elevation of the country on the east averages 4,000 feet above sea level, so its products are limited in variety.
Salmon and other fish find their way up the streams ; the ranges and plains afforded every species of game, from the fleet antelope of the upland pastures to fierce grizzlies, whose lairs were in the mountain recesses. The big-horn sheep and mountain goat had homes there, as well as deer and lordly elk. It corresponded with the region north of the Columbia, on the Yakima, where Mr. Ross met his sharp adventure half a century before I interviewed the chiefs of Klamath Land.
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The Modoc war was over in 1873 ; the army had marched north with its captives to the rare spot bordering Upper Klamath Lake and under the shadow of the ranges where Fort Klamath was to witness the trial and execution of Cap- tain Jack. I had been with the army during the campaign of the Lava Beds as correspondent for a New York journal, and was waiting the issue of the trial, when my friend, O. C. Applegate, connected with the Indian service, invited me to visit with him the agency at Yainax, that was under his charge, to interview the Modoc chiefs at their home on that reservation.
That summer day we interviewed them, heard their story of both past and present, and learned the beautiful tradi- tion of the time when their fathers lived the primitive life, with no knowledge of white men and their aggressive civ- ilization ; a time when beautiful Yainax was indeed what its name portends, "The Mountain," to which all tribes for hundreds of miles about sent annual delegations for various purposes of trade and festival. Here they exchanged products, sold horses and carried on all manner of native commerce. Here they also gambled with all the ardor of Indian nature, for gambling was one of the active traits of the wild Indian-his great passion.
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