History of the Yakima Valley, Washington; comprising Yakima, Kittitas, and Benton Counties, Vol. I, Part 22

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 22
USA > Washington > Kittitas County > History of the Yakima Valley, Washington; comprising Yakima, Kittitas, and Benton Counties, Vol. I > Part 22
USA > Washington > Yakima County > History of the Yakima Valley, Washington; comprising Yakima, Kittitas, and Benton Counties, Vol. I > Part 22

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found it impossible to return to Walla Walla. He established St. Peter's Mis- sion at The Dalles, and there he remained till September, 1850. During that year there came instructions from Rome to transfer the Bishop of Walla Walla to the newly established diocese of Nisqually. The diocese of Walla Walla was suppressed and its administration merged with that of Colville and Fort Hall in the control of the Archbishop of Oregon City.

While in this view of missionary history and its connections we have been covering the broad scope of Old Oregon, which included the entire North- west, we do not forget that our theme is especially the Yakima Valley.

It seems that neither the earliest explorers, fur traders, nor mission- aries became so familiar with Yakima as with Walla Walla, Spokane, or the Snake River. The reason is obvious. While the Yakima was unsurpassed by any of them in potential resources and in the vigor and number of native tribes, Yakima was off the main routes of travel. The Snake and Columbia were the great natural arteries of travel, and the primary aim of all incomers was to reach the seaboard. The maps of Lewis and Clark show that they obtained from the Indians at the mouth of the Tapteal (Yakima) and on the Columbia adjoining, a remarkably intelligent conception of the rivers and mountains. They learned of the towering heights of the Cascades and of course followed. the Great River to the ocean. The trappers did the same. Yet it appears from the narratives of Alexander Ross and other of the first trappers that there were frequent and regular visits to Yakima in search of furs or horses. The same- was doubtless true of the early missionaries.

Apparently the Catholic missionaries were first in the field in the Yakima Valley. There seems to be a little uncertainty about the first locations. Reverend Father O'Hara in his "Catholic History of Oregon," refers to Father D'Herbomez as having established the Yakima mission "with his indefatigable- brethren of the Oblates in the year 1847," and maintaining it till the Indian. war of 1855 forced him to retire. It appears from Theodore Winthrop in "Canoe and Saddle," from which we shall give an extract, that Fathers D'Herbomez and Pandosy were located on the "Atinam" (Ahtanum) and that they had been among the different tribes of the Yakimas some five years." Winthrop's journey was in 1853. The mission of the Ahtanum became known: later as the St. Joseph Mission, but it appears that the mission of that name was first located near the present town of Wapato, but on the north side of the Yakima River, near the present residence of W. P. Sawyer. To the Indians the spot was known as Aleshecas. This mission was located in 1849 by Father Pandosy and Brother Blanchet. It appears that there was also an auxiliary mission in the Moxee. On account of threats against the mission by some of the Indians Owhi, the chief, took Father Pandosy with him to Selah and some- times to Manashtash. Father Chirouse in the meantime spent the Winter of 1849 with Brother Blanchet at Aleshecas. In the next year, however, Kamiakin took him under his protection.

Mr. Splawn states also that a log house was built for Father Pandosy on Naneum Creek in 1850. In 1852 the mission at Aleshecas was abandoned and that near the present Tampico became the St. Joseph Mission. During the war of 1855 the soldiers under Major Rains of the Regulars and Colonel Nesmith:

OLDEST CABIN NOW STANDING IN YAKIMA VALLEY Built by J. P. Mattoon in 1864, now owned by Wm. P. Sawyer

FORMER HOME OF W. P. SAWYER

PRESENT HOME OF W. P. SAWYER

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·of the Volunteers finding the mission house on the Ahtanum deserted and a keg of powder secreted, jumped to the conclusion that the Fathers were aiding the Indians, and accordingly the mission was burned. Such was the end of the first mission on the Ahtanum.

Mr. Splawn understands from the records of Father A. M. A. Blanchet that the first mission in Yakima was the St. Rose Mission and that it was estab- lished in 1847 at "Simkoe." Another authority is quoted by Mr. Splawn (His- toricus, in Gonzaga Magazine, 1914) as asserting that the St. Rose Mission was established at Chemna at the mouth of the Yakima River.

