XXII The New West
Four years after the death of Governor Clark began the rush to Oregon. Dr. Lewis F. Linn, Senator from Missouri, and grandson of William Linn, the trusted lieutenant of George Rogers Clark, introduced a bill in Congress offering six hundred and forty acres of land to every family that would emigrate to Oregon. The Linns came to Missouri with Daniel Boone, and with the Boones they looked ever west! west!
“Six hundred and forty acres of land! A solid square mile of God’s earth, clear down to the centre!” men exclaimed in amaze. While Ohio was still new, and the Mississippi Valley billowed her carpets of untrodden bloom, an eagle’s flight beyond, civilisation leaped to Oregon.
From ferries where Kansas City and Omaha now stand they started, crossing the Platte by fords, by waggon-beds lashed together, and on rafts, darkening the stream for days. Before their buffalo hunters, innumerable herds made the earth tremble where Kansas-Nebraska cities are to-day. In 1843 Marcus Whitman piloted the first waggon train through to the Columbia.
“A thousand people? Starving did you say? Lord! Lord! They must have help to-night,” exclaimed Dr. McLoughlin, the old white-haired Hudson’s Bay trader at Fort Vancouver.
“Man the boats! People are starving at the Dalles!” and the noble-hearted representative of a rival government sent out his provision-laden bateaux to rescue the perishing Americans, who in spite of storms and tempests were gliding down the great Columbia as sixty years before their fathers floated down the Indian-haunted Ohio.
And Indians were here, with tomahawks ready.
“Let us kill these Bostons!”
McLoughlin heard the word, and shook the speaker as a terrier shakes a rat.
“Dogs, you shall be punished!”
In his anxiety lest harm should come to the approaching Americans, all night long, his white hair wet in the rain, Dr. McLoughlin stood watching the boats coming down the Columbia, and building great bonfires where Lewis and Clark had camped in 1806. Women and little children and new-born babes slept in the British fur-trader’s fort. Anglo-Saxon greeted Anglo-Saxon in the conquest of the world, to march henceforward hand in hand for ever.
Among the emigrants on the plains in 1846, was Alphonso Boone, the son of Jesse, the son of Daniel. Several grown-up Boone boys were there, and the beautiful Chloe and her younger sisters.
Chloe Boone rode a thorough-bred mare, a descendant of the choicest Boone stock, from the old Kentucky blue-grass region. Mounted upon her high-stepping mare, Chloe and her sisters and other young people of the train rode on ahead of the slow-going line of waggons and oxen. Gay was the laughter, and merry the songs, that rang out on the bright morning air.
Francis Parkman, the great historian, then a young man just out of college, was on the plains that year, collecting material for his books. Now and then they met parties of soldiers going to the Mexican War, and many a boy in blue turned to catch a glimpse of the sweet girl faces in Chloe’s train.
Happily they rode in the Spring on the plains; more slowly when the heats of Summer came and the sides of the Rocky Mountains grew steep and rough; and slower still in the parched lands beyond, when the woodwork of the waggons began to shrink, and the worn-out animals to faint and fall.
“So long a journey!” said Chloe. Six months it took. Clothes wore out, babes were born, and people died.
They came into Oregon by the southern route, guided by Daniel Boone’s old compass, the one given him by Dunmore to bring in the surveyors from the Falls of the Ohio seventy-two years before.
The Fall rains had set in. The Umpqua River was swollen,—eighteen times from bank to bank Chloe forded, in getting down Umpqua canyon.
“We shall have to leave the waggons and heavy baggage with a guard,” said Colonel Boone, “and hurry on to the settlements.”
They reached the Willamette Valley, pitched their tents where Corvallis now stands, and that Winter, in a little log cabin, Chloe Boone taught the first school ever conducted by a woman outside of the missions in Oregon.
Leaving the girls, Colonel Boone went back after the waggons. Alas! the guard was killed, the camp was looted, and Daniel Boone’s old compass was gone for ever. Its work was done.
Alphonso Boone built a mansion near the present capital city of Salem and here Chloe married the Governor, George L. Curry, and for years beside the old Boone fireside the Governor’s wife extended the hospitalities of the rising State. Albert Gallatin Boone camped on the site of Denver twenty years before Denver was, and negotiated the sale of Colorado from the Indians to the United States. John C. Boone, son of Nathan Boone, explored a new cut-off and became a pioneer of California. James Madison Boone drove stakes in Texas.
