the country, seized his lands and drove away the wild animals that had furnished him food and raiment. He had gained a little knowledge, but had lost his freedom in the forest and his home on the earth the Great Spirit had given him in common with all his children.

The reasoning power of the Indian was limited to what he saw or felt. The novelty of the sacred rites and mystical signs, the commands of virtue and the teachings of the missionaries were good enough as long as there were no more white men coming; no fears of being driven from the land, and no fears but that they would possess the country in the future as their fathers had in the past. They had learned from the Iroquois and the Blackfeet how the white men had swarmed into the Mississippi river valley, and driven the Indians back from the beautiful Ohio and the rich lands of Illinois. And it took no reasoning power to satisfy them that if the white man was not stopped from coming over the mountains to Oregon, they, too, must give up their lands and homes, or die. They appealed directly to Whitman and other Protestant missionaries to stop the white man from coming, and were told that more and more white men would come with their wives and children, cattle and horses. They saw that the priests did not bring men to take up more farms, and for that reason were more friendly to the Catholics. They had held their councils, and resolved to kill all the whites and drive back the human tide. And if they had possessed a leader like Pontiac or Tecumseh, or like Joseph who arose as a great leader after the country was settled, they could have exterminated the white settlers, and would have done so as mercilessly as they massacred Whitman and his family.

And when they resolved to fight the white man they threw away his religion, and all his teachings of morality. And now, today, seventy years after the great Indian revivals wrought by De Smet, there are fewer professed Christians among the Indians of old Oregon than ever before. But by comparison with the white man this is not much to the discredit of the Indian. The number of professing Christians among the white people of Oregon today are much less in proportion to population than seventy years ago. This was practically a prohibition community seventy years ago, but now Oregon has eighteen hundred retail liquor shops, spends thousands of dollars on prize fights, and kills a man every few days with automobiles.

The substantial uplift of any community is a slow and tedious work; and of a race a still slower and more tedious task-a work of evolution in which a thousand seen and unseen elements of change must take part. The factors undermining the strength of the men, community or race, are innate and always at work; while the forces that demoralize, or openly oppose the development of man's faculties and the uplift of the social fabric, are always present in some form ready to be set in motion. The Rev. Elkanah Walker, who was one of the first Protestant missionaries among the Oregon Indians, and who faithfully labored for their improvement for many years, in the last sermon he preached in his life, in the little Union church at the town of Gaston, discussed this matter from his experience with both the white and red men; and summed up the whole matter in this sententious sentence: "It takes a very, very long time to make a white man out of an Indian, but the descent of the white man into an Indian is short and swift."

In all the contentions between Protestants and Catholics in this Indian country, and between the partisans of American Colonization and the occupancy of the Hudson Bay Company, the Whitman massacre has ever been a subject of most bitter crimination. And no person of humane feeling can read the record of the horrible butchery of Whitman and his wife, children and others killed, without being wrought up to an intense bitterness, not only against the savages, but against the white men who may have known of the possibility of murder, and took no step to prevent it. It seems clear that the chiefs of the Hudson's Bay Company did warn Whitman of his danger at the distant and unprotected station. Whitman was himself recklessly careless of the safety of himself and family. The Indians were permitted free access to all his premises, and no preparation for protection or defense from harm was provided. The Hudson's Bay people did not trust the Indians. They had substantial barricades and stockade forts well supplied with arms for defense; and at all times required the Indians to remain on the outside of protective defenses. McLoughlin never forgot the native ferocity of the savage when aroused. the careless observer the Indians about the trading stations and missionary stations were peaceful and harmless; yet behind all this was the racial instinet of the savage, developed by ages of contention with wild beasts in the contest for existence. And with the first blow of the tomahawk on the head of the unsuspecting victim-Marcus Whitman-and the sight of blood, the savage gave tongue to demoniac yells that harked back a hundred thousand years when the naked savage man fought with clubs, the savage beast.