From Winthrop's narrative we find that Father Pandosy was on the Ahtanum in 1853 and had been among the different tribes of the Yakimas for some five years. He states that the priests told him that they spent the summers in the Ahtanum "when the copper-colored lambs of their flock were in the mountains, plucking berries in the dells, catching crickets on the slopes. In Winter they resided at a station on the Yakimah eastward." Doubtless it was the Aleshecas Mission referred to as eastward. It appears from evidence given in the United States courts in the subsequent suit over the mission claim at Tampico that that mission was established in 1852. From this it would seem authorita- tive that the Tampico- Mission was established in 1852, and that the St. Rose Mission of 1847, whether at Chemna or Simkoe, was the earliest mission. As quoted by Mr. Splawn the founding of that mission is attributed to Fathers Paschal Ricard and E. C. Chirouse.

It appears from the statements of Mr. David Longmire that there was a priest located at Selah in 1853 at what is now the George Hall place.

ST. JOSEPH MISSION BURNED

The effect of the war of 1855-6 and the burning of the buildings of the St. Joseph Mission was the suspension of the Catholic missions for a number of years. Fathers Pandosy, Chirouse, and D'Herbomez spent the year following in Fort Simcoe and among the Wenatchee, Okanogan, and Spokane tribes, and no one of them returned to Yakima. In 1867-68 Fathers St. Onge and Boulet undertook the reestablishment of the mission on the Ahtanum. Buildings were completed in 1870 and in the year following on July 15th, dedicatory services were conducted by Bishop A. M. A. Blanchet. In 1870 one of the most not- able of the Catholic missionaries located at Ahtanum. This was Father Car- uana. Two years later came Father Grassi. These two men were typical Jesuit missionaries, patient, zealous, and indefatigable. They served alternately in some degree, each being assigned part of the time to the Ahtanum Mission and part to the St. Regis Mission at Kettle Falls. It is interesting to note that in 1872 these Fathers set out an apple orchard on the Tampico place, which is now on the A. D. Eglin ranch. In 1883 Father Grassi established Gonzaga College at Spokane. Although Father Caruana was especially assigned to the work among the Indians, he, like the missionaries of all the denominations, had recog- nized the fact that the churches must look to the white population for their main source of upbuilding. As there came to be some gathering of population at Yakima City in the early seventies Father Caruana undertook the founding of both a church and a school. This school was the beginning of St. Joseph's

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Academy for Girls, moved from the old town to North Yakima and now a flourishing institution with fine buildings and an attendance of three hundred pupils. Father Jean Baptiste Raiberti was first chaplain of this school.

The close of the life of Father Caruana has an element of pathos. He had reached a great age, and after various changes of location, always keeping up his mission work, in 1896 he went to Coeur d'Alene, where he lived in re- tirement through his declining years. In 1913 he was urged to attend the semi- centennial of the beginning of his mission work in Spokane. The exertion was beyond his feeble strength and two days after his return to Coeur d'Alene he passed away, revered by both whites and reds. He had been a missionary to the Indians for fifty-one years.

With the administration of President Grant in 1869, a new system of mis- sions on Indian reservations came into existence. This was the assignment of the spiritual oversight of the natives to different churches.

In pursuance of this policy, inaugurated and announced to Congress in 1870, the Indians of the Yakima Reservation were assigned in that year to the Methodists. This action was disastrous to the Catholic missions in Yakima, and within a few years they were practically disbanded. As may be seen from Father O'Hara's book on the "Catholic History of Oregon," the Catholic Church felt that it was unjustly treated in the application of this policy. It is asserted that they had no proper representation on the Commission of Indian Affairs. Father De Smet asserted in a letter of March 11, 1871, that, having been invited to attend a meeting of various church people in Washington City to consider assignments, he found himself the only Catholic in the conference and practically powerless to secure any consideration for his church. Never- theless the order was made that the Catholics should be allowed to build chapels on the Yakima Reservation. As a matter of fact, there are both Methodists and Catholics among the Reservation Indians, though the author has been re- cently informed by those familiar with affairs on the Reservation that the Indians are not inclined to adhere to any Christian Church, the dissensions in the various denominations and their own unhappy experiences with many of the so-called Christian race having weakened their faith in all churches.

