The Quarterly of the Oregon Historical Society Part 3

To be sure the first settlers of Oregon had no such antic.i.p.ations as these, but they were not slow to perceive the advantages everywhere around them; sawmills were erected in advance of the great bulk of the immigration, so that immigrants were not required to go through the experience of the first settlers of Ohio and Indiana, housing one or two generations in log cabins.

No description of soil or surface or scenery can give an adequate presentation of this country, as upon the climate depends nearly everything which makes it, pre-eminently, a never failing supplier of man's wants. In this lat.i.tude, countries east of the Rocky Mountains have long cold winters and short hot summers, while west of the Cascades no such extremes are ever known.

The Kuro-s.h.i.+wo of j.a.pan, a broad, deep, and warm current of ocean water flows along our western sh.o.r.e, tempering the mountain air and covering the valleys with perpetual verdure. At this writing, the twenty-fifth of January, the fields have been once whitened with snow, cattle are pasturing upon unfrosted gra.s.s, and wild daisies are in bloom. Occasionally a cold wave from the north pushes seaward the tropical warmth, when for a few days the inhabitants get a mitigated sample of the arctic regions, but such incursions are few and far between,--say once in ten years, and not to be compared with the winter climate of Idaho, Montana, or the Eastern States. So seldom and short are the periods, when the ground is frozen, that agriculture is continuous through the whole year. In every winter month plowing is done and grain sown.

In what country, between the parallels forty-two and forty-nine north lat.i.tude, would cattle live through the winter upon gra.s.s, which was the dependence of those who crossed the great plains to this coast in the days of the pioneer? Arriving in these western valleys during the months of September and October, their teams worn and impoverished, were turned out upon the prairies and by midwinter were fat enough for beef.

Such was the country and the climate of the west coast to which the immigrants came, a land flowing with milk (no honey), beautiful and grand beyond description, rich beyond expectation, healthful beyond comparison; its streams abounding with fish, and its mountains with game; a country where there has been no failure of crops, and where blizzards, hurricanes, and cyclones are unknown.

Now a few words as to the character of the people who settled it, and in this examination I shall try to steer clear of the poetry and romance which are beginning to dehumanize them. It is not necessary for the purpose of this paper to show that the pioneers were more moral or more intelligent than those they left in the enjoyment of the peace and comforts of well regulated society, but it is important to know that they were a fair average in all respects as human beings, and as this question can not be determined by a personal examination, we must resort to the environment they voluntarily chose, or, in other words, to the objects and conditions which impelled them to the undertaking. The indolent and cowardly are not attracted by dangers, and hence we infer that volunteers make better soldiers than conscripts, and this inference is borne out by experience. Enterprises of great danger, forlorn hopes, are not chosen by those who love ease and quiet pleasure, but by the courageous and venturesome; those who take pleasure in overcoming resistance, surmounting obstacles, and braving dangers. The former are inclined to remain upon the old homestead, under the protection of law and the restraining influence of conservative public opinion; the latter push for the frontier, with apparent relish for the kind of life found only on the fretful edge of civilization. Some have a.s.sumed, therefore, that the borders are chiefly peopled by the reckless and immoral, those who would not be subject to proper restraint in the older communities; such an a.s.sumption, however, is wide of the mark. Under our flag there are no penal colonies; people go where they choose to go, and the currents of population are determined by self-selection. Places of trial and danger are taken by those who are not dismayed by such incidents, and unless we are willing to admit that there is a necessary connection between courage and criminality--that the enterprising and resolute are as a consequence tinctured with immoral tendencies--we shall believe what is more reasonable and in full accord with our experience, that the manly virtues are quite compatible with the moral attributes. I lived on the frontier, the Platte Purchase in Missouri, right among the people who contributed in men and money to the invasion of Kansas a few years afterwards, and I must say that I never lived in a more hospitable and law-abiding community. The forceful faculties were more prominent than in New England, but for personal honor, honesty, and brotherly feeling it would compare favorably with any portion of the United States. I had left that country when the Kansas troubles began, and was somewhat puzzled to reconcile the doings of the Border Ruffians with the character of the people as I knew them, but when I considered that a large majority of them were from the South, and, being born to the inst.i.tution of slavery, were inheritors of all that such a state of society implies, I ceased to wonder.

