Quaker, named George Bush—considered a mulatto by early settlers, but according to family records of East Indian descent—and a tough-fibred Kentuckian, Michael Simmons. These men and their families wintered north of the Columbia and eventually explored around Puget Sound and took up claims not far from the present town of Olympia.
The Hudson’s Bay Company had had a flourishing farm on Nisqually flats for some years but there were no other settlements and the general opinion was that England intended to claim the lands north of the Columbia. The prolonged and rather dubious negotiations between Daniel Webster, as secretary of state, and Lord Ashburton, a special British commissioner, have led many people to claim that Webster was quite willing to relinquish northern “Oregon” to Great Britain, if Great Britain would force Mexico to sell us California.
A good deal of bitter feeling about the Oregon Question seemed to focus itself in communities in the Mississippi Valley. In 1843 one hundred delegates met in Cincinnati for an “Oregon convention” and there adopted a resolution to the effect that the United States had a right to the western country “between the parallel of forty-two degrees on the south and fifty-four on the north.” This was the origin of the famous “Fifty-four Forty or Fight” slogan which elected the Democrat, James K. Polk, to the presidency in 1844 and which was finally settled in 1846 after an outbreak of hostilities with Britain was narrowly averted by making the forty-ninth parallel the northern boundary.
Immediately after the settlement of the quarrel with England the Oregon colonists expected to be welcomed into the Union with open arms, but they had inserted into their provisional constitution a clause which read that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime” should ever be permitted in their territory. This roused the opposition of such Southern leaders as Calhoun, and the Congressional session of 1846–47 closed without providing in any way for this new colony.
The Whitman massacre had stirred the Oregon settlers and forced them to a sharpened realization of their need for help from the home government. During that famous winter of 1848 Joe Meek had been dispatched to Washington with news of the colonists’ plight. His great virility, masculine good looks, frontier clothes, tall tales, and way with the ladies—aided slightly no doubt by kinship with President Polk—had all of Washington at his feet from the moment he entered the genteel Willard Hotel in his rough costume and announced to the timid clerk that he was “Minister Plenipotentiary and Envoy Extraordinary from all Oregon to the United States of America.” The Whitman massacre was thus in no small measure responsible for the passing of the bill to make Oregon a Territory in 1848.
After this period three major events built up the Pacific Northwest and gave it its present character: the gold discoveries in California, Idaho, Montana, and British Columbia; the settlement of the Indian wars; the coming of the railroads.
Discovery of gold in California changed that state’s history almost overnight, bringing it from a feeble position of rivalry with the Territory of Oregon to one of easy dominance. The adventurous Forty-Niners have assumed a place in American history which many historians consider they ill deserve in comparison with the more sober missionaries, explorers, traders, and settlers who opened up the Oregon country. Even the Oregon Trail became for many the California Trail, but in recent years the northern states have begun to realize how easy it is for them to compete in glamour of history and beauty of landscape with their highly publicized southern neighbor.
Many of the men who did not go south from Oregon to make a fortune in the goldfields made it by staying home and supplying roaring San Francisco with timber for buildings and all kinds of farm produce, as well as oysters and fish. The Puget Sound region, having also prospered indirectly by the California gold discoveries, grew strong enough to seek independence from the Oregon settlers—claiming that their interests were quite separate—and in 1853 became the Territory of Washington and a state in 1889. Their first governor was General Isaac I. Stevens who had been sent out to survey for a western railroad. Railroads were to play the next great role in the settlement of these lands.
The great days of the Columbia River boat traffic, with the boom period in the mining areas of the Inland Empire, opened up the eastern drylands to settlers other than missionaries who found this country far more beautiful and promising than they had been led to believe. They discovered that animals eating the apparently dead dry grass grew sleek and fat, that there were possibilities in dry farming, that irrigation from adjacent streams created magical fertility. Encroachment on the lands of the proud Indians of this section led to wars and treaties and the forming of reservations.
The railroads were—and still are—a storm center to western people. Their building had been at one time a “sectional issue between the North and the Cotton South” so that southern leaders successfully blocked the establishment of roads to the west until after the outbreak of the Civil War. After the war California, with its spectacular prosperity, was served first, but through the late sixties, the seventies, eighties, and nineties, the railroads began to reach their iron fingers into the Arcadian northern lands. There then appeared on the western scene such great organizers and wily schemers as Henry Villard and Jay Cooke, and a little later James J. Hill and E. H. Harriman. Fortunes were made and lost, towns destroyed or created by the stroke of a pen. Bitter court contests and public name-callings followed in the wake of the westward push of the iron rails.
In the twentieth century the history of the Pacific Northwest has been very largely the history of all of the United States, with certain natural differences growing out of geographical position, lateness in development (making both for advantages and disadvantages), and the discovery and utilization of local resources. Such aspects of the Northwest have been considered in this book through such individual communities as most clearly set them forth.
CHAPTER III
The Seasons
The months from April to October in the Pacific Northwest give so rich a variety of experience in scent, form, and color that even the native is often bemused with the weather and nature’s generosity.
Spring in the Pacific Northwest might be said to begin officially when people set out on rhododendron viewing expeditions along the miles of the Olympic Peninsula or the Oregon coast. The rhododendron is the state flower of Washington. Oregon chose a more useful plant, the Oregon grape, which bears yellow bells of blossom in spring and purple globes of berry in autumn, besides offering a year-round spot of glistening green in the dankest landscape. Like the Japanese, however, who worship the pink cherry which yields no fruit—since this teaches, they say, “the subtle use of the useless”—the Northwesterner worships the rhododendron which graciously lends its rosy beauty to ugly wastes of logged-off land as well as to untouched forest fringes.
About the time that rhododendrons appear, Scotch broom also comes along to herald the season, and meadows and canyons assail the eye with glitter of brilliant yellow. Pussywillow doesn’t count as a messenger of a new season in the Northwest, for it is apt to appear at Christmas if the season is mild, and be gathered for a New Year green along with the dark red berries of the kinnikinik or Indian tobacco.
Timed to coincide with rhododendron and Scotch broom, the groves turn white with dogwood and wild cherry, and erratic winds carry the spice of blossoming red currant. Downy plumes of spiraea signal the passing airs; fields display purple and white iris and the sky-blue cornflower. Then west coast forests hide the three-petaled trillium, pale bleeding hearts with lacy leaves, the gentle, secretive brown ginger, and the small precious orchid known as Lady Slipper. Fragrant pink twin-vine riots delicately over logs and mossy earth. Fungus of a thousand varieties, in every tone from white to deepest purple, re-create in the damp woods curiously marine memories, the frills and convolutions of conchs, or coral, or even sea anemones.
When the flat-petaled pink rose opens along every country road, spotted foxgloves are defining the marshy lines of languid streams;
