History of the Yakima Valley, Washington; comprising Yakima, Kittitas, and Benton Counties, Vol. I, Part 14

Author: Lyman, William Denison, 1852-1920
Publication date: 1919
Publisher: [Chicago] S.J. Clarke
Number of Pages: 1134

USA > Washington > Benton County > History of the Yakima Valley, Washington; comprising Yakima, Kittitas, and Benton Counties, Vol. I > Part 14
USA > Washington > Kittitas County > History of the Yakima Valley, Washington; comprising Yakima, Kittitas, and Benton Counties, Vol. I > Part 14
USA > Washington > Yakima County > History of the Yakima Valley, Washington; comprising Yakima, Kittitas, and Benton Counties, Vol. I > Part 14

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MEASURED THE RIVERS

The captains measured the rivers, finding the Columbia 960 yards wide and the Snake 575. From their point of observation across the continued plain they noted how it rose into the heights on the farther side of the river, those

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which we now call "Horse Heaven." They had already taken into account the far distant mountains to the south, the present named Blue Mountains, which they thought about sixty miles distant, just about the right estimate. It is to be hoped that it was one of the perfect days not infrequent in October and that the azure hues of those mountains which we have today were before them in all their rich, soft splendor. They noted in the clear water of the river the in- credible number of salmon. The Indians gave them to understand that fre- quently in the absence of other fuel they burned the fish that, having been thrown out upon the bank, became so dry as to make excellent fuel.

These Indians were of a tribe known as Sokulks. According to the de- scription they were hardly so good-looking a people as the Chopunnish, but were of mild and peaceable disposition and seemed to live in a state of com- parative happiness. The men, like those on the Kimooenim, were said to con- tent themselves with a single wife. The explorers noted that the men shared with their mates the labor of procuring subsistence more than is usual among savages. They were also very kind to the aged and infirm. Nor were they inclined to beggary. All things considered the Sokulks at the junction of the big rivers were worthy of much esteem.

Captain Clark made a journey up the Columbia in the course of which he made sundry interesting observations on the Indian manner of preparing salmon for preservation as well as present use. At one point he entered one of the mat houses. He was immediately provided with a mat on which to sit and his hosts proceeded at once to cook a salmon for his repast. This they did by heating stones and dropping them into the buckets of water which contained the fish, adding stones to maintain the boiling of the water until the fish was properly cooked. After sufficient boiling these hospitable natives placed the fish before Captain Clark. He found it excellent. One thing which Captain Clark noticed at this point, was the large number of Indians blind in one or both eyes and having decayed teeth. He attributed the blindness to the glare of the sun on the unprotected eyes, and the decay of teeth to the habit of eating roots without cleaning them of the sandy soil in which they grew. It would appear from the topography of the journal that Captain Clark went some distance above the present location of Kennewick, for he describes a large river flowing from the west, known to the Indians as Tapteal. This was of course the useful and beautiful stream which is the vital feature of the valley described in this. history, the Yakima. The fact that the Lewis and Clark party learned of it under the name of Tapteal seems to conform to the fact which we stated on the authority of Frank Olney in Chapter II, Part I, of this volume, that the word Yakima is a new name. The Tapteal appears at many points in later reports of explorers. On page 641 of Coues' edition of the Lewis and Clark journals, we find other forms of the name: Tapteel, Tapteat, Taptete, Tapatett, and Taptul. It does not appear from the journal that the party ascended or even that they crossed the Tapteal, but they were undoubtedly the first white men to see it.

At this point of the journey the party secured an abundant supply of "game," grouse (or rather what we now call prairie chickens), ducks, and also a "prairie cock, about the size of a small turkey," (sage hens, as we call them). The journal states that they found none of these last except on the Columbia.

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In this connection it is interesting to note that some Indians say that genuine wild turkeys were known in the Yakima Valley in old times.

While camped at the junction of the rivers the men were busily engaged in mending their clothes and traveling outfits and arms and otherwise prepar- ing for the next stage of the journey. One very interesting feature of the stay here was the fact that one of the chiefs with one of the Chimnapum, a tribe farther west, provided the party with a map of the Columbia and the nations on its banks. This was drawn on a robe with a piece of coal and afterwards trans- ferred by some one of the explorers to a piece of paper. They preserved it as a valuable specimen of Indian delineation. Inspection of the copy of this map shows a remarkable general accuracy.