In connection with this stage of the history we come in contact with one of the dominant figures of Yakima history, James H. Wilbur. His history properly belongs to that of the Reservation and we shall have much more to say of him later. But he is fitly mentioned in connection with mission work. He was a leading man among the first Methodist ministers and missionaries in Oregon, a man of extraordinary power both of body and spirit. He was a true representative of the Church Militant and the Church Triumphant, and in case of any failure of spiritual forces he could wield those of the physical arm with an energy which made him a terror to evil doers. He became Super- intendent of Schools on the Reservation in 1860 and in 1864 was appointed Indian agent. In both capacities he was an earnest missionary to the Indians. With the introduction of Grant's policy in 1870, Mr. Wilbur became able to use both official and moral agencies for the promotion of the Methodist Church. And he was a genuine frontier Methodist of the powerful type. His power was great and his influence unbounded. He was agent twenty years and during that time exercised a force among both races such as few men in the North-

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west ever did. Honored, loved, respected by all, and feared by some, Father Wilbur was truly one of the great men of the Northwest. He passed away in Walla Walla in 1887, at the age of seventy-seven. With the decade of the seventies it may be said that the missionary era ended, and we shall be ready to take up that of the immigrants.

As a final view of the early days of the Yakima missions we will close this chapter with the promised extract from Winthrop's fascinating volume, "Canoe and Saddle."

It will be recalled that Winthrop, an officer of the United States Army, later losing his life in the Civil War, a soldier, traveler, poet, and all-round hero, made a solitary journey in 1853 from Puget Sound to The Dalles by way of the Naches Pass and the River. He had stopped on the Wenas to interview the McClelland party of railroad engineers, and had then gone on toward "Le Play House," as the Indians called it, the St. Joseph Mission.

This is his narrative of the approach to the Ahtanum :- "We had long ago splashed across the Nachchese. The sun, nearing the western hills, made every opening valley now a brilliant vista. The rattlesnake had died just on the edge of the Atinam ridges, and Kpawintz was still brandishing his yellow and black prey, and snapping the rattle about the flanks of his wincing roan, when Uplintz called me to look with him up into the streaming sunshine, and see Le Play House.

"A strange and unlovely spot for religion to have chosen for its home influence. It needed all the transfiguring power of sunset to make this desolate scene endurable. Even sunset, lengthening the shadow of every blade of grass, could not create a mirage of verdant meadow there, nor stretch scrubby cotton- wood trees to be worthy of their exaggerated shade. No region this where a Friar Tuck would choose to rove, solacing his eremite days with greenwood pleasures. Only ardent hermits would banish themselves to such a hermitage. The missionary spirit, or the military religious discipline, must be very positive, which sends men to such unattractive heathen as these, to a field of labor far away from any contact with civilization, and where no exalting result of con- verted multitudes can be hoped.

"The mission was a hut-like structure of adobe clay, plastered upon a frame of sticks. It stood near the stony bed of the Atinam. The sun was just setting as we came over against it, on the hill-side. We dashed down into the valley, that moment abandoned by sunlight. My Indians launched forward to pay their friendly greeting to the priests. But I observed them quickly pause, walk their horses, and noiselessly dismount.

"As I drew near, a sound of reverent voices met me,-vespers at this sta- tion in the wilderness. Three souls were worshipping in the rude chapel at- tached to the house. It was rude indeed,-a cell of clay,-but a sense of the Divine Presence was there, not less than in many dim old cathedrals, far away, where earlier sunset had called worshippers of other race and tongue to breathe the same thanksgiving and the same heartfelt prayer. No pageantry of ritual such as I had often witnessed in ancient fanes of the same faith; when in- cense filled the air and made it breathe upon the finer senses; when from the organ tones, large, majestical, triumphant, subduing, made my being thrill as if music were the breath of a new life more ardent and exalting; when inward

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to join the throngs that knelt there solemnly, inward to the sanctuary where their fathers' fathers had knelt and prayed the ancestral prayers of mankind for light and braver hope and calmer energy; inward with the rich mists of sunset flung back from dusky walls of time-glorified marble palaces, came the fair and the mean, the desolate and the exultant, came beauty to be transfigured to more tender beauty with gentle penitence and purifying hope, came weariness and pain to be soothed with visions of joy undying, celestial,-came hearts well-nigh despairing, self scourged, or cruelly betrayed, to win there dear re- pentance strong with tears, to win the wise and agonized resolve ;- never in any temple of that ancient faith, where prayer has made its home for centuries, has prayer seemed so mighty, worship so near the ear of God, as vespers here at this rough shrine in the lonely valley of Atinam.