Notwithstanding the great advance in biological science, the human being is very much of an enigma, and, however well disposed he may be from natural endowment, we can not guess what he may do until his previous environment has been examined. Suppose John Brown had been born and raised in the South, and had read his Bible through Southern spectacles, and had heard the Word expounded by devout defenders of the patriarchal inst.i.tution, would he not have been found praying and fighting with Stonewall Jackson when the time came for war?

A large proportion of the pioneers were from Missouri, and at the time of the adoption of our const.i.tution, which submitted the question of slavery to a popular vote, much solicitude was felt by anti-slavery men as to the result. Argument and inquiry were on the wing, and there was eminent opportunity, not only to learn the opinions and wishes of men but how those opinions and wishes came to be formed. Some of the ablest and best advocates of a free state were from the South and some of those who voted to fasten the relic of barbarism upon this free soil were from the North. One solid, earnest, but uneducated free state man, born and raised in Kentucky, and a resident of Missouri for several years just before coming to the Oregon Territory, was asked as to the evolution of his opinion and answered "that when living in his native State, a doubt as to the rightfulness of slavery had never crossed his mind; that he regarded abolitionists the same as horse thieves, and would have meted out to them the same punishment; that when he got to northern Missouri, where there were but few slaves, he was struck with the difference he felt and saw, as respects social conditions; people were more on an equality; that conservative deference paid to slaveholders was conspicuous by its absence, and when he got to Oregon, the spirit of abolitionism was in the air." He thought that if the good people of Kentucky could experience what he had they would clear slavery from that state in a year. I was intimately acquainted with that man for thirty years, and I am confident that I never saw one more honest and truthful, or one more ready to a.s.sist in reforms or more willing to be informed. Ignorance was his sin, as it was of the majority of those subject to the malign influence of slavery, and yet in his native State he was a possible border ruffian. What an honest, earnest man believes to be right he will defend, and for his convictions there is always a higher law to which he will appeal, notwithstanding the limitations of statutes and const.i.tutions.

Though a Webster might lose himself in adoration of the Federal Union and an Everett offer up his mother a living sacrifice to preserve it, it is to the credit of human nature that human rights, human interests, human convictions and affections stand nearer and dearer to the people than any mere machinery of human government. The abolitionists believed the Const.i.tution of the United States was a covenant with Death and a league with h.e.l.l, and they protested with all their soul and strength; to those Southerners reared to believe in the divinity of slavery, the Const.i.tution was a worthless rag, for it did not protect them in their supposed rights. To the men of earnest convictions on both sides we owe our present disenthrallment.

The foregoing apparent digression has been indulged for the reason that the Oregon people were severely criticised and denounced in connection with our Indian wars, spoilation claims, and the votes cast in favor of slavery upon the adoption of our free const.i.tution; and also for the reason that the aspect of character has a sociological bearing.

Advanced evolutionists include with their scientific s.h.i.+bboleth, "the survival of the fittest," an ethical element, when applied to civilized society. The early settlements here were singularly free from transgressors. There was no criminal code and no courts of law up to the time of the provisional government. Every man was a law unto himself, and it is said there was no offense against person or property of sufficient importance to require them. These were halcyon days, often referred to by old Oregonians, who say that crime and criminals were unknown until society was put under the tantalizing reign of law. I have heard not a few, in referring to the good old times, express the opinion that mankind are governed too much by statute and thereby released, in a great degree, from moral restraint.

There is occasionally an old settler so impressed with pioneer equality, fraternity, and purity, that he lays all subsequent social disturbance to the provoking interference of legal machinery with natural rights, and he longs "for a lodge in some vast wilderness"

where he can end his days in peace, away from penalties and penal inst.i.tutions and the temptations which civil government offers to the predatory instincts of men.

Such logical metonomy is not mentioned here except to show that the pioneers were lovers of peace and good order, and fully subject to enlightened moral restraint. As before mentioned, they were peculiar in one respect, that is, in the possession of a large share of the executive or heroic qualities.

