USA > Washington > History of Washington; the rise and progress of an American state, Vol. III > Part 3
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Allen subsequently found several traders of a similar kind doing business along the trail between Fort Boise and the Dalles. How many of them made a final profit by their extortions none can now know. Some certainly did not. There is a limit beyond which such brutal exactions cannot always be carried with safety, and even the most experienced extortioner cannot always fix it at the furthest verge with that nicety which a soulless avarice suggests. Hungry men are sometimes hungrier than they look, and during these trying years it was not possible to tell by the looks of men how hungry their wives and children were. When mistakes were made with such men, the results were disastrous to those who made them.
Among all these trials there were some, not so tragic in character, which displayed the vices and the virtues, the pas- sions and affections of men and women in most curious and remarkable ways. Colonel Allen, in his manuscript, which well deserves to find a publisher, tells of finding a young
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couple on the trail somewhere between the Umatilla and the Dalles, who had been left there by the train with which they had so nearly completed their long journey. They had a few household goods, but almost no provisions, and they were absolutely without means of going farther except on foot, unless they could arrange with the owner of some jaded team who might still overtake them, to take them in. It was evident that they had only recently been married- perhaps just before starting. The man was despondent, but the woman was defiant, and even heroic. Had her little stock of worldly effects been larger, and had she been seated on top of it, instead of beside it, she would have suggested heroism on a monument facing all the world with defiance.
The husband was trying to arrange with those who were going by to take them in, but so far had met with no success. Allen's teams were too far gone to make it possible for him to give them assistance, and he had for a week or more been living on less than one full meal a day. But a packer had fallen in with him, some days earlier, who had several pack animals without loads, which he was taking down the river for a stock of goods of some kind. Allen at once saw what might be done, and he took enough interest in the pair to help them make their arrangements with the packer. The young man had no money; he had no goods to spare; the best he could do was to promise to pay when he could earn the money-to work for the packer until he had paid him, if he had any employment to offer. Allen had a little money left, and he proposed to make a loan of part of the sum needed if the packer would wait for the rest, and a bargain was arranged. The next thing was to get the goods on the backs of the animals, and in such shape that they could carry them.
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This was a work of no small difficulty, and the owner of the animals often swore, with a form of oath peculiar to the vast solitudes in which he had long resided, that such a thing as this or that piece of furniture had never been fastened to a mule's back before. At the bottom of the little heap was an iron Dutch oven, weighing probably forty or fifty pounds, and at this the packer stood aghast. It was simply impossible. His vocabulary of profanity, large as it was, was now nearly exhausted, but by all that remained of it he protested that he would never ask any self-respecting animal of his to carry it, and there was and must be an end of the matter.
Here the young wife became heroic again. The oven must go or nothing should go. All the packing might be unpacked. She would stay there on that desolate, dusty road as long as life remained to her, or the oven should go if she went.
Allen now saw, or began to see, what the trouble had been- or at least he believed he did. So taking the husband aside he said : "Can your wife make bread ?"
"Can she make bread ?" he retorted, indignation now beginning to get the better of his anxiety. "She can make as good bread as you ever ate, and she is proud of it. Her mother gave us that oven when we were married, and she will never part with it. That's why we were put out of our train. One thing after another had been thrown away to relieve the teams, and finally their owner insisted that the oven had to go, and we had to go with it, for she would not leave it."
Allen returned to the packer and opened new negotiations, which were at last successful. At the first camp the oven was unpacked and some bread was made. The packer ate of it until it seemed possible that a new baking would be
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required before the journey could be resumed, and thence- forth there was no trouble about the oven. Even the mule seemed to carry it willingly.
Those who arrived latest each year suffered more or less from lack of provisions. Some went hungry for many weary miles. Their teams were so nearly exhausted that their progress was necessarily slow, and there was no means of replenishing their scant stock of supplies except from the soulless traders, and even these could not furnish all with what they required. Now and then a fish might be caught, or procured by trade or purchased from some Indian, and sometimes edible roots or berries were found, that in some degree supplied the place of the food to which they were accustomed. But none starved. Each year, after the first settlers had arrived, relief parties were sent out both from the Willamette and the Sound, with sufficient supplies for. all so far as they could be reached.
With such toil, privation, sorrow and danger was this wonderful journey made by these heroic settlers. And finally when their jaded teams could drag them no further; when they were themselves worn out with the trials and privations of their journey; when their fainting hearts could hardly longer sustain them; when they had strewn the long road over mountains and plains, from the Missouri to the Sound, with their goods, and marked it with the graves of their dead, they reached the end of their journey. The oxen were unyoked for the last time. The last camp fire was extinguished. The few remnants of their goods that their wagons contained were unloaded at the door of some hospitable settler, and they prepared to look about them for the homes that were to repay them for all they had done and suffered.
