Ox-Team Days on the Oregon Trail Part 8

It occurred in this way. We did not then know how to scaffold up above the tough, swelled bases of the large trees, and this made it very difficult to chop them down. So we burned through them. We bored two holes at an angle to meet inside the inner bark, and when we got a fire started there the heart of the tree would burn through, leaving an outer sh.e.l.l of bark.

One morning, as usual, I was up early. After lighting the fire in the stove and putting on the kettle, I hastened to the burning timber to start the logging fires afresh. As I neared a clump of three giants, two hundred and fifty feet tall, one began toppling over toward me. In my confusion I ran across the path where it fell. This tree had scarcely reached the ground when a second started to fall almost parallel to it, the two tops barely thirty feet apart and the limbs flying in several directions. I was between the two trees. If I had not become entangled in some brush, I should have been crushed by the second falling tree. It was an escape so marvelous as almost to lead one to think that there is such a thing as a charmed life.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A narrow escape.]

In rafting our precious acc.u.mulations of timber down the Columbia River to Oak Point, we were carried by the current past the place where we had expected to sell our logs at six dollars a thousand feet. Following the raft to the larger waters, we finally reached Astoria, where we sold the logs for eight dollars a thousand instead of six, thus profiting by our misfortunes.

But this final success had meant an involuntary plunge off the raft into the river with my boots on, for me, and three days and nights of ceaseless toil and watching for all of us. We voted unanimously that we would have no more such work.

The flour sack was nearly empty when I left home. We were expecting to be absent but one night, and we had been gone a week. There were no neighbors nearer our cabin than four miles, and no roads--scarcely a trail. The only communication was by the river. What about the wife and baby alone in the cabin, with the deep timber at the rear and a heavy jungle of brush in front? Happily we found them all right upon our return.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A lesson in the art of clam baking.]

CHAPTER ELEVEN

HUNTING FOR ANOTHER HOME SITE

OUR enjoyment of this first home did not last long. Hardly were we fairly settled, when news came that unsettled us again.

In April of 1853, the word had begun to pa.s.s around that we were to have a new Territory to embrace the country north of the Columbia River. Its capital was to be on Puget Sound. Here on the Columbia we should be away off to one side, out of touch with the people who would shortly become a great separate commonwealth.

It seemed advisable to look about a little, before making the move; so leaving the little wife and baby in the cabin home one bright morning in May, Oliver and I each made a pack of forty pounds and took the trail, bound for Puget Sound. We camped where night overtook us, sleeping in the open air without shelter or cover other than that afforded by some friendly tree with drooping limbs.

Our trail first led us down near the right bank of the Columbia to the Cowlitz, thence up the latter river thirty miles or more, and then across the country nearly sixty miles to Olympia.

At this time there might have been, about Puget Sound, two thousand white people all told, while now there are nearer a million. But these people were so scattered we did not realize there were even that number, for the Puget Sound country is a big place--more than two hundred miles long and seventy-five miles wide--between two mountain ranges, with the Cascades on the east and the Olympics on the west. The waters of the Sound, including all the channels and bays and inlets and sh.o.r.es of forty islands, make more than sixteen hundred miles of sh.o.r.e line--nearly as many miles as the Oregon Trail is long; that is, almost as many miles as we had the previous year traversed from the Missouri River to the Sound.

Our expectations had been raised high by the glowing accounts of Puget Sound. But a feeling of deep disappointment fell upon us when we could see in the foreground only bare, dismal mud flats, and beyond these a channel scarcely twice as wide as that of the great river we had left, bounded on either side by high, heavily timbered land. We wished ourselves back at our cabin on the Columbia.

Should we turn around and go back? No; we had never done that since leaving our Indiana home. But what was the use of stopping here? We wanted a place to make a farm, and we could not do it on such forbidding land as this. The dense forest stretching out before us was interesting enough to the lumberman, and for aught I knew there were channels for the s.h.i.+ps; but I wanted to be neither lumberman nor sailor. My first camp on Puget Sound was not cheerful.

Olympia at the time contained about one hundred inhabitants. It had three stores, a hotel, a livery stable, a saloon, and one weekly newspaper. A glance at the advertising columns of this paper, _The Columbian_ (the name which was expected to be that of the new territory), disclosed but a few local advertisers. "Everybody knows everybody here," a resident remarked to me, "so what's the use of advertising?"