The Great American Desert, with its sand stretches, waterless wastes, unbridged rivers, Rocky Mountains, and predatory savages, loomed up deterrently to the spiritless. A four to six months' journey in wagons, exposed to all the vicissitudes of travel and climate and the forays of more dreadful foes, ever on the alert to dispossess travelers of their only means of conveyance, was not to be considered a pleasure trip.

No doubt that to a certain but undefinable extent and in numerous ways, the circ.u.mstances and incidents to be expected on the overland journey were selective, and yet the Oregon Pioneer, as pictured by his eulogists, is rather a fanciful personage. Not that the incidents from which the picture is drawn are to any unusual degree false, but that there is too much of the commonplace left out, and so the typical pioneer, like the typical Yankee, is a caricature. The pioneers, as a body, were only a little different from those who were too affectionate or diffident to start, and among them were all sorts of people; but looking only to those who endured extraordinary privations, to those who developed an uncommon degree of strength, courage, and virtue, there have grown up the poetry and romance of the pioneers, and to none is this more evident than the pioneers themselves. At one of their annual gatherings, when an eloquent speaker was narrating the trying incidents of the overland journey, one of the earlier immigrants inquisitively remarked "I wonder if I ever crossed the plains?" I was querying the same; still we must not neglect to state that the speaker was dealing in facts. He was leaving out so much that those who had pa.s.sed the ordeal wondered if they had ever been there. Indeed, the speakers and writers who have been called to the task of perpetuating pioneer history have had the usual inducements to false coloring, which has been the curse of all history in all times.

Striking incidents, battles, sieges, marches, insurrections, revolutions, and the leading actors in them, of such is the warp and woof of history, until man is understood to be a mere fighting animal, although the greater part of his life has been spent in peaceful avocations and the greater exertion of his force and faculties has been devoted to constructive industry.

Out of such partiality has inevitably grown the great man theory of human progression. The student of history pa.s.ses along from point to point in the b.l.o.o.d.y trail of the historian, stopping at such characters as Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, Napoleon, etc., until these great destroyers are looked upon as the prime factors of the evolutionary state. Of course, these and such as these must not be ignored or left out, for history would cease to be history without them, but it is equally important to know that man, judged only by them, ceases to be man. Of late an improved philosophy of history a.s.signs them their proper place and significance as an index of evolution, and gives us the hopeful sign that notwithstanding the occasional irruption of man's destructive faculties, his progress is princ.i.p.ally due to the subordination of the militant spirit. And now, while the princ.i.p.al part of our early history, territorial and state, is devoted to our really insignificant Indian wars and the princ.i.p.al characters on both sides, it is well enough to think that the greater constructive works of peace have been going forward with hardly a halt, and the more sober tints are yet to be given the picture of early Oregon times.

With such coloring as we now have of pioneer life and the pa.s.sage of the great plains, posterity will wonder, as did the pioneer before quoted, if the pioneers ever did cross, and also what kind of people they must have been to undertake, with such slender means, so perilous a journey. Samuel R. Thurston, Oregon's first delegate under the Territorial Government, advertised his const.i.tuents as "fellows who could whip their weight in wildcats," very good electioneering taffy, no doubt, but rather strong and really degrading language to apply to the earnest men and women who so patiently toiled to the Northwest coast.

Of a higher type and tone was the poetical exaggeration "only the brave started, only the strong got through." The facts are different.

Some arrant cowards and many more physically weak persons, by some sufficient means, found their way here. The emigrant train was not a forlorn hope; no such test was made for members.h.i.+p. Neither was it a test of patriotism; albeit every citizen is a quixotic propagator of his republican faith. Various were the inducements in the minds of those who left the older states for the Pacific Slope. Many, like ex-Senator Nesmith, did not really know, as they had no well defined purpose, but might answer in his language, and with probable truth, that they were "impelled by a vague spirit of adventure." Restless spirits are always ready for any move, promising unusual scope for the exercise of their faculties. Many were along to enjoy the exhilaration of travel, in a new, strange, and truly wonderful country. Many, long wasted by the miasmatic fevers of the overrich and productive Mississippi Valley, sought immunity in the untainted mountain air of the Far West. A few of the Daniel Boone stripe were too much crowded where inhabitants exceeded one to the square mile, and took one more move with the hope that the hum drum of civilization would never overtake them. A few of a poetical turn of mind, tired of the monotony of the greater East, sought fresh inspiration and a home upon the picturesque sh.o.r.es of the sunset seas.

