USA > Washington > History of Washington; the rise and progress of an American state, Vol. III > Part 4
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OF AN AMERICAN STATE
little there was of it, was for the most part claimed by the Puget Sound Agricultural Company, and while the first settlers looked upon it with envy, it was soon found to be of little value for their use or that of any other. The valleys, where the soil was of unknown depth, and of almost inexhaust- ible fertility, were covered with an impenetrable jungle, mak- ing their inspection difficult if not impossible. The outlook for these people who had come so far, with so much courage and with such high hopes, was not encouraging. But they could not return. There was nothing to do but make the best of their situation, and they applied themselves to the work that lay before them with stout hearts and willing hands.
Their first concern was to secure food and shelter. Their supplies were, in most cases, exhausted. Their household effects, or most of them, had been abandoned from necessity on the trail. They must begin life anew, and almost with their naked hands alone. The settlers who had preceded them received them usually with a generous hospitality, but it was not to be imposed upon. It was too evident, in most cases, that those who offered so freely had little enough for themselves. But some of those who had come earliest were well supplied, and provided generously for all who came after. Among these was George Bush, the mulatto who had done so much for the Simmons party. Many of the earlier pioneers bear willing testimony to his generosity. Year by year, as he enlarged the area of his cultivated lands, he produced a larger and larger supply of grain, all of which he kept for the new arrivals. He would sell nothing to the merchants or to speculators at any price. The settlers he provided with food for their first winter, and with seed for their first sowing. If they had no money he still supplied
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THE RISE AND PROGRESS
them with what they needed, asking only that each should pay him when he could, and taking no security. Many of those who came earliest got their food for the first winter, and the small amount of seed needed for the following spring, from this man and in this way. And yet, under the law as it was at that time, he could not secure title to his own claim, nor would his oath be received in any court, because of his color.
To select the family claim-the land which a generous government was sometime to give these brave men and women, who had come so far and suffered so much to win an empire for it-was naturally the first concern of all. Nothing in the way of home making could be done until the home site was selected, and such steps taken as could be to secure it. Each was anxious to get something as good as was left-something if possible to accord in some degree with the ideals each had formed. This required exploration, and exploration required time. Meantime the family found a home with some settler, or lived in the wagon as it had done while on the trail, or perhaps in an abandoned shack that some earlier settler had partly built and occupied for a time, and then left for something better or more to his liking. "In our first cabin," says Mrs. Martha H. Ellis, "there was neither door, window nor fire place, and one row of shakes was missing from the roof when we moved into it. All the goods we had left were taken to it on a hand sled, and at one load." Mrs. Frost says her family first occupied the Bushelier cabin near Spanaway Lake. It had neither floor, door nor window, and only half a roof. During the three weeks they remained in it, it rained most of the time, but they got along very comfortably, doing their cooking in the unroofed part, and sleeping and eating
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OF AN AMERICAN STATE
under the roof. Home finding was particularly difficult for families like those of Mrs. Frost, where the husband and father had died, or been murdered by Indians on the way. But these were never neglected by their neigh- bors. Claims were selected for them, and willing hands helped to build their cabins. The children, if old enough, found employment in herding sheep for the Hudson's Bay Company, "which was paid for in salt salmon, potatoes and an occasional pan of flour," as one of those who had experience of this kind bears testimony, and sometimes with more prosperous neighbors. No one lacked the neces- sities of life, and none expected luxuries.