CHAPTER XXXVI. THE SETTLER'S CABIN.
" What went ye out into the wilderness to see?"
T HE question, slightly changed in form, has been asked a thousand times of the pioneers, and to it they have given various answers, but rarely have they been such as would satisfy the ordinarily pru- dent mind. Few of them have perhaps been satisfactory to themselves. Why did they come two thousand miles through a wilderness, over mountains, across burning deserts, expos- ing themselves, and their wives and children, to a thousand dangers, seen and unseen-to storm and flood, to accident and disease, to attacks by marauding savages and prowling wild beast, to the insults of outcasts who were worse than savages, to starvation and death ? They were not crowded out of the places where they were. They could scarcely hope to find a richer or a fairer country than was lying all about them. For hundreds of miles through Iowa and Nebraska the feet of their oxen and the wheels of their wagons cut deep into ground as fertile as any on the earth, and as easily cultivated. Mrs. Elizabeth Dixon Geer of Yamhill County, Oregon, kept a diary while on the way out in 1847, in which she noted on May Ist: "Passed through Princeton, Bureau County, Ill .; rich soil; hundreds of acres not owned or culti- vated by any one." Eastern Iowa was but sparsely settled; in its western part there was scarcely a human habitation save the wigwam of the Indian. In all of Nebraska and Kansas, the greater parts of which are now covered yearly by fields of waving corn in which a man on horseback may easily conceal himself, and in all of the Dakotas, now among the most productive wheat States in the Union, there was not yet a single settler. Iowa had not population enough to form a State until 1846, nor had Wisconsin until 1848, nor
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Minnesota until ten years later. Illinois, which many of the settlers left to seek new homes in Oregon, had less than one-fifth as many people in 1850 as it was shown to have by the census of 1900; Missouri had a little more than one- fifth, and Indiana about one-third, as many.
It was not then because of overcrowding that people were seeking new homes in a distant country, and at so great a risk. It was perhaps, to some extent, because profitable employment was not then as easy to find as now. The use of steam, the invention of machinery, and encouraging legislation had not diversified the occupations of men as they have since done, nor had railroads and other improved methods of transportation made it possible to distribute the products of their industry, quickly, regularly and cheaply to market. Even farming was not as profitable as it has since become, except in the neighborhood of the most popu- lous centers, because of the difficulty and uncertainty of dis- tributing farm produce to those who were to consume it. The farmers of the old West and Northwest, in 1850, shipped their surplus products by the Great Lakes eastward, or down the Mississippi and its tributaries to New Orleans. Unless they were near the lakes, or on or near the bank of some navigable river, it was impossible to get their surplus to any market. There were then only 7,355 miles of railroad in the entire country, and most of that was in States east of the Alleghany Mountains. There were but 299 miles in Ohio, 86 in Indiana, 22 in Illinois, and 28 in Kentucky. In Ten- nessee and Wisconsin there was not a foot of rail laid yet, and the iron horse had nowhere crossed the Mississippi .*
It was believed by many that the lakes and rivers would always continue to be the main avenues of commerce. Strict
* A Cyclopedia of Commerce, Harper & Brothers, 1858.
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laws forbade the obstruction of their harbors and channels. In 1857 the owners of steamboats plying on the upper Mississippi, above St. Louis, attempted to enjoin the Rock Island Railroad from maintaining its bridges at Davenport, Iowa. Abraham Lincoln appeared in the case, as special counsel for the railroad, and made an argument before Mr. Justice McLean of the supreme court, sitting as circuit judge at Chicago, which the lawyers of that time seem to have regarded as one of his greatest efforts. It is to be regretted that this argument has not been more fully pre- served, for in it he seems to have pointed out what few, if any, at that time foresaw, viz .: that railroads were chang- ing the whole course of the internal commerce of the country, extending it into regions where it could not otherwise go, and opening up to settlement and cultivation vast areas that must, without them, remain desolate and uninhabited. His contention was that one man had as good a right to cross a river as another had to sail up or down it; that these were equal and mutual rights, that must be exercised so as not to interfere with each other, like the right to cross a street or highway, and the right to pass along it. But how must this particular crossing be made? Must the products of the boundless and fertile country lying west of the river, for all time be stopped at its western bank, unloaded from the cars, ferried over the river and then reloaded again? He then drew a vivid picture of the great West, and argued that the necessities of commerce demanded that the bridges across the river be a conceded right, which the steamboat interests ought not to be allowed to successfully resist, and thereby stay the progress of civilization and development in a great region where progress was only beginning .*
* Tarbel: "The Life of Abraham Lincoln," Vol. I, pp. 276-8.