What years had passed since the expedition of Lewis and Clark! It seemed like a bygone event, but one who had shared its fortunes still lived on and on,—our old friend, Patrick Gass. In the War of 1812, above the roaring Falls of Niagara, Sergeant Gass spiked the enemy’s cannon at the battle of Lundy’s Lane. Years went on. A plain unpretentious citizen, Patrick worked at his trade in Wellsburg and raised his family.
In 1856 Patrick Gass headed a delegation of gray-haired veterans of the War of 1812 to Washington, and was everywhere lionised as the last of the men of Lewis and Clark.
On July 4, 1861, the land was aflame over the firing on Fort Sumter. All Wellsburg with her newly enlisted regiments for the war was gathered at Apple Pie Ridge to celebrate the day.
“Where is Patrick Gass?”
A grand carriage was sent for him, and on the shoulders of the boys in blue he was brought in triumph to the platform.
“Speech! speech!”
And the speech of his life Patrick Gass made that day, for his country and the Union. The simple, honest old hero brought tears to every eye, with a glimpse of the splendid drama of Lewis and Clark. Again they saw those early soldier-boys bearing the flag across the Rockies, suffering starvation and danger and almost death, to carry their country to the sea.
“But me byes, it’s not a picnic ye’re goin’ to,—oh, far from it! No! no! ’T will be hard fur ye when ye come marchin’ back lavin’ yer comrades lyin’ far from home and friends, but there is One to look to, who has made and kept our country.”
It seemed the applause would never cease, with cheering and firing of cannon.
“Stay! stay!” cried the people. “Sit up on the table and let us have our banquet around you with the big flag floating over your head.” In an instant Pat was down.
“Far enough is far enough!” he cried, “and be the divil, will yez try to make sport of mesilf?” Excitedly the modest old soldier slipped away.
The war ended. A railroad crossed the plains. Oregon and California were States. Alaska was bought. Still Pat lived on, until 1870, when he fell asleep, at the age of ninety-nine, the last of the heroic band of Lewis and Clark.
William Walker, who gave to the world the story of the Nez Percés, led his Wyandots into Kansas, and, with the first white settlers, organising a Provisional Government after the plan of Oregon, became himself the first Governor of Kansas-Nebraska.
Oh, Little Crow! Little Crow! what crimes were committed in thy name! In the midst of the war, 1862, Little Crow the third arose against the white settlers of Minnesota in one of the most frightful massacres recorded in history. Then came Sibley’s expedition sweeping on west, opening the Dakotas and Montana.
The Indian? He fought and was vanquished. How we are beginning to love our Indians, now that we fear them no longer! No wild man ever so captured the imagination of the world. With inherent nobility, courage to the border of destruction, patriotism to the death, absolutely refusing to be enslaved, he stands out the most perfect picture of primeval man. We might have tamed him but we had not time. The movement was too swift, the pressure behind made the white men drivers as the Indians had driven before. Civilisation demands repose, safety. And until repose and safety came we could do no effective work for the Indian. We of to-day have lived the longest lives, for we have seen a continent transformed.
We have forgotten that a hundred years ago Briton and Spaniard and Frenchman were hammering at our gates; forgotten that the Indian beleaguered our wooden castles; forgotten that wolves drummed with their paws on our cabin doors, snapping their teeth like steel traps, while the mother hushed the wheel within and children crouched beneath the floor.
O mothers of a mighty past, thy sons are with us yet, fighting new battles, planning new conquests, for law, order, and justice.
Where rolls the Columbia and where the snow-peaks of Hood, Adams, Jefferson, Rainier, and St. Helens look down, a metropolis has arisen in the very Multnomah where Clark took his last soundings. Northward, Seattle sits on her Puget sea, southward San Francisco smiles from her golden gate, Spanish no more. Over the route where Lewis and Clark toiled slowly a hundred years ago, lo! in three days the traveller sits beside the sunset. Five transcontinental lines bear the rushing armies westward, ever westward into the sea. Bewildered a moment they pause, then turn—to the Conquest of the Poles and the Tropics. The frontiersman? He is building Nome City under the Arctic: he is hewing the forests of the Philippines.