Fortunately, employment for the first winter after their arrival was not difficult to find, even in the earliest years. The Simmons party and those who followed them in 1846, and perhaps in later years, made shingles which found ready sale at Fort Nisqually. For these they sometimes received as much as $4.00 per thousand, though the price was generally lower, but as they were always taken at some price, their manufacture provided regular and fairly profitable employ- ment. After 1850 the demand for timber for wharf build- ing in San Francisco-and later for lumber and shingles, when numerous fires had destroyed the canvas city which first grew up there, and made it necessary to rebuild with more substantial material-furnished employment for all, at rates which kept many from doing more to improve their homes and claims than urgent necessity required. Loggers were paid $4.00 per day, and those who had ox teams, if they cared to go to the logging camps with them, could make several times this amount. Provisions of all kinds sold at high prices during these years. The demands of the home market steadily increased, and that of the San Francisco
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THE RISE AND PROGRESS
market increased much faster, so that after the first winter was safely passed the settlers found it more profitable to attend to the improvement and cultivation of their claims than to work for wages of any sort. In the early '50's, flour was worth $10.00 per hundred pounds, in the market at Olympia; salt pork, 20 cents per pound, eggs, $1.00 per dozen, butter, $1.00 per pound, and potatoes $3.00, onions $4.00, and beets $3.50 per bushel .*
As soon as possible after a claim was chosen, the family home was built. This was easily done. The settler's cabin has been much the same kind of structure in all the States of the Union, from the time of John Smith and Miles Stan- dish to the present day. A simple one-room house, built of rough logs, with the bark on, and roofed with shakes- that is, thin strips three or four feet in length, split from a straight-grained log. In Washington and Oregon these cabins were perhaps more easily built than in any of the older States. It was easy to find perfectly straight trees of the proper size, and most of them furnished several logs of the desired length. There was so little difference in the diam- eter at the ends of these logs that they were easily laid one above the other in regular tiers, until the desired height was
reached. The ends were notched, or in some cases simply squared, so as to permit them to fit closely together, and the spaces between them, if there were any, were plastered with wet clay, which effectually kept out both wind and rain. Rafters of round poles were then set up, the shakes laid over them in regular layers, and held in place frequently with small poles laid across them, as nails were not easily obtained. An opening was left at one side usually, for a door, and at one end for a chimney. The latter was built of stones, if suitable
* Meeker: "Pioneer Reminiscences of Puget Sound," p. 42.
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OF AN AMERICAN STATE
stones for the purpose were easily obtained; if not, stones were used only so far as they were absolutely required, and all above was built of sticks thickly plastered with clay-a "cat-and-clay" chimney, as it was called. The door opening was closed, at first-if the family were forced by circum- stances to take immediate possession-by a blanket or the dried skin of some animal. Later, boards were split and hewed as smooth as might be with an ax, fastened together by crosspieces made in the same way, perhaps with pins of wood. The hinges were stout pieces of rawhide, or old leather, and the latch was a heavy crossbar of wood, some- times fastened to the door with a simple wooden pin, and so arranged as to drop into a slot or bracket fastened to the wall. For a window-there was seldom more than one in the first cabin-a simple opening in the wall was sufficient, and in many cases these were large enough for only one pane of glass, when the glass could be got. If it was large enough for a sash, with four or six panes in it, and was provided with hinges so that it might be opened to let in the fresh air and the odor of the woods and flowers in the spring and summer months, it marked the family as a particularly favored one, and perhaps even as having some pretentions to aristocracy.
The furniture and interior finish of these cabins was as simple as the cabins themselves. In many cases there were no floors. The family often took possession and began to make themselves quite comfortable before there was time to make or lay a floor, and that was left to be prepared and put in at some more convenient time-on rainy days and evenings. As there was no floor it was easy to drive a forked stick in the ground, the width of a bed from the side of the cabin and the length of it from the end, and on this to lay two stout poles, the opposite ends of which were thrust
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THE RISE AND PROGRESS
between the logs of the cabin walls. Across these some other pieces of wood were carefully laid, and the whole was covered with a downy mattress of fragrant cedar boughs. On this was placed the carefully saved blankets and patch- work quilts, the snowy sheets and real feather pillows that had been saved when all else had to be abandoned in the desert, or lost on the trail, and the settlers slept in beds of their own, and under roofs of their own, for the first time in many weary months. For a table two stout pegs were driven into holes bored in the log wall, at a proper height, and across these was laid a stout plank, split and hewed out by the pioneer's own ax. Smaller shelves, made on the same pat- tern as the table, but placed higher on the walls, bore the carefully polished tin or pewter plates and cups, the knives and forks and spoons that had seen service in the camp on the way across the plains, and possibly a yellow earthen bowl or two, or a wooden trencher. A smaller shelf, that would some day be ornamented with a clock, when Seth Thomas should send his wares to the coast and increasing wealth should enable the family to own a timepiece, now supported the family Bible, and perhaps the dog-eared reader and arithmetic which father and mother had used in their school days and were now carefully saved for the children, while on a nail beneath it hung the almanac, put forth without money and without price by some benefactor of mankind who, after long and profound study and much experimenting with the simple alembic, shown in the picture on the cover, had discovered a universal remedy for all the ills that flesh is heir to. This shelf also held the neatly orna- mented pincushion, the scissors, the goodman's spectacles, when not in use, the camphor bottle, some spools of thread, and was withal a convenient place to put things that would
CEDAR STUMP RESIDENCE.