But while all of the foregoing and many other inducements might have been present in varying degree, the great incentive to immigration was free land. Not only land for the landless, but land for all, and in unstinted quant.i.ty. The scenes at Oklahoma divest the emigration to Oregon of all mystery, and while there was probably small difference in kind or degree of virtue between those who came and those who remained, of one fact pioneers are cognizant, namely, that the incidents and trials of the overland journey were a wonderful developer and equalizer. The fict.i.tious gloss of so-called society was abraded, and the shams of character in which human beings had invested themselves, like weakly oxen, were left on the road. Everywhere this is observable, and it is often remarked that the true pioneer is never afterward subject to an undue self-inflation. It seems as though a few months' practice of sincere brotherhood is fatal to an offensive amount of arrogance and egotism.

Now let us inquire as to the use and the tenacity of hold the pioneers had for their unbought possessions. There was no sign of indolence on their part upon arriving. The same pus.h.i.+ng qualities which enabled them to surmount all difficulties in getting here were not wanting when homes were to be made and farms to be cultivated. To all appearances the older community, with an infusion of vigor born of success and adventure, had been transplanted upon virgin soil. Of necessity population was spa.r.s.e. In large districts, princ.i.p.ally settled by immigrants before 1851, there was but one family to the square mile, and in other portions were those arriving afterwards and settling two to the square mile. In this way a few people cover, or rather appropriate, a large country, and their improvements, though considerable, appear very meager. Every thing, however, was at hand; rail timber ten cuts to the tree; cedar for s.h.i.+ngles and shakes; poles straight enough for rafters without hewing, and fir trees, seemingly grown for the special purpose of house frames. The soil was favorable.

Though producing a good growth of the most nutritious native gra.s.s, it was easily plowed, two good horses being sufficient to turn over two acres of sod in a day, and, unlike the sward in other countries, was mellow from the first harrowing. Many a family coming as late as October plowed and fenced forty acres and raised from twelve hundred to sixteen hundred bushels of wheat the next harvest, working their cattle that hauled them across the plains and feeding them nothing but the bunch gra.s.s upon which they pastured through the winter months.

After the discovery of gold in California, the market for all farm products was at almost every man's door and at marvelous prices.

b.u.t.ter from fifty cents to a dollar a pound; bacon from twenty-five to fifty cents a pound; chickens from $5 to $10 per dozen; eggs from twenty-five to fifty cents per dozen; sheep from $5 to $12 per head; cows, $50; horses, $200; oxen from $100 to $200 per yoke; wheat from $1 to $7 per bushel, and labor from $2 to $5 per day. Of course, such prices gradually wore down, but the opportunity for large profits in farming and stock raising continued for a quarter of a century. Our public disburs.e.m.e.nts, however, were not on the same scale. Up to the year 1859 Uncle Sam paid a good share of the governmental expenses, and at that time our state government was organized under a const.i.tution that has often been called parsimonious.

The sixteenth and thirty-sixth sections of each towns.h.i.+p, or lands in lieu thereof, were devoted by Congress to common schools; land was also given to found a state university and agricultural college, and five hundred thousand acres along with five per cent of the sales of public lands were given to an internal improvement fund to be used by the state. Add to this the swamp lands, amounting to several hundred thousand acres of the most valuable, all given without cost, and one might well ask, "in the name of common sense what more should a paternal government do for a people?" And yet it has done more. Coast defenses and lighthouses have been built, the rivers dredged, harbors improved, something near a million dollars appropriated to cut a ca.n.a.l around the cascade falls, and military roads and posts established to protect our inhabitants from the aborigines.