We here finally reach our bearings in the quest for the rightful ownership of the wilderness of Oregon. Whether it suits our wishes or our preconceived views or not, we are compelled to face the proposition that the white man, black man, red man and yellow man are all on this globe on equal land tenures. That they have all sprung from a single original pair and though now found in divers races, they have fought for and conquered their positions on the face of the globe, not only in competition with wild beasts, but also wild men. That this tremendous evolutionary program, so far as it has related to the possession of land on which to live and grow, has never been settled in any other way than

"The good old rule, the simple plan,

That they should take who have the power,
And they should keep, who can."

The coming of the white man was inevitable, and the subjection of the Indian equally so. Our pioneers but followed nature's impulse justified by the entire history of mankind. And if the inspiration of a higher humanity, and the precepts of Christianity can be used to enforce justice and inculcate charity to the poor benighted children of the forests that we found in the possession of this beautiful land, it is our bounden duty to see that while we enjoy all the beauty and glory of these grand rivers and gorgeous mountains that the remnant of the native race be made as comfortable and enlightened as their mental and moral development will permit.

It would be a useless and unprofitable task to go into the rivalries and con

tentions that arose out of the Whitman massacre and the management of the Indians. It would have been far better for the Indians, and for the white people, and the cause for which both Protestants and Catholics claimed they were the champions, to have left the Indians wholly to one sect or the other.

But the evil that was wrought has long since passed, leaving nothing but the lesson that peace and harmony is more profitable than contention and discord. The cause of Christianity was not promoted. What services then, if any, can be discovered outside the cause of religion which these sectarians may have rendered the country? Before the Protestant missionaries came, the white population was practically all males, and almost wholly subjects of Great Britain, and members of the Catholic church. If any action or influence was to be expected or might be exerted, it would have been in favor of delivering Oregon to the British monarchy. The record is made up, and there can be no successful denial of this proposition. What then were American citizens, if they were even men of God and disposed to peace, to do? It did not take Jason Lee long to decide. Although born in Canada under the British flag, he was United States American to the core. Marcus Whitman, born in the United States, was first of all things in his character as a citizen, a champion of American ideas and laws. And the same was to be said of Gray, Griffin, Walker, Eells and all the rest of the American missionaries. Were they to keep silence on political rights for fear public speech might offend Briton or Catholic? Self preservation being the first law of nature, they must act; and they did

act.

The great fur company had an eye single to the coining of profits out of the skins of wild animals. Its interest was first to hold Oregon as a game preserve for the pelts it might produce. But if civil government must come, then let it be the government that gave the country over to the Fur Company, and the great monopoly would still control the country. To make good this scheme subjects of Great Britain alone must be encouraged to come to Oregon; and they must be such as would take orders from the Catholic Vicar General. Protestant Episcopal priests from England would not do, although their salaries were provided by law, because they could not receive the confession of the Roman Catholic French trappers of the Hudson's Bay Company, and could not control such employees in any political movement instigated by the Protestant preachers. The line of cleavage was plainly discernible when the American independent trappers and employees of the Protestant missions sought to unite with themselves the Catholic Frenchmen on French Prairie, in a movement for civil government to protect life and property. Under the lead of the Vicar General, the H. B. Co., and every member of the Catholic church but two opposed any organization whatever, and put their protest on record. And while waiting patiently for two years to persuade the Catholics to join in an organization to protect the rights of all persons without distinction of creed or nationality, Jason Lee, Marcus Whitman and their co-laborers, worked with might and main to bring the government of the United States to support and defend the infant colony., Letters, petitions and memorials were sent to Congress and Cabinet, and eastern journals were plied with facts and arguments to save Oregon. Jason Lee went in person; and Marcus Whitman took his life in his hands and made a mid-winter ride across the continent to forestall the

Vol. 1-9

action of a timid, if not cowardly, secretary of state in a possible agreement to give up all of Oregon north of the Columbia river. While there is no direct or record proof of this statement, the whole history of the diplomacy with England about Oregon during the Harrison-Tyler and Polk administrations, goes to show that the weakness and imbecility of our foreign policy was held back from giving Oregon away only by the appeals from Oregon and the threatening speeches of Senators Benton and Linn in Congress. These appeals from Oregon were mainly from the Protestant missionaries, and in the main drafted and forwarded by them. But these brave men did not stop with appeals on paper. On October 3, 1842, accompanied only by A. L. Lovejoy, Marcus Whitman bid good bye to his wife and all he held dear in life and made the most wonderful trip on record-a two thousand mile dash across the continent in the winter season, over trails traveled only by wild Indians on horseback, picking up food for horse and man as occasion offered in a wilderness, covered up and snowed in by storms for weeks, fording mountain torrents in icy water, and breaking ice, and finally winning the goal of his endeavors and rushing on to Washington city before congress could adjourn in 1843.