One of the first American families to arrive in the territory made their home for a time in a hollow stump like that shown in the engraving, and many others since their time have lived comfortably in similar habitations.
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THE RISE AND PROGRESS
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OF AN AMERICAN STATE
be wanted sometime, and but for which nobody would know where to look for them. The pots and skillets and the Dutch oven, or possibly a tin one that could produce biscuit of most amazing quality when required, had their place in a corner near the fire. A few three-legged stools, and in rare cases a roughly made rocking chair, if there were a grand- mother or grandfather in the family, completed the furniture. Such clothing as was not in daily use was hung on pegs driven in the wall, and in the more tidy homes, was covered with a sheet or blanket. The rifle, so essential a part of every settler's outfit, had its special place on two forked sticks, or perhaps a pair of buckhorns, fastened across the chimney, and near it the ever ready shot pouch and powderhorn.
In cabins such as these, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay were born, and Benton, Corwin, Thad. Stevens, Grant, Sheridan and Farragut, and other great soldiers, sailors and statesmen were not unfamiliar with life in them.
The first cabins built by the settlers were not all as roughly made nor as poorly furnished as those here described, and yet there are persons still living who can testify that the picture is not overdrawn. A few lived for a time in even more primitive style. The family of James McAllister was not very well satisfied with the claim they first selected on Bush Prairie, because of its gravelly soil, and the year after their arrival he chose another in the Nisqually Valley. "Mother disliked to stay alone with the children while father was building a house for us on the new claim," says Mrs. Hart- man,* who was McAllister's daughter, "and he laughingly told her that he had seen two hollow cedar stumps on the new claim that were big enough to live in, and if she would
* "Tacoma Ledger," March 19, 1893.
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THE RISE AND PROGRESS
live in them for a while he would take her with him. Mother told him she would go, so father scraped out the stumps, and made a roof for them, and mother moved in with her six children. She found it very comfortable, the burned-out roots making 'such nice cubby holes for stowing away things.' Mother continued to live in her stump-home until father built a house, the work being necessarily slow, as he had but few tools."
The McAllisters were not the only family in the Puget Sound country who made their home for a time in a cedar stump, though in any other country the story would seem most improbable. But west of the Cascades, in Washing- ton and Oregon, there is many a hollow cedar stump that is quite large enough to make one good-sized room. It is a peculiarity of the cedar in western Washington that it begins to decay at the heart. Many a tall tree is still stand- ing, and apparently growing as luxuriantly as its neighbors, that is rotten at the core and only its outer shell is sound and living. When the tree finally dies, through this process of internal decay, its rotten interior easily takes fire, when it is soon converted into a blazing chimney two or three hun- dred feet high. The immense trunk and its branches are quickly consumed, and only the hollow stump is left, its roots being converted into great charred tunnels, running some distance into the earth .* Not a few families have
* Winthrop had an experience with a fire in one of these hollow cedars during his trip in 1853, although it happened east of the Cascades, where the trees are smaller than on the west side. He had been compelled, by a storm, to camp earlier than he had wished, and had made his camp fire at the base of one of these dead cedars. "As I sat by my fire," he says, "thinking over the wide world, and feeling that I looked less blindly than once upon its mysteries, suddenly I was visited by a brilliant omen. "All at once the darksome forest became startlingly full of light. A broad glare descended through the lowering night, and shed about me a
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OF AN AMERICAN STATE
found in these hollow stumps a convenient shelter during their first winter in Washington.