In common with all the other inhabitants of the United States, we have been suffering for the last few years from an aggravating increase of our great American industry, politics, but until the discovery was made, that people can grow rich by taxing themselves, the people of Oregon were contented with small levies for public purposes. Indeed, we have done little in the way of public improvements to create expense. With the exception of county roads, which are mainly ungraded dirt ways, and the bridging of streams, nothing of importance has been attempted.

In view of all the foregoing comes the sharp contrast of the present condition of the pioneers and their immediate descendants. In the absence of any reliable census reports, I have been obliged to rely upon regional inspection, taking a towns.h.i.+p here and there and tracing up the career of the first white inhabitants. For this purpose I have selected, for an average, one hundred square miles on the east side of the Willamette Valley, in Marion County, which contains the state capital, and an examination shows that sixty-six per cent of the donation claims have pa.s.sed out of the possession of the donees and their descendants, another fifteen per cent are mortgaged for all they are worth, and for practical purposes may be considered as lost to them. Not more than fifteen per cent of the whole have been ordinarily successful in holding and improving a part of their possessions and are now free from debt. Only five of all of them have increased their holdings and are thrifty. Eighty-seven per cent held section claims, and it may be mentioned that the half-section claimants were more successful in holding their own, and add very much to the favorableness of this report. In the better part of this county, a hundred square miles in a body might be selected where the per cent of loss would be greater, but this was settled chiefly by French, Scotch, and English Canadians, mountain men and trappers of nomadic habits, who married Indian women of the whole or half-breed, and of whose descendants less is expected, as they are pa.s.sionately fond of ardent spirits. A teetotaler of mixed blood would be a rare sight. Neighborly, clever people, of lax business habits, and of necessity trustful, they were soon beat out of their landed possessions. Probably in no American community has the credit system been so much in vogue as on this Northwest coast, and likely for the reason that in no other place are crops so sure, and certainly in no other place was a broad basis of credit so much at the disposal of debtors. A family with a section of land that produces unfailing crops at small cost, can get credit anywhere; and what a harvest it has been for merchants and middlemen in these western valleys until recently.

Ah, man! you are, indeed, a wanting animal, one whose wants are ever multiplying and exacting. Only a few of the race are securely provident by immediate self-denial, and this truth applies equally to the pioneers, those resolute men and women--

Who kept step with the patient ox, And toiled by the rolling wheel, Drew success from the sand and rocks, As sparks from the flint and steel.

The heads of families did not so readily depart from their early habits of economy, but the children soon reveled in their magnificent possessions. Girls and boys alike became semi-nomads, or properly speaking, fell into the ways of the baronial English or the planter cla.s.s of the South. As a consequence of their newly found competence and leisure "they took to horse," and strange, what a fascination comes over a human being when he takes to horse. In truth, that boy who did not admire the splendid aboriginal equestrians of the Great Plains and get filled with the spirit of the wild and free, as he saw them scurrying along the mountain side or sweeping down into the valley with the speed of the wind; that boy must have been an unchangeable clodhopper or a born philosopher.

Very few of them escaped the uncivilizing contamination, and many a youth, fresh from an unfinished course at school, had his book education cut sadly short by bestriding a cayuse and becoming a practical cowboy. The infatuation was not confined to the boys. The girls, too, had as much fondness for the n.o.ble brute, and were as expert and graceful in his management. Some of them have ridden seventy-five miles in a day. As a means of social communication at that time it had no equal; and for stock raising and the round-up in such a country, the horseman was unapproachable. Still, with all such advantages, and they were many, which could have been turned into permanent profit, the cowboy generation, though having a "heap of fun," and no doubt genuine pleasure, let the earth slip from under his feet. How could it be otherwise? Who could deny them? A party of boys and girls on their favorite steeds, the former in leggings, bell spurs, and the graceful sirrapa; the latter in the freshness of physical beauty and bedecked with flowing skirts and scarlet streaming sash--when such a cavalcade went galloping over the prairies with a speed that put to shame a Sheridan's ride, what parent could or would deny them.

