“Well, we’ve come to the Jumping-Off Place at last,” pioneer women used to say, sitting down wearily at the trail’s end, sometimes to weep with their faces turned away, hidden in apron or sunbonnet. . . . The farthest reach, the shore of the other ocean, no more land for track of foot or wheel. So here we pause and stand and take our final root.
CHAPTER II
Historical Background
LOOKING BACK
The Pacific Northwest has recently become very conscious of its history. Everywhere historic roads and trails and the campsites of famous exploring or pioneering parties are being re-marked; old blockhouses, forts of the Indian War days, early cabins, and fur trading posts are now carefully preserved or restored; and the gracious houses of the first days of wealth and leisure are re-furnished by the women of pioneer societies.
From early summer to mid-autumn, one can see in almost any town embarrassed young men going about their normal business wearing an imposing growth of whiskers, and young women swishing self-consciously down the streets in the long full-skirted dresses of another period. These are unmistakable signs of a Pageant, a Fair, a Round-up, a Jubilee, a Stampede, a Potlatch, or just a simple Celebration.
The university town of Eugene, Oregon, gives a performance every three years which might serve as a model of what a good pageant can be when a community of above-average people whole-souledly devote themselves to a spectacle intended not alone to please boosters but to give enjoyment to poets, musicians, and artists. Goodwin Thacher, the University of Oregon professor who writes the scripts, does not do just a “continuity,” he does a “poem,” a “song.” Some three thousand people and five hundred animals take part in these great outdoor performances. All the university resources are tapped, including the departments of Drama, Music, and English, and the School of Physical Education, which helps train the dancers. The Eugene Gleemen and the Women’s Choral Union take part. All the rural families from the pioneer county of Lane contribute costumes, equipment, and participants. There is no speaking, only singing, music, and pantomime; and the parade is so complete that the one criticism ever leveled at it (and old-timers can be very critical) was made by a woman from arid eastern Oregon who said that it had “everything except water-witches”—an oversight which the Eugene Register Guard was pretty sure would be corrected next time.
At these anniversary celebrations the local papers find delight in reprinting the singularly inept prophecies of certain men who fought the annexation of Oregon Territory when it was a matter of debate in the United States Senate. The eminent Mr. Daniel Webster often commands a lead paragraph with his long-remembered words of the 1840s: “What can we do with the western coast, a coast of 3,000 miles, rockbound, cheerless, uninviting and not a harbor on it? What use have we for such a country? I will never vote one cent from the public treasury to place the Pacific Ocean one inch nearer Boston than it is now.”
Senator McDuffie of South Carolina was pleased to state that he would not “give a pinch of snuff for the whole territory.” He went so far as to wish that “the Rocky mountains were an impassable barrier”; while even Senator Thomas H. Benton, Oregon’s staunch friend, considered that perhaps these rocky peaks had indeed been “placed by Providence” to mark the western limits of the States and set thus a boundary to man’s ambitions.
Many of the best minds of the period were solidly against the settling of these distant lands; but there were, fortunately, a number of simple people willing to set out on one of those almost mystical American drives in search of the promised land.
EXPLORERS BY BOAT
When the local papers publish short résumés of Northwest coast history, many accounts begin with Balboa wading into the Pacific far to the south in 1513, flag in hand, to claim all the shoreline of this unexplored ocean in the name of his country. This included the lands of the Northwest, which Balboa did not see, and it was Spain’s first claim to the territory which at one time, from her Mexican seat, she wished to annex to herself.
In the sixteenth century most of the famous European mariners were busy searching for something which did not exist except in wishful thinking, the legendary Strait of Anian, or Northwest Passage to the Orient.
About the time that Henry VIII was scandalizing Christendom with his goings-on a Spanish galleon under Bartolome Ferrelo moved cautiously up the west coast, perhaps as far as the forty-third parallel, which means that Ferrelo was the first white man to reach the latitude of Oregon. In 1579, Francis Drake, busy making life uncomfortable for the Spaniards in the name of Henry’s daughter the Virgin Queen of England—a perverse jade who wouldn’t say yes or no to the king of Spain on the subject of matrimony—sailed his famous Golden Hind along the same wild coast. Some authorities say he reached the forty-eighth parallel, which would be about on a line with the town of Everett, Washington. Others say he certainly sailed no farther than the forty-third parallel. But however far Drake got he gave as his reason for turning back a report of weather conditions which well-read native sons have been resenting ever since. Although it was June the “chaplain” to his roistering buccaneers claimed that they traveled in intense cold and snow. Residents of the Pacific Northwest, who boast of roses in January—although the land lies in the latitude of Newfoundland— quite frankly don’t believe Parson Fletcher’s story.
After Drake, Sebastian Vizcaino came in 1602 from Spain to Monterey in California and from there pushed on north the following year as far as the forty-third parallel, leaving a record of his passing in the names of such Oregon coast promontories as Cape Blanco and San Sebastian.
In the years that followed, until 1774, so far as records go—though Oregon Indian myths say otherwise—no alien eye was laid upon that roaring coastline, no outsider caught a glimpse of naked red men with deformed heads, faces painted with mica and ochre; holding their annual food gathering expeditions for fish, roots, berries; fasting and communicating with spirits; performing their mystic rites. While European nations contended for the eastern part of the New World, the western part slept in wild beauty, its snowcapped peaks unassailed, its records of geologic convulsions— exploding mountains, seas of lava, prehistoric oceans—unread by knowing eye. The hundreds of miles of waterways were disturbed only by Indians paddling their dugout canoes, chanting their minor songs on the waters of Whulge, their name for the inland sea; looking respectfully at the Mountain that was God—which no red man dared approach—or at Kulshan, the White Watcher—the Mt. Ararat of their flood legend, now known prosaically as Baker.
In 1774 Spain roused herself for another effort on the Pacific to consolidate her claims there. She sensed a threat in Russian activity far up the Northwest coast and in the gradual pushing overland of the fur companies from Hudson’s Bay. Up the west coast then sailed Juan Perez, bringing back little of value except word that the northern Indians would seem to have had white communication since they had iron trinkets in their possession. Perez was followed in 1775 by Bruno Heceta who formally claimed the Northwest lands for Spain and who brought back a report of turbulent discolored water off the shore to the north which was probably the Columbia resisting the Pacific with a fierceness so pronounced that it took years for mariners to fight their way into her waters. Neither of these two Spanish mariners got as far north as Alaska, where the Danish captain Vitus Bering, in service to the fabulous Tsar Peter, had already discovered the sea otters, destined to play such a significant part in Northwestern development.
It was left to Englishmen to publicize the big trade discovery on the west coast. As a result of the travels of Captain James Cook, who came out in 1776 from London,