On October 18th, the party packed up and pushing off into the majestic river proceeded downward toward the highlands, evidently what we call the Wallula Gateway. In the general journal, called the edition of 1814, in which the contributions of all the party are merged, there seems to be some confusion as to the mouth of the Walla Walla River. The record mentions an island near the right shore fourteen and one-half miles from the mouth of Lewis' River and a mile and a half beyond that a small brook under a high hill on the left, "seeming to run its whole course through the high country." This evidently must be the Walla Walla River, though it can hardly be called a "small brook," even in the low season, and it flows quite distinctly in a valley, though the high- lands begin immediately below. They also say: "At this place too we ob- served a mountain to the southwest the form of which is conical, and its top covered with snow." This is obviously incorrect, for Mount Hood, which is the only snow mountain to the southwest visible any where near that place, cannot be seen from the mouth of the Walla Walla except by climbing the highlands. They might have seen Mount Adams to the northwest.

On the next day, October 19th, the party was visited by a chief of whom they say more and tell more on their return. This was Yelleppit. They de- scribed him as a "handsome, well-proportioned man, about five feet eight inches high and about thirty-five years old, with a bold and dignified countenance." His name is preserved in a station on the S. P. S. R. R., located just about at the place where the party met with this chieftain.

After the meeting with Yelleppit the party once more committed them- selves to the downward rushing current of the Columbia, where it now skirts Benton and Klickitat counties on its right bank, and passed beyond the range of our story. Of the interesting details of their continued journey down the river and the final vision of the ocean, "that ocean, the object of all our labors, the reward of all our anxieties," we cannot speak.

START ON RETURN JOURNEY

Having spent the winter at Fort Clatsop, about ten miles from the present Astoria and nearly the same distance from the present Seaside, they left Fort Clatsop for their long return journey, on March 23, 1806. They saw many interesting and important features of the country on the return, which they failed to note in going down. Among these, strange to say, was the entrance

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of the Willamette, the largest river below the Snake. The return was made as far as the "Long Narrows," (The Dalles) with the canoes, but at that point they procured horses and proceeded thence by land, mainly on the north side of the river. Reaching the country of the "Walla Wallahs," they again came in contact with their old friend, whose name appears in that portion of the jour- nal as Yellept. They found him more of a gentleman than ever. He insisted on his people making generous provision for the needs of the party, and gave them the valuable information that by going up the "Wolla Wollah" River and directly east to the junction of the Snake and Kooskooskee they might have a route full of grass and water and game, and much shorter than to follow the banks of the Snake River. Accordingly crossing from the north bank of the Columbia, which they had been following, they found themselves on the Wolla Wollah. They do not now describe it as before as a "small brook," but as "a handsome stream, about fifty yards wide and four and a half feet depth." They got one curious misapprehension here which was held later by explorers in general in regard to the Multnomah or Willamette. They under- stood from the Indians that the Willamette ran south of the Blue Mountains and was as large as the Columbia at the mouth of the Wolla Wollah, which they say was about a mile. They inferred from the whole appearance, as the Indians seemed to explain it, that the sources of the Willamette must approach those of the Missouri and Del Norte. One quaint and curious circumstance is men- tioned at this stage of the story, as it has been, in fact, at various times. And that is the extravagant delight which the Indians derived from the violin. They were so fascinated with the sound of this instrument and the dancing which accompanied it that they would come in throngs and sometimes remain up all night. In this particular instance, however, they were so considerate of the white men's need of sleep that they retired at ten o'clock.

We cannot give further space to this monumental journey. We must con- tent ourselves, in this farewell glance at this first and in many respects the most interesting and important of all the early transcontinental expeditions, with saying that the effects were of momentous, even transcendent value to the development of our country. Without the incorporation of Old Oregon into the United States, we would in all probability not have got California, and with- out our Pacific Coast frontage, think what a crippled and curtailed Union this would be! We would surely have missed our destiny without the Pacific Coast. The Lewis and Clark Expedition was one of the essential links in the chain of acquisition. The summary of distances by the party is a total of 3,555 miles on the most direct route from the Mississippi at the mouth of the Missouri, to the Pacific Ocean, and the total. distance descending the Columbia waters is placed at 640 miles.