Well, the parents did not deny them this and other diversions from gainful industry, and, little by little, the princely donations of land went into the till of the shopkeeper or the safe of the money changer. Landless and moneyless, they scattered over the country, and, as it were, dropped into all kinds of callings. Many of them have gone east of the Cascades and taken homesteads and pre-emptions in the arid regions, and there upon the bunch gra.s.s lands have gained a living and some a competence by stock raising and wool growing. Others followed up the streams into the mountains and in some narrow valley made a home away from the every day temptations of the lowlanders. Others went to the coast. Many of the young have found ample success in other avocations and do not regret the loss of the parental donations. They are found on the bench, at the bar, in the pulpit, in the governmental employ, in college faculties, and in all honorable pursuits. Only a few have ign.o.bly failed, and those few do not invalidate the maxim that "where there is a will there is a way" for falling into the drink habit they lost their wills.

In conclusion, I am not willing to a.s.sert that the policy of the general government, in donating land as a reward for taking possession of this Northwest coast, was not a wise policy or that it was an injury to the donees, though in the main they failed to keep the gift, but the lesson is none the less valuable; and what is it but a confirmation of the general truth that "necessity is the mother of invention," the spur to exertion, and that success in this life is to be obtained only through the school of experience as the reward of continued and temperate effort. As there is no royal road to knowledge so there is no royal road to wealth or any other valuable acquisition; and it is not proper to confine this edict of fate to mere material things, although to be fed and clothed is the first and most imperious demand of nature. Man in all of his successful undertakings is an evolutionary being. Whether intellectually, morally, or physically considered, he keeps best what he has produced, what he has earned. As a hard and fast donee, he is not a success; as a beggar, he is disgusting even to himself. Sometimes he needs charity, but always justice.

T. W. DAVENPORT.

GLIMPSES OF EARLY DAYS IN OREGON.

It would be difficult, indeed, to find anything new to say of pioneering or pioneers, and useless to trace the pioneers along their journey across the Plains. We will pa.s.s over an interval of eight months and introduce our loved fathers and mothers on their arrival at where Portland now stands.

On the first of November, 1845, after a journey of eight months of inconceivable hards.h.i.+ps, a small party of those pioneers first stepped on the banks of the grand Willamette River, near where Morrison Street is now located. The rays of the setting sun casting their light and shade o'er the beautiful landscape, impressed the beholders with a deep feeling of thankfulness that they were permitted to reach the new land, and stand on the sh.o.r.e of the wonderful river of the west. The wind murmuring through the branches of the stately fir bade them welcome, and the old trees served as shelter for the next two months.

With the aid of flint, steel, and powder, a large camp fire was soon burning brightly, casting a rich glow o'er the magnificent wall of forest trees. It was a picturesque scene. The soft moonlight, the sparkle of the water, the lurid light from the resinous fire, formed a scene worthy of a painter's skill. They sat around the fire for hours reveling in the luxury of rest; and they arrived dest.i.tute in all save character, determination, and self-reliance. With such sterling qualities failure was impossible.

The little company did not retire early, as they were forming plans for their future work. At a late hour buffalo robes and blankets were spread on the ground, and soon all were lost in sleep. The only sound that broke the silence was the yelp of the prowling coyote.

With the first rosy blushes of the dawn the men began to rise, and before the sun was fairly over the horizon the sound and echoes of their axes brought cheer to our mothers' hearts, for they knew ere long homes would shelter them from the winter's storms. Weeks of hard labor were required to fell the trees, and clear away the brush, and prepare the site on which to build. Trees were cut the proper length, one side of the log hewed smooth with a broadax, and fitted so they would join at the corners and lie compact. It was no easy task, but our loved pioneers, with only a saw, auger and ax, broadaxe and adze would put to shame some of the more modern workmen. Logs for the puncheon floors were split and smoothed with an adze, and fitted close together, making a warm and solid floor. The structure raised to a proper height, poles were used for rafters; some of the logs were cut three feet in length, from which shakes were made and used in place of s.h.i.+ngles. The fireplace and chimney was built with sticks and plastered inside and out with a thick coating of clay. Some had a stout iron bar securely fastened on one side of the large fireplace; on this bar, which was called a crane, iron hooks were placed, on which the teakettle and other cooking utensils were hung; all cooking and baking was done before the open fire and broad clay hearth.