Humble indeed was the beginning of pioneer life with these stump dwellers and cabin dwellers, but theirs was not a squalid poverty. Most of them had never been wealthy, or even well to do, as the term goes, but they had been richer in the homes they had left than they were upon their
strange weird lustre. I sprang up, and beheld a pillar of flame hung on high in the gloom.
"An omen quite too simply explicable. I had kindled my fire in the hollow of a giant trunk. Flame slowly crept up within, burning itself a way through the dry core, until it gained the truncated summit, sixty feet aloft, and leaped outward in a mighty flash. Once escaped, after its stealthy growth, the fire roared furiously up this chimney of its own making. The long flame streamed away from its gigantic torch, lashing among the trees and tossing gleams, sparks and great red flakes into the inner glooms of the wood. Nobler such an exit for one of the forest primeval than to rot away and be a century in slow dying. His brethren around watched sombrely the funeral pyre of their brother. Their moaning to the wind mingled with the roar of his magnificent death-song. Trust Nature. None of the thaumaturgists, strong in magical splendors, ever devised such a spectacle as this. I had fought my way, a pressing devotee into the inner shrine, unbullied by the blare of the tempest, and this was the boon offered by Nature to celebrate my initiation. * * * * *
"As I could not take my tall torch in hand and be a pathfinder, I patroled about the woods, admiring it where it stood, a brilliant beacon. The blossom of flame still unfolded, unfading, and as leaf after leaf fell away, like the petals of roses, other petals opened about the unconsumed bud. Firelight gave rich greenness to the dark pines. Sometimes a higher quiver of flame would seize an overhanging branch and sally off gayly; but the blast soon extinguished these escapes. Fire gnaws quicker than the tooth of Time. I was sitting, drowsy and cowering near my furnace, when a warning noise aroused me. A catastrophe was at hand. Flames grew intenser, and careered with leaps more frantic, as now with a riving uproar, the giant old trunk cut away at its base, cracked, trembled, swayed, and fell in sublime ruin. At this strange tumult, loud and harsh in the dull dead of the night, the horses, affrighted, looked up with the light of the flame in their eyes, and then dashed off furiously."-"Canoe and Saddle," pp. 263-5.
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THE RISE AND PROGRESS
arrival here. Though in many cases most of their valued effects had been abandoned on the trail, they wasted no time in idly bewailing their loss. If the good wife regretted the loss of the claw-foot table, the mahogany bureau with glass handles and its commodious drawers, the mirror which had reflected the faces of her ancestors, or the high- backed, broad-armed easy chair in which she had been rocked to sleep in days gone by, she consoled herself with making plans for something that would replace them. It was as useless to cry for lost claw-footed tables, and gilt- framed mirrors, as for spilled milk. It was far better to replace them with something that would serve the purpose, if it did not look so elegant. This they set to work to do. Possibly, like our first parents,
"Some natural tears they dropt, but wiped them soon; The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide."
In none of the older States did the settlers find it necessary to remain in these hastily constructed cabins for so short a time as in this. Indeed, within a very few years it become unnecessary to build them at all, except in places remote from the settlements. The primitive saw mill, built by the capitalists of New Market in 1846, was soon followed by others. Abernethy & Clarke had one running at Oak Point on the Columbia in 1849, and T. M. Chambers one at the mouth of Steilacoom Creek soon after. Captain Renton had a saw mill at Alki Point in 1853, and Yesler's steam mill at Seattle, the first in the territory, was started in March of the same year. The demand for lumber to rebuild San Francisco in the early '50's, and to supply the mines and farms of California, soon became so great that
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mills increased in number rapidly. Though built for the most part to supply an outside demand, their owners were not unmindful of the value of the home market. Buildings in the towns, and in the neighborhood of the mills, soon ceased to be constructed only of logs; and while logs were more plentiful than in any other place in the world, there were fewer log-built towns, and such log-built towns as there were, were smaller than in any other territory. There probably never were more than twenty or twenty-five log buildings in Seattle or Olympia, and fewer still in other towns.