And what for?

There is nothing in all history so dramatic and forceful as this four months' winter storm ride of Marcus Whitman. And at the very time he was risking his life, his everything for Oregon, Daniel Webster, Secretary of State of President Tyler's administration, was writing to the American minister in London, that the Columbia river at its mouth was not navigable for nine months in the year, and that there were not more than seven hundred white people in the whole of the country, and that it had been suggested, "That the line of boundary might begin at the sea, or the entrance of the straits of San Juan De Fuca, follow up these straits, give us a harbor at the southwest corner of these inland waters and then continue south, striking the (Columbia) river below Vancouver, and then following the river to its intersection with the forty-ninth degree of latitude North."

What was that but giving up the Puget Sound and all of the State of Washington except a narrow strip along the coast, and a triangle adjoining Idaho.

What influence Whitman exerted or representation he made to the President or his Secretary was not known. He was not a boaster. It was not a matter to be given to the press after the style of the modern politician. It is sufficient to say that Daniel Webster's map of Oregon was not adopted. And Jason Lee was as active, and as faithful in his labors to save Oregon as was Whitman. And in the historical light of that great contest for the possession of this country, the services of these two Protestant missionaries rise to the dignity of a great service to humanity and to their country.

CHAPTER VI

0000-1862

WHAT DID THE FORELOPERS FIND HERE-THE FACE OF NATURE-THE GEOLOGY AND EXTINCT ANIMAL LIFE—THE VAST WATER POWERS-MADE VALUABLE BY APPLICATION OF DISCOVERIES IN ELECTRICITY.

When the missionaries and first settlers came over the Rocky mountains down into the Snake river valley, they found a region wholly unlike anything they had ever beheld before. The Three Tetons, the vast lava sage brush plain, the great river coming from some mysterious distance nobody knew just where, the towering snow-capped mountains, the mighty water falls and the deep and trackless forests. It was a panoramic picture never to be forgotten; majestic and aweinspiring rather than beautiful. The great mountain ranges, wide extended plains and gloomy forests seemed rather to forbid than invite examination. It was all natural enough and to be expected from the silent-going Indian, and necessary to the venturesome trapper; but for preachers and farmers, nature's wilderness required time to conquer. And for these reasons it was a whole generation of men from the time Jason Lee drove down his tent pegs in the Willamette valley until farmers and herdsmen ventured to build permanent homes on the wide extended areas of Central Oregon.

The Willamette valley was the first place settled in old Oregon. And it was by all visitors acclaimed the beauty spot of Oregon-another Garden of Eden. The only picture of the country extant made by one who knew its every nook and corner before the settlers came, and who had chased the elk and deer with his pony and rifle from Oregon City to Umpqua valley, and left a life-like description of the valley, was David McLoughlin, son of Dr. John McLoughlin. It was, he said, a natural park on a grand scale that could not have been improved by artificial culture. It was in its natural state of beauty, romantic and grand beyond the power of words to express, with prairies, streams and groves of trees filled with animal life. Herds of elk and deer could be seen everywhere feeding fearless of men. And from this valley the snow-capped peaks of both the Coast and Cascade ranges of mountains could be seen towering above the plains. This was the open book, the enchanting scene to every eye. But what was the underlying foundation?

Everything in nature, says Emerson, is engaged in writing its own history; the planet and the pebbles are attended by their shadows, the rolling rock leaves its furrows on the mountain side, the river its channel in the soil, the animal its bones in the stratum, the fern and the leaf their epitaphs in the coal, and the falling rain drops sculptures their story on the sand and on the stone. Nearly everything that is known about the geological formation of Oregon is due to the unselfish labors of one man. The boy that grew up to be that one man was borr