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If the railroads did not then furnish transportation for the products of labor, neither did manufacturing furnish the home markets now enjoyed, or opportunity for profitable and diversified employment. The census of 1850 shows the capital employed in manufacturing to have been $530,000,000, as against $12,686,265,673 in 1905; the number of people employed was 1,050,000, as against 5,470,321; the wages paid $240,000,000, as against $2,611,540,000, and the total value of product $1,020,300,000, as against $14,802,147,087. The amount of capital employed in 1905 was therefore nearly twenty-four times greater than in 1850; the number of people employed was more than five times greater-the rate of wages more than doubled, and the value of products more than fourteen and a half times that of the earlier year, while the total population had increased only about three- fold.
Lack of profitable employment and lack of market therefore made these people discontented, and they saw no immediate prospect of bettering their condition where they were. They were accordingly impelled by circumstances such as do not at present exist, and with which people of the present day are not at all familiar, to seek some other region where their labor would be better rewarded. The writings of Kelly, the efforts of Wyeth, the letters sent back by the missionaries, some of which found their way into print, the reports of the early explorers, particularly of Lewis and Clarke, and to some extent in later years those of Fremont, the adventures of Captain Bonneville, and the story of the founding of Astoria, as told by Irving, various reports made to Congress, but more than all else the speeches made by Senators Benton and Linn of Missouri, Tappan of Ohio, Sevier of Arkansas, and others, in the debate on joint
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occupation, and the boundary treaty, had directed their attention to the Pacific Northwest. In these debates much interesting matter, descriptive of the country, its products, soil and climate, as well as its attractive location with refer- ence to the future commerce of the world, in the form of reports and letters, was read, printed and widely distributed. The public was not then as well supplied with reading matter as now, and public documents, particularly when they con- tained information that people were seeking, were more generally and more carefully read than at the present day. He who was fortunate enough to receive an official copy of a speech made by his senator or representative in Congress, not only read it himself, but passed it along to his less favored neighbor, and he again to some other neigh- bor until all had read it. The fact that we had no port on the Pacific that we could call our own must have impressed many. That England should assert claims here in opposi- tion to our own, and persist in dividing possession with us was particularly distasteful. Benton's suggestion that thirty thousand settlers, with their thirty thousand rifles, would prove our most effective negotiators for undisputed posses- sion of this country* was received with approval, and awoke a patriotic desire in many a breast to help found an American State on the Pacific Coast.
But it was Senator Linn's land bill more than all else that aroused the hopes of the great majority of those who finally concluded to seek homes in the far Northwest. As early as December 1839, he had introduced a series of reso- lutions in the Senate, asserting our indisputable right to the
* This was really Senator Tappan's suggestion, as he made it a day earlier than Benton did, though he spoke of 50,000 settlers and 50,000 rifles.
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whole of Oregon, and proposing "that six hundred and forty acres of land should be granted to every white male inhabit- ant of said territory, of the age of eighteen years, who shall cultivate and use the same for five consecutive years, and to his heirs at law in the event of death." In 1843 Senator Linn embodied a similar provision in a bill to provide military protection for the emigrants, and to extend the laws of Iowa over the new territory. This bill provided that each active settler, who was a citizen of the United States, or had declared his intention to become such, if married, might take a claim equal to 640 acres for himself and wife, and 160 acres in addition for each child under the age of 18 years, while unmarried men might take 320 acres each .* This was known as the donation claim act, but it did not become a law until September 27, 1850. There was as yet no home- stead law under which any citizen of the United States, or one who had declared his intention to become such, if over twenty- one years old, might acquire a quarter section of land any- where, if it was still owned by the government, by going upon and cultivating it for a period of five years. Our government had not yet adopted that enlightened policy by which homes have been provided for so many, for their benefit and its own. Such a measure had been frequently proposed, both in the House and Senate, but while it had been championed by many great statesmen like Benton, Seward, and Douglas, and many more of lesser fame, it had not been enacted into law. Timid men had feared the govern- ment could not afford such a liberal policy. Narrow men saw in it a plan to give away what belonged to all the States, under the pretense of benefiting poor but deserving indi- viduals, solely to hasten the settlement of the new States,
* Benton's Abridgment of the Debates in Congress, Vol. XIV.
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and for their benefit only. Some contended that laborers, whose industry was needed in the mills and various indus- tries of the East, as well as to build roads and canals and make other improvements, would thus be enticed away to newer regions where their labor might not be so well rewarded. The slave-holding element steadily antagonized it because it would hasten the development of new free States, which were already increasing too rapidly and breaking down that nice balance of power which they had so far been able to maintain in the Senate, but which it was becoming evident they could not maintain much longer.
But though these measures did not become law* the dis- cussion of them in and out of Congress for so many years, steadily and in an ever increasing degree, directed public attention toward the West. "Land for the landless" became a political shibboleth. Ever increasing trains of emigrants poured across the Alleghanies into the States and territories of the old Northwest, and out of them and through them came the tide which flowed over another and greater range of mountains to the far-away Pacific.