JEFFERSON'S TRIBUTE TO CAPTAIN LEWIS

President Jefferson did not exaggerate the character of this expedition in the tribute which he paid to Captain Lewis in 1813, when he expressed himself thus: "Never did a similar event excite more joy throughout the United States ; the humblest of its citizens have taken a lively interest in the details of this journey and looked with impatience for the information which it would fur-

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nish. Nothing short of the official journals of this extraordinary and interest- ing journey will exhibit the importance of the service, the courage, devotion, zeal and perseverance under circumstances calculated to discourage, which ani- mated this little band of heroes, throughout the long, dangerous and tedious travel."

Though many additional valuable discoveries of this land where we live were made by later explorers, Lewis and Clark and their assistants may justly be regarded as the true first explorers. They were moreover the only party that came purely for exploration. Later parties, though making valuable ex- plorations, did such work as incidental to the fur trade. With the completion of this great expedition, therefore, we may regard the Era of the Explorers completed and that of the Fur Hunters begun.

Our special interest in this volume is the Yakima country and its inhabi- tants as noted by these first explorers.

It does not appear that the Lewis and Clark party entered into the pre- cincts of the three counties covered by this history further than the edge of Ben- ton, apparently from about the vicinity of Kennewick and thence onward to the Yakima River and possibly toward Richland on their entrance to the country. Then when they resumed the journey after several days' pause at the junction of the big rivers, they seem to have touched the land at various points from about the vicinity of Hover downward, though their journey was by boat. On the return they came with horses from near the present vicinity of Fallbridge on the north side of the Columbia to a point opposite the mouth of the "Wolla Wollah," where, with the assistance of Yellept, they crossed to the southern shore.

At all events we may be assured that the eyes of Lewis and Clark and their associates were first to gaze upon the sublime river toward the azure hued Rattlesnake Mountains and then to pass through the Wallula Gateway to the broad plains of the Umatilla and the arid slopes with which the Horse Heaven fronts the south.

CHAPTER V /

ERA OF TRAPPERS, HUNTERS AND TRAIL-MAKERS

STARTING OF THE FUR TRADE-PROFITS OF THE BUSINESS-AMERICAN FUR COM- PANIES-FOUNDING OF ASTORIA-THE FREE TRAPPERS-RECORD OF DISASTER- SOME STORIES OF THE FUR TRADERS-ROSS' STORY-HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY- THE BOATS OF THE TRADERS-LATER AMERICAN FUR TRADERS-SOME UNIQUE. FREE TRAPPERS

In the preceding chapter we have given a view of the earliest discoveries by sea and land. By 1806 the general features of the continent both on coast and. interior were measurably well known. With the discoveries of Meares and Vancouver and Broughton, the English explorers, and Gray and Kendrick and Ingraham, the Americans, and Heceta and Perez and Bodega, the Spaniards, and La Perouse, the Frenchman, and Behring, Schelikoff and Resanoff, the Rus- sians, and many more of those nations, the shore line all the way from the Arctic circle to Mexico had been traced and mapped. By the explorations of Malaspina the old myth of Anian had been finally exploded. The Inland Pas- sage, now the scene of many summer excursions to Alaska, had been definitely located, and it was understood that the old legendary voyages of Juan de Fuca and Maldonado and Fonte had no other basis of fact than the possible passage- through a maze of islands from one section of the Pacific Ocean to another. Such was the status of discovery on the coast.

With the monumental expedition of Lewis and Clark the location of the mountains, Rocky and Cascades, and some of their spurs, and the relations of the two great river systems, the Missouri and Columbia and their tribu- taries, to each other and to the mountains, had been determined in a general way. Such were the results of exploration. But one of the great working facts of the progress of geographical discovery has been that the main incen- tive was not discovery, pure and simple, but was some ulterior political or com- mercial end, or both of these combined. In the history of the discovery of the American Continent we find two of those ends playing a tremendous part in determining the aims and movements of discoverers.

Political and commercial aims were curiously interwoven in these two great quests, and ultimately social and even religious aims added their part to the complexities and evolutions and involutions of these fundamental aims. These two great quests were for gold and for furs.

