Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands written by Charles Nordhoff

C >> Charles Nordhoff >> Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands

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[Illustration: THE DUKE OF YORK. QUEEN VICTORIA. Puget Sound Chiefs.]

The rocks are volcanic from near the mouth of the Willamette to and above
the Dalles, and geologists suppose that there have been great convulsions
of nature hereabouts in recent geological times. The Indians have
a tradition, indeed, that the river was originally navigable and
unobstructed where now are the Cascades, and that formerly there was a
long, natural tunnel, through which the Columbia passed under a mountain.
They assert that a great earthquake broke down this tunnel, the site
of which they still point out, and that the debris formed the present
obstructions at the Cascades.

Oregon, if one may judge by the fossil remains in Mr. Condon's collection,
seems once to have been inhabited by a great number and variety of
pre-adamite beasts; but the most singular object he has to show is a very
striking ape's head, carved with great spirit and vigor out of hard lava.
This object was found upon the shore of the Columbia by Indians, after
a flood which had washed away a piece of old alluvial bank. The rock of
which it is composed is quite hard; the carving is, as I said, done with
remarkable vigor; and the top of the head is hollowed out, precisely as
the Indians still make shallow depressions in figures and heads which
they carve out of slate, in which to burn what answers in their religious
ceremonies for incense.

But supposing this relic to belong to Oregon--and there is, I was told,
no reason to believe otherwise--where did the Indian who carved it get his
idea of an ape? The Indians of this region, poor creatures that they are,
have still the habit of carving rude figures out of slate and other
soft rocks. They have also the habit of cutting out shallow, dish-like
depressions in the heads of such figures, wherein to burn incense. But
they could not give Mr. Condon any account of the ape's head they brought
him, nor did they recognize its features as resembling any object or
creature familiar to them even by tradition.

The Dalles of the Columbia are simply a succession of falls and rapids,
not reaching over as great a distance as the Cascades, but containing one
feature much more remarkable than any thing which the Cascades afford, and
indeed, so far as I know, found nowhere else.

The Columbia above the Dalles is still a first-class river, comparable
in depth and width, and in the volume of its water, only with the Lower
Mississippi or the Amazon. It is a deep, rapidly-flowing stream, nearly a
mile wide. But at one point in the Dalles the channel narrows until it is,
at the ordinary height of the river, not over a hundred yards wide; and
through this narrow gorge the whole volume of the river rushes for some
distance. Of course water is not subject to compression; the volume of the
river is not diminished; what happens, as you perceive when you see this
singular freak of nature, is that the river is suddenly turned up on its
edge. Suppose it is, above the Dalles, a mile wide and fifty feet deep;
at the narrow gorge it is but a hundred yards wide--how deep must it be?
Certainly it can be correctly said that the stream is turned up on its
edge.

The Dalles lie five or six miles above Dalles City; and you pass these
rapids in the train which bears you to Celilo early the next morning
after you arrive at Dalles City. Celilo is not a town; it is simply
a geographical point; it is the spot where, if you were bound to the
interior of the continent by water, you would take steamboat. There is
here a very long shed to shelter the goods which are sent up into this
far-away and, to us Eastern people, unknown interior; there is a wharf
where land the boats when they return from a journey of perhaps a thousand
miles on the Upper Columbia or the Snake; there are two or three laborers'
shanties--and that is all there is of Celilo; and your journey thither
has been made only that you may see the Dalles, and Cape Horn, as a bold
promontory on the river is called.

What I advise you to do is to take a hearty lunch with you, and, if you
can find one, a guide, and get off the early Celilo train at the Dalles.
You will have a most delightful day among very curious scenery; will
see the Indians spearing salmon in the pools over which they build their
stages; and can examine at leisure the curious rapids called the Dalles.
A party of three or four persons could indeed spend several days very
pleasantly picnicking about the Dalles, and in the season they would shoot
hare and birds enough to supply them with meat. The weather in this part
of Oregon, east of the Cascade range, is as settled as that of California,
so that there is no risk in sleeping-out-of-doors in summer.

There is a singularly sudden climatic change between Western and Eastern
Oregon; and if you ask the captain or pilot on the boat which plies
between the Cascades and Dalles City, he can show you the mountain range
on one side of which the climate is wet, while on the other side it is
dry. The Cascade range is a continuation northward of the Sierra Nevada;
and here, as farther south, it stops the water-laden winds which rush up
from the sea. Western Oregon, lying between the Cascades and the ocean,
has so much rain that its people are called "Web-feet;" Eastern Oregon, a
vast grazing region, has comparatively little rain. Western Oregon, except
in the Willamette and Rogue River valleys, is densely timbered; Eastern
Oregon is a country of boundless plains, where they irrigate their few
crops, and depend mainly on stock-grazing. This region is as yet sparsely
settled; and when we in the East think of Oregon, or read of it even, it
is of that part of the huge State which lies west of the Cascades, and
where alone agriculture is carried on to a considerable extent.