"God is not far from our lives at any moment. But we go for days and years with no light shining forth from kindling heart to reveal to us the near divineness. With clear and cultivated perception we take in all facts of beauty, all the wonderment of craft, cunning adaptation, and subtile design in nature ; we are guided through thick dangers, and mildly scourged away from enfeebling luxury of too much bliss ; we err and sin, and gain the bitter lessons of penance; and all this while we are deeming or dreaming ourselves thoughtfully religious, and are so up to the measure of our development. But yet, after all these years, coming at last to a wayside shrine, where men after their manner are adoring so much of the Divine as their minds can know, we are touched with a strange and larger sympathy, and perceive in ourselves a great awakening, and a new and wider perception of God and the Godlike, and know that we have entered upon another sphere of spiritual growth.

"Vespers ended. The missionaries, coming forth from their service, wel- comed me with quiet cordiality. Visits of men not savage were rare to them as are angels' visits to worldlings. In Winter they resided at a station on the Yakimah in the plains eastward. Atinam was their Summer abode, when the copper-colored lambs of their flock were in the mountains, plucking berries in the dells, catching crickets on the' slopes.

"Messrs. D'Herbomez and Pandosy had been some five years among the different tribes of this Yakimah region, effecting of course not much. They had become influential friends, rather than spiritual guides. They could exhibit some results of good advice in potato patches, but polygamy was too strong for them. Kamaiakan, chiefest of Yakimah or Klickatat chiefs, sustained their cause and accepted their admonitions in many matters of conduct, but never asked should he or should he not invite another Mrs. Kamaiakan to share the honors of his lodge. Men and Indians are firm against clerical interference in domestic institutions. Perhaps also Kamaiakan had a vague notion of the truth, that polygamy is not a whit more unnatural than celibacy.

Whether or not these representatives of the Society of Jesus have per- suaded the Yakimahs to send away their supernumerary squaws, for fear of something harsher than the good-natured amenities of purgatory, one kindly and successful missionary work they have done, in my reception and entertain- ment. Their fare was mine. Salmon from the stream and potatoes from their own garden spread the board. Their sole servant, an old Canadian lay brother, cared for my horses-for them and for me there was perfect repose."

CHAPTER VII

COMING OF THE IMMIGRANTS

FIRST COMERS-GOVERNMENT EXPEDITIONS-THE GREAT IMMIGRATION-FIRST IMMIGRATION THROUGH YAKIMA-GEORGE H. HIMES' LETTER TO EZRA MEEKER-WINTHROP'S DESCRIPTION OF SCENERY AND OF ADVENTURES-THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT

The Yakima country was among the later regions of the Northwest to be developed, but it went through essentially the same stages of history as Walla Walla, the Willamette, the Palouse, and other parts of the country. The arid climate of all except the parts contiguous to the mountains discouraged settle- ment to any large degree until the time for irrigation arrived. But like other sections it passed through the stages of gold hunting, fur hunting, cattle raising, -and then entered into its destiny of becoming the great horticultural and or- chard region of the state. Its stages of evolution were retarded longer, then more rapidly accelerated than the others and finally came with a rush not known in any other section of the inland country. It may be noted, however, that it was the common experience of all the interior sections to be neglected by the earliest immigrations. The first settlers all headed for the seaboard, first the Willamette Valley, and then Puget Sound.

Hence, we find even in Walla Walla, the first to be developed of the inland districts, that the builders were largely of those who came with the railroads and not with the ox-teams. Much more so was it the case with Spokane and Yakima, which could hardly be called pioneer sections at all in the sense of the Willamette Valley, whose creators were mainly the ox-team pioneers of the de- cades of the forties, fifties, and sixties. Yet in spite of this fact that Yakima is, and has been, essentially a modern rather than a genuine pioneer community in the primitive sense, many of its builders are the children or grand children of the ox-team pioneers, and the halo of that heroic era still casts its glow over all their childhood memories. And yet further, aside from personal connec- tions, the era of the pioneers is one of the great working facts of American his- tory. As a nation we were born on the move westward. Indeed we cannot claim this great pioneer movement to be an American fact, though it is more vividly exhibited in America and especially Western America than elsewhere. It is in truth a world fact. While we cannot aver and we cannot bring any rabbinical legend to prove it-we have the impression that when Adam and Eve were just fairly recovering from the shock of expulsion from the Garden of Eden, Eve, brushing away her tears, looked bravely toward the unknown and said, "Let's go West, Adam!" Their descendants have been moving West ever since. And now in the greatest cataclysm of history, we here, where East

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is West and West is East,-we, the children of the pioneers, are sending our sons and our treasure both East and West, in order to teach the world that great fundamental fact, Liberty, the boon for which our fathers moved West.