Hence, we find ourselves on the threshold of an inquiry into the outline features of one of these great quests, that for furs. We shall for the time dismiss the history of the gold hunters, fascinating as it is and tremendous as has been its part in human affairs, with the observation that the Spanish

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and Portuguese were guided almost entirely in their explorations and policies in South America, Mexico, and the southern part of North America by that mysterious lure of the precious metals and precious stones which stamped out of existence the beautiful and interesting semi-civilizations of Peruvians and Aztecs and ultimatley hastened the downfall of Spanish despotism. By one of those mysterious allotments of fortune or Providence which constitute the turning points of history, the gold quest and discoveries in North America were postponed till the middle of the Nineteenth Century, with the result that this continent became Anglo-Saxon rather than Spanish, Republican rather than Monarchical.

What that means in the present great crisis of human history is beyond the scope of analysis or imagination.

The quest for furs, while less dazzling and dramatic than that for gold and diamonds, has been more steady and continuous and has probably played even a greater part in the affairs of the world. The gold hunt was mainly Spanish and Portuguese, and that for furs mainly French, English and Rus- sian, while the Americans, latest to arrive, have been distributed in both fields. And, in fact, we must avoid national generalizations in such a view as this. None of the people of Europe or America have shown themselves indifferent to the attractions of either furs, gold, or gems.

STARTING OF THE FUR TRADE

The first great market for furs was China, and the Russians were first to enter it. The crew of the ill-fated and heroic Russian explorer, Vitus Behring, beleaguered on the desolate island which bears his name and where he died, discovered the sea otter skins, and when they escaped from their rocky prison, they conveyed many of these furs with them to Avatcha Bay, and thus the conception of the great fur trade on the Pacific was first formed. In 1771 a Pole, Maurice de Benyowski, sailed from Kamchatka with the first regular cargo of furs, to Canton. The Mandarins of China were eager to secure furs as symbols of rank and wealth, and the Canton market speedily became the entrepot for the adventurers of all nations, East and West.

In 1776, the very year of the Declaration of Independence, that Columbus of Eighteenth Century England, James Cook, started on his inter-oceanic voyages across the water of two hemispheres. In the course of it he passed up the coast of Oregon and Alaska and into the Arctic Ocean. By another of those mysterious dispensations of Providence, there was on one of Cook's ships an American sailor, John Ledyard, and thereby hangs a tale.

For this keen and inquisitive Yankee, along with others of the crew, found and preserved for their own comfort, sea-otter skins from the Alaska islands. Reaching Canton, they discovered that there was a great demand for these furs, and they sold them at a great profit. This experience planted in the enterprising Ledyard the idea of encouraging his countrymen to visit the western coast in search of furs. When Ledyard reached America he came in touch with Jefferson and other Americans, and indirectly there sprung from this course of events, the fitting out at Boston of the "Lady Washington" and

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"Columbia Rediviva," in command of Robert Gray and John Kendrick, to whom we owe the discovery of the Columbia River, and the strongest link in the chain of America's claim to Oregon. Indirectly, also, Jefferson was led on to the Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis and Clark Expedition. As a result of these beginnings by Russians and English the maritime fur trade had reached large proportions and yielded great profits by the opening of the Nineteenth Century. The last decades of the Eighteenth Century were fairly. redolent with the fragrance, the romance, of the sea.

These were the years when the United States, just sprung, with the fire and hope of a new Era, from the arms of Liberty, was entering the lists of com- merce against the nations of the old world. Those were the days of the sail ships, and the hard-visaged skippers of Nantucket and Gloucester, and Boston, and Newport were circumnavigating the globe and making the silks and nan- keens and toys and fragrant woods and spices of the Orient the household treasures, to become later the heirlooms of many of the subsequent "first fami- lies" of New England.

One of those Yankee barks would load up at Boston or Nantucket with trinkets and hatchets and tobacco and rum, and round the foaming barriers of Cape Horn and up the South American and Mexican coasts, sliding through the tropics, and then creeping along the California and Oregon shores, to pause for a season's trade in the mouth of the Columbia or at Nootka, or even way up North to Queen Charlotte's Sound or Dixon Entrance or Cook's Inlet, there to exchange the cargo for one of sea-otter or seal skins, battling often with waves and sometimes with treacherous savages, as the fate of the "Tonquin" and the "Boston" proved only too truly. Then, with Stars and Stripes flying exultantly, the ship would square away for Canton or Macao, where the furs would go out and the silks and teas and sandal wood and spices would go in, and then away around the Cape of Good Hope for home. Such was the great three years' round-up of the "Seven Seas." The glory and fascination and the peril of the ocean was in it, and sometimes its profits. What with savages and storm and scurvy and fluctuating markets and caprices of politics and world wars, some have said that not even the huge percentages of gain were adequate compensation.