You will spend a day in returning from the Dalles to Portland, and
arriving there in the evening can set out the next morning for Olympia,
on Puget Sound, by way of Kalama, which is the Columbia River terminus
for the present of the Northern Pacific Railroad. It is possible to go
by steamer from Portland to Victoria, and then return down Puget Sound to
Olympia; but to most people the sea-voyage is not enticing, and there are
but slight inconveniences in the short land journey. The steamer leaving
Portland at six A.M. lands you at Kalama about eleven; there you get
dinner, and proceed about two by rail to Olympia. It is a good plan to
telegraph for accommodations on the pretty and comfortable steamer _North
Pacific_, and go directly to her on your arrival at Olympia.

Puget Sound is one of the most picturesque and remarkable sheets of water
in the world; and the voyage from Olympia to Victoria, which shows you the
greater part of the Sound, is a delightful and novel excursion, specially
to be recommended to people who like to go to sea without getting
sea-sick; for these land-encircled waters are almost always smooth.

When, at Kalama, you enter Washington Territory, your ears begin to be
assailed by the most barbarous names imaginable. On your way to Olympia
by rail you cross a river called the Skookum-Chuck; your train stops at
places named Newaukum, Tumwater, and Toutle; and if you seek further, you
will hear of whole counties labeled Wahkiakum, or Snohomish, or Kitsap, or
Klikatat; and Cowlitz, Hookium, and Nenolelops greet and offend you. They
complain in Olympia that Washington Territory gets but little immigration;
but what wonder? What man, having the whole American continent to chose
from, would willingly date his letters from the county of Snohomish, or
bring up his children in the city of Nenolelops? The village of Tumwater
is, as I am ready to bear witness, very pretty indeed; but surely an
emigrant would think twice before he established himself either there or
at Toutle. Seattle is sufficiently barbarous; Steilacoom is no better; and
I suspect that the Northern Pacific Railroad terminus has been fixed at
Tacoma--if it is fixed there--because that is one of the few places
on Puget Sound whose name does not inspire horror and disgust.

[Illustration: NANAIMO, VANCOUVER'S ISLAND.]

Olympia, which lies on an arm of Puget Sound, and was once a town of
great expectations, surprises the traveler by its streets, all shaded with
magnificent maples. The founder of the town was a man of taste; and he
set a fashion which, being followed for a few years in this country of
abundant rains, has given Olympia's streets shade trees by the hundred
which would make it famous were it an Eastern place.

Unluckily, it has little else to charm the traveler, though it is the
capital of the Territory; and when you have spent half an hour walking
through the streets you will be quite ready to have the steamer set off
for Victoria. The voyage lasts but about thirty-six hours, and would be
shorter were it not that the steamer makes numerous landings. Thus you
get glimpses of Seattle, Steilacoom, Tacoma, and of the so-called saw-mill
ports--Port Madison, Port Gamble, Port Ludlow, and Port Townsend--the
last named being also the boundary of our Uncle Samuel's dominions for
the present, and the port of entry for this district, with a custom-house
which looks like a barn, and a collector and inspectors, the latter of
whom examine your trunk as you return from Victoria to save you from the
sin of smuggling.

From Port Townsend your boat strikes across the straits of San Juan de
Fuca to Victoria; and just here, as you are crossing from American
to English territory, you get the most magnificent views of the grand
Olympian range of mountains and of Mount Regnier. Also, the captain will
point out to you in the distance that famous island of San Juan which
formed the subject or object, or both, of our celebrated boundary dispute
with great Britain, and you will wonder how small an object can nearly
make nations go to war, and for what a petty thing we set several kings
and great lords to studying geography and treaties and international law,
and boring themselves, and filling enterprising newspapers with dozens
of columns of dull history; and you will wonder the more at the stupid
pertinacity of these English in clinging to the little island of San Juan
when you reach Victoria, and see that we shall presently take that dull
little town too, not because we want it or need it, but to save it from
perishing of inanition.

It is something to have taste and a sense of the beautiful. Certainly the
English, who discovered the little landlocked harbor of Victoria and chose
it as the site of a town, displayed both. It is by natural advantages one
of the loveliest places I ever saw, and I wonder, remote as it is, that
it is not famous. The narrow harbor, which is not so big as one of the
big Liverpool docks, is surrounded on both sides by the prettiest little
miniature bays, rock-bound, with grassy knolls, and here and there shady
clumps of evergreens; a river opening out above the town into a kind of
lake, and spanned by pretty bridges, invites you to a boating excursion;
and the fresh green of the lawn-like expanses of grass which reach into
the bay from different directions, the rocky little promontories with
boats moored near them, the fine snow-covered mountains in the distance,
and the pleasantly winding roads leading in different directions into the
country, all make up a landscape whose soft and gay aspect I suppose is
the more delightful because one comes to it from the somewhat oppressive
grandeur of the fir forests in Washington Territory.