FIRST COMERS

The pioneer era was ushered in by the coming to Oregon of fur hunters, missionaries and little bands of adventurers, who together composed the nucleus of that American community which formed the Provisional Government of 1843. There were certain individuals, too, whose agency in leading the way to the immigration movement was so unique as to deserve mention.

One of these was Hall J. Kelley of Boston. He was a native of New Hampshire and a Harvard graduate. As early as 1815, when seventeen years old, he conceived the idea of the colonization of Americans in Oregon. He was a man of high scholarship, philanthropic spirit, and patriotic purpose. He was a dreamer and idealist, planning to form a community on the Columbia, as one of the Utopias which minds of that stamp, from Plato down, have been fond of locating somewhere in the unexplored West. After making a great effort with partial success, to enlist Congress in his schemes, he succeeded in organiz- ing a company of several hundred, and by 1828 shaped the definite plan of going to St. Louis and following the route of the fur companies across the plains to the River of Oregon. But opposition by those same fur companies and adverse criticism by the press broke up his enterprise for that time. In 1832 he started with a small party for the land of his dreams by the route through Mexico and California. He met with Ewing Young, an American of great natural abilities and some education. Young and Kelley, brainy and original men, the former from shrewd commercial instinct and the latter from philanthropic dreams, formed a little company, and proceeded overland from California to Oregon. This was in the autumn of 1834. When, after some dis- asters, the company of eleven reached the Columbia, Young took up a great tract of land in the Chehalem Valley, where he devoted himself to stock-raising, Kelley, having become an invalid, went in distress to Fort Vancouver, where Doctor McLoughlin treated him with kindness, though the exclusive "British- ers" would not admit him to "social equality." The other members of the company were scattered in various directions, but some of them remained till American occupancy became an accomplished fact.

This company of 1834,-the same year that the Methodist missionaries under Jason Lee arrived-may be considered the advance guard of American immigration. Kelley, upon his return to New England by way of the Sand- wich Islands, disseminated much useful information about Oregon. To him, without doubt, is to be attributed much of the subsequent wave of interest which swept on toward American immigration. As first a New England col- lege man, educator, and social theorizer, and then a leader of the pioneer move- ment to Oregon, Hall J. Kelley is worthy of permanent remembrance.

Ewing Young became distinguished for leading the party which in 1837 drove a band of seven hundred cattle from California to Oregon. This event marked an epoch in preparing for immigration and subsequent American pos-

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session. One of the peculiarly noteworthy facts in connection with Young's enterprise, is that Doctor McLoughlin, the Hudson's Bay Company's magnate, who had at first discountenanced Young on account of a charge of stealing brought against him from California, and who frowned upon the cattle enter- prise for fear of American influence, became reconciled to both Young and the cattle, and subscribed liberally to the enterprise.

The next movement may be called a real immigration to Oregon. It con- sisted of a party of nineteen, commonly known as the "Peoria party," since they went from Peoria, Illinois. Jason Lee, the missionary of Chemeketa, deliv- ered a lecture at that place in 1838, and so much interest in Oregon was aroused that in the year following, the Peoria party, the first regular party from the Mississippi Valley, set forth for the River of the West. Their leader, T. J. Farnham, christened his followers the "Oregon Dragoons" and Mrs. Farnham gave them a flag with the inscription, "Oregon or the Grave." Farnham de- clared his purpose to seize Oregon for the United States.

The Peoria party had the good fortune to have two writers with the num- ber, whose accounts possess rare interest. These writers were the leader Farn- ham, and Robert Shortess. The party went to pieces at Bent's Fort on the Arkansas, but its members reached Oregon somewhat in driblets during that year, and the one following. Shortess reached the Whitman Mission at Walla Walla in the Fall of 1839, and there he remained until the following Spring, when he went down the river to The Dalles. From The Dalles, he made his way over the Cascade Mountains to the Willamette Valley, and there he lived many years. Farnham also finally reached Oregon, but his avowed mission was unfulfilled. Shortess says of him: "Instead of raising the American flag and turning the Hudson's Bay Company out-of-doors, he accepted the gift of a suit of clothes and a passage to the Sandwich Islands, and took a final leave of Oregon." But upon his return to the States, Farnham published a "Pictorial History of Oregon and California," a book of many interesting features, and one which played a worthy part in waking the people of the Mississippi Valley to the attractions of the Pacific Coast.

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History of the Yakima Valley, Washington; comprising Yakima, Kittitas, and Benton Counties, Vol. I, Part 22

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