Windows were a sort of sliding door in the wall, without gla.s.s. The furniture was extremely simple, being split out of fir or cedar trees, and, if not elegant, was substantial; doors were also made of shakes, and hung on wooden hinges. Wooden pegs were used in place of nails.

Rough bedsteads were placed in one corner of the large room, the trundle bed pushed under it during the day, and at night drawn out ready for the little ones. For one to see the number of sweet faces and bright eyes of the many children lying in their beds, the scene would put the old woman who lived in her shoe far in the minority.

Large quant.i.ties of moss stripped from the trees made good mattresses; with buffalo robes and blankets they had comfortable beds. Their primitive cabins completed ready for occupancy, with heartfelt thankfulness they left the shelter of the trees for their first Oregon home.

The latchstring, like a welcome hand, bade them enter. A bright fire greeted them with her golden rays and warmth, and the sound of the teakettle, cheerily singing, they catch the glad refrain and quickly joined with--

"Home! Home! sweet, sweet home!

Be it ever so humble, There's no place like home."

How well they realized the true meaning of home, as no roof had sheltered them for the past ten months. As the family gathered around the ruddy light of the cheerful fire, which was their only light, plans were made to visit Oregon City for supplies of food and clothing. Indians, with their canoes, conveyed them to their destination. Soon wheat, bolts of flannel, with other necessary articles, were purchased and s.h.i.+pped; fathers stepped on board, and the trusty Indian with a stroke of the paddle sent the frail craft swiftly gliding o'er limpid water. Ere long they were rus.h.i.+ng over the Clackamas rapids, which in hurried haste, flows on and yet is never gone. As the sun was sinking behind the hills, they reached home, where the anxious mother, blinded by tears of gladness, thanked G.o.d for the much needed supply of clothing and wheat, which was their only bread. Deer and other game were plentiful, and easily brought down by their trusty rifle. Salmon was bought of the Indians. Ducks, geese, and swan were numerous. All winter mothers were kept busy cutting and making clothing for the entire household; also teaching their daughters how to sew, knit, and attend to general housework; and if mothers were sick they did the work with willing hands. The canoe and bateaux were their only means of transportation. Neighbors would surprise the family by bringing their violins, and spending the evening talking and dancing. The large room would be cleared of all furniture, which was placed in the loft where the small children were put to bed; soon the merry sound of tripping feet were keeping time to Money Musk, and other old time music, the old men talked over the possibilities of Oregon. One thought bridges would span the Willamette; others shook their heads, saying not while we live. Our children may live to see one. Others thought railroads would be built across the continent; all looked at the speaker and echoed "A railroad! Never, over those mountains. Why, man, no one in G.o.d's world will live to see that day. Steamers and s.h.i.+ps will come, but no railroad."

Our pioneer mothers made their dresses with plain skirts; waists were sewed onto the skirt; sleeves were much like those worn by the women of to-day. Their hair was combed smooth by their forehead and wound in a coil high on their head, many wore side combs, a high back comb held their coil of glossy hair. Hairpins were an unknown luxury. White handkerchiefs were worn in place of collars, and they looked very pretty crossed or tied in a bow at the throat. All were deft with the needle, also weaving; those who have the rare blue and gray counterpanes, manufactured by their willing hands, possess an heirloom of great value.

In the spring of 1846 gardens were made by those living on farms, from which early vegetables were procured, and in the fall many bushels of potatoes, pease, and other vegetables were stored; of summer fruit there were wild strawberries, and later raspberries and blackberries, of which large quant.i.ties were picked and dried; also hazel bushes, producing nuts in abundance, which were gathered and stored for winter use. There was not much buying and selling, except of wheat, which was used as currency, as well as for food. Portland was founded in 1845 by pioneers who were quick to see the magnitude and resources of the country. J. B. Stephens, who was a cooper, saw the large revenue to be made by exporting salmon, and soon began making barrels and kegs, from which he netted a large profit. The first tannery built in Portland was erected near where the exposition building is located, by D. H.

Lownesdale, who had the honor of introducing a new circulating medium, which was Oregon tanned leather.

In 1845 the first ferry from the east bank to the west sh.o.r.e was a canoe.

In 1845 Portland was named.