Those who went to California in 1849, and later years, went to find gold. They hoped to find it easily in the river beds, in the dust by the wayside, everywhere in fact, with but very little labor. Most of them were disappointed, but their disappointment was consoled in a considerable degree by the discovery that wealth, if not in gold nuggets, could be obtained from the soil with tolerable certainty, and by methods with which they were quite familiar. Thousands of them became wealthy through the cultivation of the soil,
* The homestead act did not become effective until May 20, 1862, more than a year after the war began.
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where one acquired a competence in the mines. But those who came to Oregon based their hopes on the soil alone. In it they confidently expected to find a competence, if not wealth, as others had found and were still finding it in the older States. They hoped it would prove to be a better soil than that they were leaving, that climatic conditions would be more favorable to its successful cultivation, and that its surplus products might be readily and profitably marketed, and, in some of these respects at least, most of them were not disappointed.
Burnett says there were three considerations that pre- vailed with him to make the journey; to assist in building up a great American commonwealth on the Pacific Coast, to restore Mrs. Burnett's health, and to become able to pay his debts. He was a lawyer, but had engaged in business and had been unfortunate. He owed so much that he could scarcely more than pay the interest, year by year, and saw no prospect that he would ever be able to do much better where he was. He therefore proposed to his creditors that he make this venture, and they consented that he should do so. Mrs. Burnett's health had long been delicate. He hoped that change of scene and change of climate might prove beneficial to her. The doctors said the journey would be likely either to kill or cure her. She was anxious to make the trial, and willing to abide the result, whatever it might be. If the Linn bill should become a law they would be entitled to take 640 acres of land for themselves, and 160 for each of their six children-1,600 acres in all, and this seemed wealth in itself. It was true that the bill was not yet law- might never become law, and it was also true that the govern- ment did not yet own, beyond dispute, the land which the bill proposed to give. It might never own it, but with the
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help of "thirty thousand settlers and their thirty thousand rifles," there was not much doubt about it. Of the thirty thousand rifles theirs would make one, and there was already evidence that others were coming to join them. The full thirty thousand might not appear, but there would be enough, and their confidence was fully justified. In fact less than six thousand, according to the best information we have, had arrived in and started for Oregon before the boundary dispute was adjusted by the treaty of June 15, 1846. But these were enough. 1385637
To these six thousand the country owes more than it is ever likely to pay. They indeed came to help found an American commonwealth on the Pacific. They came, as the Jews came from the Babylonian captivity, to help rebuild the temple of Solomon-to work with their trowels in one hand and their swords in the other-though their trowels were axes and their swords were rifles. They won not only a State, but they pushed forward the boundaries of the country to their natural limit, the Pacific Ocean. They won for the country its first possessions on this coast, and made possible all that it has since acquired, and they and those who followed them worked out for the nation a greater destiny than they knew or guessed .*
Many, no doubt most of those who crossed the plains and mountains in those early pioneer days, took little thought
* "An American settlement grew up at the mouth of the Columbia. Conventional agreements among themselves answered the purpose of laws. A colony was planted-had planted itself-and did not intend to retire from its position-and did not. It remained and grew; and that colony of self-impulsion, without the aid of government, and in spite of all its blunders, saved the territory of Oregon to the United States, one of the great events which show how little the wisdom of government has to do with great events which fix the fate of countries." Benton: "Thirty Years' View," Vol. II, pp. 477-8.
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about building States. Their sole object was to better their own condition. They were seeking homes, and hoped to find them where conditions would be more favorable to their prosperity than they were in the States they had left. Some sought a better climate, some better markets. Some hoped to escape the ague, then so prevalent in all the newer States of the old West. Some thought there would be great advantages in being near the ocean; they would be in touch with its commerce, and by it they would have access to "the world's markets." But alas for their expectations! The markets of the world were still a great way off-farther, in fact, than they were from the places they had left. The United States in 1850 had no trade with Japan, and but little with China or the islands of the Pacific. The Japanese of that day were quite as much of a hermit people as those of Corea. The markets of Europe were on the other side of the globe. All our trade with the outside world was done through our Eastern ports; that of the Pacific, and even the ports of the Pacific, remained to be built up; and few of those who came with such high hopes of benefit from and through it lived to see it fairly established, or even well begun.
All came for land, and of land there was plenty. But even that was disappointing. Most of it was covered with a growth of giant timber, which it would take a long time to remove, and with which few of them knew how to deal. In the States they had left it would have been immensely valuable-wealth in itself. Here it cumbered the ground, and for the time was worse than valueless. To be rid of it would require much patience, and a vast amount of labor. Claims which today are worth a fortune for their timber alone, were then avoided because too difficult to clear, and uncleared they were valueless because useless. The prairie land, what
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