Those who did not immediately replace their cabins with frame buildings, found it easy to secure lumber to make their homes quite comfortable. Floors were laid and doors and windows provided. Often a new and larger house was built, or the old one enlarged by adding another log house to it. The inside walls were hewed flat, if not very smooth, often by the light of the fire in the evening after the day's work in the clearing was done. Then the new wall was whitewashed and made to look very cheery and comfortable. A second floor was added, making a loft that was a convenient lodging place for the tired wayfarer who might come along too late to complete his journey during the day, and must never be turned away. A carpenter was secured for a day or two to make a cupboard, perhaps with a glass door in it; to add some pantry and other shelves; to make a real bedstead with high posts, and a trundle-bed that could be pushed under it and out of the way in the daytime, and in which the children slept at night. He also made a table of planed boards, with crossed legs, and some new stools that were almost as good as chairs; and when these latter were hung about with a calico valence and provided with a
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THE RISE AND PROGRESS
cushion, they were very comfortable, and made things look quite homelike.
"My family," says Judge Hanford, in talking with the writer of these early days, before this history had yet begun to take form, "was among the aristocrats of those times. My mother had brought with her a few yards of calico, which she used to good purpose to make our furniture comfortable. An old barrel was sawed in two, and the staves cut out of one side of it. This was mounted on legs and rockers, and when furnished with a cushion and covered with some of this calico, it made a sumptuous rocking chair. A rough frame was covered in the same way, and made an excellent lounge or sofa. When it finally got a feather mattress and pillow it was a fine thing to take a nap on, and I often was sorry when compelled to leave it in the evening and go to bed."
How much was done in simple ways to make the homes of the settlers cheerful and comfortable, only the settlers and their children know. There were few newspapers in those days, and such as there were, were very small, but the paper in which parcels came from the store was carefully saved, and when neatly folded, and the edges notched with the shears or scissors, it made a very nice ornamental covering for the unpainted shelves on which the tableware was put away when not in use. Other shelves were nicely covered with white muslin, and sometimes made gay with a bit of ribbon. A cracked or not too badly broken cup, or a glass bottle, was made to do duty as a vase, and when filled with wild flowers was a not incon- siderable ornament for the table, or the mantelpiece if there was one. The planting of flowers was not neglected, and the honeysuckle, the morning-glory, and ivy and other
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flowering or trailing plants soon hid the roughness of the exterior of these early houses as completely as the handi- craft of the housewife hid that of the interior. With so little did our heroic mothers make themselves comfortable and even happy.
In these cabins they were often left alone with their children for days and weeks together. The bread-winners of the family-the husband and father, and the older boys, if there were any-were compelled to seek work, and it was generally found in the logging camps, in the mills or in loading the waiting ships with lumber, and this kept them from home most of the time. Sometimes long journeys were necessary, to obtain supplies, or attend to equally urgent business. Mrs. Ezra Meeker was left alone with her baby, in their first cabin near Kalama, for a whole month or more while Mr. Meeker and his brother made a trip to the Sound in search of their claims; and in their second cabin, which was on McNeill's Island, she was left for even a longer time, with two children and a nurse, while Mr. Meeker went to Walla Walla to meet the first settlers who came through the Nachess Pass. Many other pioneer women had similar experiences. Their neighbors were few, and none of them sufficiently near at hand to render assistance in case of need. It is a curious fact that pioneers everywhere seem to have made little effort to be near each other, and the pioneers of Washington were no exception to the rule. The Simmons party, consisting of six families, took claims some of which were seven miles apart. Wanch and Ford stopped near Centralia, and Packwood in the Nisqually bottoms, while Glasgow and Rabbeson went to Whidby Island, where Col. Ebey settled later. In 1853 Col. J. Patton. Anderson, the newly appointed marshal of
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