PROFITS OF THE BUSINESS

Yet those percentages were large enough to tempt an ever-increasing number of merchants and adventurers.

Robert Gray once got for an axe a quantity of furs on Puget Sound that were worth $8,000 in the Canton market. Dixon reports that in 1786 and 1787 there were sold in Canton five thousand eight hundred sea-otter skins for $160,700. Sturgis relates that he had collected as high as six thousand skins of fine quality in a single voyage, and that on one day he got five hundred and sixty of the very best. In one case he knew a capital of $50,000 to yield a gross income of $284,000. .

But great as were the profits and important as were the historical bearings of the maritime fur trade, the continental trade became a yet more potent factor in the making of American history.

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During the years long prior to the growth of the fur trade on the Pacific Coast, there had been initiated upon the Mississippi and St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes the great companies whose agency in the quest for furs was to play a great part in the history of the Pacific Coast. These traders for the sea-otter and the seal on our western shore represented a sort of free-for-all rush to new fields and new markets without any special moneyed interests in the lead. But the situation in Louisiana and Canada was radically different. Great operators, foreshadowings of the monopolies of the Nineteenth Century, had come into existence long before the American Revolution. As far back as the beginning of the Sixteenth Century De Monts, Pontgrave, Champlain, and other great French explorers had secured monopolies on the fur trade from Louis XIII and his minister, Richelieu. Later La Salle, Hennepin, D'Iberville and others had the same advantages. The St. Lawrence, the Great Lakes, and the upper Mississippi were the great "preserve" of these concessionaires. The English and their American colonists set themselves in battle array against the monopolistic Bourbon methods of handling the vast domain which the genius and enterprise of De Monts and Champlain had won for France, with the result that upon the heights of Abraham the Fleur-de-Lis was lowered before the Cross of St. George, and North America became English instead of Gallic, and one of the world's milestones was set for good. Then, by one of those beautiful ironies of history which baffle all prescience, victorious Britain violated the principles of her own conquest and adopted the methods of Bourbon tyranny and monopoly, with the result that another milestone was set on the highway of liberty and the new continent became American instead of European.

But out of the struggles of that century, French, English and American, out of the final distribution of territory, by which England retained Canada and with it a large French and Indian population, mingled with English and Scotch, out of these curious comminglings, economic, commercial, political, religious, and ethnic, grew the great English fur companies, whose history was largely wrought out on the shores of the Columbia, and from whose juxtapo- sition with the American state-builder the romance and epic grandeur of the history of the River largely comes.

Many enterprises were started by the French and English in the Seven- teenth Century, but the "Hudson's Bay Company" became the Goliath of them all. The first charter of this gigantic organization was granted in 1670 by Charles II to Prince Rupert and seventeen others, with a capital stock of ten thousand five hundred pounds. From this small beginning the profits were so great that, notwithstanding the loss of two hundred thousand pounds from the French wars during the latter part of the century, the company declared dividends of from twenty-five to fifty per cent.

The field of operations was gradually extended from the southeastern regions contiguous to Hudson Bay, until it embraced the vast and dreary expanses of snowy prairie traversed by the Saskatchewan, the Athabasca, the Peace, and finally the Mackenzie. Many of the greatest expeditions by land under British auspices which resulted in great geographical discoveries were primarily designed for the expansion of the fur trade.

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History of the Yakima Valley, Washington; comprising Yakima, Kittitas, and Benton Counties, Vol. I, Part 14

Author: Lyman, William Denison, 1852-1920 Publication date: 1919 Publisher: [Chicago] S.J. Clarke Number of Pages: 1134

Author: Lyman, William Denison, 1852-1920
Publication date: 1919
Publisher: [Chicago] S.J. Clarke
Number of Pages: 1134