broom that glorify the spring countryside were said to have been brought by the early French sisters. Later comers to the land of promise brought the cows and chickens, the stoves, wagons, pianos, and mirrors, and all the rest of the large and small things by which a comfortable life is lived.
No single book could possibly encompass all the stories within a single story which would constitute an adequate chronicle of the Pacific Northwest.
Lumber and Fisheries, Shipping and Mines, Horse and Cattle ranching, Reclamation by Irrigation—each could make a saga many-sided and dramatic.
The inland country has its yarns of vigilantes and outlaws where cattle rustling was a popular pastime and where men paid for drinks in gold dust. The coast keeps pace with its stories of the wild waterfront days, of shanghaiing and smuggling around all the islands, Puget Sound, and the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
There are the tales of the days before there were roads and the rivers carried the life from the coast inland; the era of steamboating on the Columbia in the heyday of the mining boom to the east when the handsome stern-wheelers and side-wheelers laboriously breasted the current, carrying prospectors and adventurers, outlaws and harlots, upriver to their assorted destinies. And back behind the steamboat to the earliest days when sailing vessels were the only connection with the world outside the wilderness; when the Sandwich Islands were the nearest source of supplies and Canton was more accessible than Boston.
There is the story of the coming of the railroads, with all their attendant scandals and crises. The steel rails pushed slowly westward through desert and mountain, dust and snow, bringing with them a flock of speculators and agents, promise-makers and promise-breakers to give the railroads a bad name in the Far West from which they have never recovered. The turning wheels carried the seed of “Jim Hill mustard” across the Rockies, and for many a town, with its hope of becoming a prosperous “terminus” finally destroyed, this was to be the only gold the railroads ever brought.
It is due in large part to the railroads that the Chinaman added his brief color to the Northwest scene. The Chinese were brought in as cheap labor, and when the railroads had been built, or abandoned, they went on into placer mining, into laundries and truck gardens and into many kitchens, until the citizens decided that their low wage scale was a growing menace and rose to push them out. But it wasn’t long ago that their blue coolie suits and sandals, wide-brimmed straw hats and baskets of vegetables on poles, were a familiar picture in the streets. On holidays they sailed their bright paper kites to the envy of the same children who sang after their impassive yellow faces:
Ching Chong Chinaman, sitting on a rail,Along came a blackbird and pulled off his tail.
The tail was the queue, of course, and the Chinamen suffered silent martyrdom over their long black braids. Drunks could never resist pulling them, and when feeling against the Chinese rose high, masked men went so far as to enter shops and hold up stages to cut off this sacred appendage as a warning that its owner was not wanted in the country (although without it a Chinaman dared not return to his native land). Only a scattering of the old Chinese are left. Most of the family servants have gone back to China to die as all good Celestials hope to do. Some few remain—cantankerous and loyal, temperamental and profane—performing their culinary miracles with chicken, pork, and green vegetables.
Women are often heard to complain of the shortsightedness that deprived them of an easy solution to the servant problem on this coast. Certainly the hardworking Northwest woman would make a book by herself, beginning with the Indian “wives” who helped white men to endure frontier privations and who must have suffered in their own way when the whites and the reds began to fight for dominance and they stood helpless between two worlds. The first white women in the Far West were missionary wives— with the exception of Jane Barnes, an adventurous London barmaid who created havoc among Indians as well as whites with her costumes and her carryings-on during a brief stay at Fort Vancouver in 1814. The missionary women seem to have all been exceptional characters; Eliza Spalding and Mary Walker enduring martyrdom no less real than that of the beautiful blonde Narcissa Whitman whom the Indians murdered outright. Missionary wives had at least a Cause to work for, but there were hundreds of other women who came west during the forties on through the fifties, sixties, seventies, and even into the eighties, against their will and better judgment, leaving behind all comforts and going into seemingly endless privations and want because their men had caught the virulent “Oregon fever.” These were the women who bore their children along the line of march, saw their favorite possessions abandoned in the wayside dust as overloaded oxen gave out, buried their dead and drove the wagons over the graves so the Indians might not find them, coming after months of endurance to the trail’s end only to find hardships and discomfort more vital than any they had experienced so far. These earliest women made possible the famous trip of Asa Shinn Mercer from the West Coast to the East in the sixties to bring back a cargo of New England virgins, and later Civil War widows, to fill the frontier’s most desperate need—good wives for the white men. They provided the necessary respectable background for “Mercer’s girls” to come to.
An over-romantic and too fulsome treatment of the pioneer has led many people in the Northwest to a sharp reaction which—with equal stupidity—allows no good word to be said for these hardy early emigrants from the east. The novel Honey in the Horn, although it outraged and angered many descendants of pioneers, who are apt to ask sourly what the Pulitzer Prize stands for anyway if it can be given to such a book, certainly came to many of the less beglamored residents of the Northwest as a distinctly astringent relief. Truth, however, is apt to lie between extremes, and certainly the proper approach to the pioneers of early Oregon—despite current tastes in literary modes—does not lie through an Okies of 1840 angle any more than it lies through a transplanting of Virginia cavaliers and their ladies. The early Oregon pioneers were American folk; the same kinds of people and in just about the same proportion of races and types as the settlers of the Eastern seaboard and the Middle West.
The complete story of the Pacific Northwest Indian—treated not alone as ethnological subject but as human being—has never been told, and it would make a fascinating chronicle, rich and varied and full of strongly developed personalities. The Northwest Indian pantheon contains names worthy of a place alongside King Philip, Black Hawk, or Tecumseh. First of all there is the remarkable Young Joseph of the Nez Percés, who conducted an unwilling campaign against the whites to retain the beautiful Wallowa Valley, ancestral home of his people. Joseph’s retreat of over one thousand miles hampered by women and children, and his superb last stand, are ranked as masterpieces of military strategy. Then there is Leschi whom the whites hanged for wanting to keep the Nisqually plains for Indian horseracing and the streams for Indian fishing; a story on which violent sides have been taken—both Ezra Meeker, the old pioneer, and the contemporary writer of fiction, Archie Binns, finding Leschi less guilty than Governor Stevens. There’s Captain Jack of the Modocs who waged a war in the Dantesque landscape of the southern Oregon lava beds; Lawyer and Moses, Kamiakin and Seattle, and the Duke of York from Port Townsend who affected a high silk hat, had two wives known as Jenny Lind and Queen Victoria, and whose engaging character was blackened—perhaps unfairly—by Theodore Winthrop, the young Bostonian whose The Canoe and The Saddle is a Far Western classic of the early days.
The poignancy of the Indians’ inevitable defeat comes through with moving force in some of the speeches and the questions the “blanket men” and the “long hairs” put to the triumphant whites. Thus Chief Seattle: “The very dust under your feet responds more lovingly to our footsteps than to yours, because it is the ashes of our ancestors.” Seattle told his white friends that long after the last red man had perished and his memory had become only a white man’s myth, the shores and woods and even the streets would still throng with the invisible dead Indians who had so “loved this beautiful land. . . . The white man will never be alone. Let him be just and deal kindly with my people for the dead are not altogether powerless.” And then there is that mildly puzzled profound question of Young Chief at the council of whites and Indians called by Governor Stevens