We could not stay at Olympia. We had pushed on past some good locations on the Chehalis, and farther south, without locating. Should we now retrace our steps? Oliver said no, and my better judgment also said no, though I was sorely pressed with a feeling of homesickness.

The decision was quickly made to see more of this Puget Sound. But how were we to see these--to us--unexplored waters? I declared that I would not go in one of those Indian canoes, that we should upset it before we were out half an hour. I had to admit that the Indians navigated the whole Sound in these canoes and were safe, but I would not trust myself in a craft that would tip as easily as a Siwash canoe. When I came to know the Indians better and saw their performances in these frail craft, my admiration for the canoes was even greater than my distrust had been.

Neither Oliver nor I had much experience in boating, and we had none in boat building. However, when we had discarded the idea of taking a canoe, we set to work with a hearty good will to build us a skiff. We made it out of light lumber, then easily obtained at Tumwater. We determined to have the skiff broad enough not to upset easily, and long enough to carry us and our light cargo of food and bedding.

As in the trip across the Plains, we must provide our own transportation. Here and there might be a vessel loading piles and square timber for the San Francisco market, but not a steamer was then plying on the Sound; there was not even a sailing craft that essayed to carry pa.s.sengers.

As the tide drew us off on the placid waters of the bay at Olympia, with just a breath of air stirring, our little eighteen-foot craft behaved splendidly. The slight ripples jostling against the bow brought dreams of a pleasure trip, to make amends for the tiresome pack across the country.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A Siwash Indian in his canoe.]

We floated lazily with the tide, sometimes taking a few strokes with the oars, and at other times whistling for the wind. The little town of Olympia to the south became dimmed by distance. But we were no sooner fairly out of sight of the little village than the question came up which way to go. What channel should we take?

"Let the tide decide; that will carry us out toward the ocean."

"No, we are drifting into another bay; that cannot be where we want to go."

"Why, we are drifting right back almost in the same direction from which we came, but into another bay! We'll pull this way to that point to the northeast."

"But there seems a greater opening of water to the northwest."

"Yes, but I do not see any way out there."

So we talked and pulled and puzzled, until finally it dawned upon us that the tide had turned and we were being carried back into South Bay, to almost the very spot whence we had come.

"The best thing we can do is to camp," said Oliver.

I readily a.s.sented. So our first night's camp was scarcely twelve miles from where we had started in the morning. It was a fine camping place. A beautiful pebbly beach extended almost to the water's edge even at low tide. There was a gra.s.sy level spit, a background of evergreen giant-fir timber, and clear, cool water gus.h.i.+ng out from the bank near by. And such fuel for the camp fire!--broken limbs with just enough pitch to make a cheerful blaze and yet body enough to last well. We felt so happy that we were almost glad the journey had been interrupted.

Oliver was the carpenter of the party, the tent-builder, wood-getter, and general roustabout, while I, the junior, was "chief cook and bottle-washer."

An encampment of Indians being near, a party of them soon visited our camp and began making signs for trade.

"_Mika tik eh_[1] clams?" said one of the matrons of the party.

"What does she say, Oliver?"

"I'm blessed if I know, but it looks as if she wanted to sell some clams."

After considerable d.i.c.kering, with signs and gestures and words many times repeated, we were able to impart the information that we wanted a lesson in cookery. If she would show us how to cook the clams, we would buy some. This brought some merriment in the camp. The idea that there lived a person who did not know how to cook clams! Without saying by your leave or anything else, the motherly looking native woman began tearing down our camp fire.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Edward S. Curtis_

Indians gathering clams on the beach.]

"Let her alone, and see what she's up to," said Oliver, noticing that I was disturbed at such interference with my well-laid plans for bread-baking.

She covered the hot pebbles and sand where the fire had been with a lighter layer of pebbles. Upon these the clams were deposited. They were covered with fine twigs, and upon the twigs earth was placed.

"_Kloshe_,"[2] she said.

"_Hyas kloshe_,"[3] said her husband, who squatted near by, watching the proceedings with evident approval.

"What did they say?" I asked.

"I know what they said, but I don't know what they meant," responded Oliver, "unless it was she had done a good job; and I think she has."

Thus began and ended our first lesson in the Chinook jargon, and our first experience with a clam bake.