In the harbor of Victoria the most conspicuous object is the long range of
warehouses belonging to the Hudson Bay Company, with their little trading
steamers moored alongside. These vessels bear the signs of traffic with a
savage people in the high boarding nettings which guard them from stem to
stern, and which are in their more solid parts pierced for musketry. Here,
too, you see a queer little old steamboat, the first that ever vexed
the waters of the Pacific Ocean with its paddle-wheels. And as your own
steamer hauls up to the wharf, you will notice, arrayed to receive you,
what is no doubt the most shocking and complete collection of ugly women
in the world.

These are the Indians of this region. They are very light-colored;
their complexion has an artificial look; there is something ghastly and
unnatural in the yellow of the faces, penetrated by a rose or carmine
color on the cheeks. They are hideous in all the possible aspects and
varieties of hideousness--undersized, squat, evil-eyed, pug-nosed, tawdry
in dress, ungraceful in every motion; they really mar the landscape, so
that you are glad to escape from them to your hotel, which you find a
clean and comfortable building, where, if you are as fortunate as the
traveler who relates this, you may by-and-by catch a glimpse or two of
a fresh, fair, girlish English face, which will make up to you for the
precedent ugliness.

Victoria hopes to have its dullness enlivened by a railroad from the
mainland one of these days, which may make it more prosperous, but will
probably destroy some of the charm it now has for a tourist. It can hardly
destroy the excellent roads by which you may take several picturesque
drives and walks in the neighborhood of the town, nor the pretty views you
have from the hills near by, nor the excursions by boat, in which you can
best see how much Nature has done to beautify this place, and how little
man has done so far to mar her work.

Silks and cigars are said to be very cheap in Victoria; and those who
consume these articles will probably look through the shops and make a
few purchases, not enough to satisfy, though sufficient to arouse the
suspicions of the Collector of Customs at Port Townsend. If you use your
time well, the thirty-six hours which the steamer spends at Victoria will
suffice you to see all that is of interest there to a traveler, and you
can return in her down the Sound, and make more permanent your impressions
of its scenery.

You will perhaps be startled, if you chance to overhear the conversation
of your fellow-passengers, to gather that it concerns itself chiefly with
millions, and these millions run to such extraordinary figures that you
may hear one man pitying another for the confession that he made no more
than a hundred millions last year. It is feet of lumber they are speaking
of; and when you see the monstrous piles of sawdust which encumber the
mill ports, the vast quantities of waste stuff they burn, and the huge
rafts of timber which are towed down to the mills, as well as the
ships which lie there to load for South America, Tahiti, Australia, and
California, you will not longer wonder that they talk of millions.

Some of these mills are owned by very wealthy companies, who have had the
good fortune to buy at low rates large tracts of the best timber lands
lying along the rivers and bays. A saw-mill is the centre of quite a
town--and a very rough town too, to judge from the appearance of the men
who come down to the dock to look at the steamer, and the repute of the
Indian women who go from port to port and seem at home among the mill men.

Having gone by sea to Oregon, I should advise you to return to California
overland. The journey lies by rail through the fertile Willamette Valley,
for the present the chief agricultural country of Oregon, to Roseburg, and
thence by stage over and through some of the most picturesque and grand
scenery in America, into California. If you are curious in bizarre social
experiments, you may very well stop a day at Aurora, thirty miles below
Portland, and look at some of the finest orchards in the State, the
property of a strange German community which has lived in harmony and
acquired wealth at this point.

Salem, too, the capital of Oregon, lying on the railroad fifty miles below
Portland, is worth a visit, to show you how rich a valley the Willamette
is. And as you go down by stage toward California you will enjoy a long
day's drive through the Rogue River Valley, a long, narrow, winding series
of nooks, remote, among high mountains, looking for all the world as
though in past ages a great river had swept through here, and left in its
dry bed a fertile soil, and space enough for a great number of happy and
comfortable homes.

May and June are the best months in which to see Oregon and Puget Sound.
With San Francisco as a starting-point, one may go either to Portland or
to Victoria direct. If you go first to Victoria, you save a return journey
across Puget Sound, and from Olympia to Kalama, but you miss the sail up
the Columbia from Astoria to Portland. The following table of fares will
show you the cost of traveling in the region I have described:

Time. Fare.
From San Francisco to Portland................... 3 days $30 00
From San Francisco to Victoria................... 3 " 30 00
From Portland to Celilo.......................... 1 day 7 00
Excursion tickets, good from Portland to Celilo and
back............................................. 3 days 10 00
From Portland by Olympia to Victoria............. 3 " 12 25
From Portland to San Francisco by railroad and
stage............................................ 79 hours 42 00

Meals on these journeys are extra, and cost from half a dollar to
seventy-five cents. They are generally good. All these rates are in
coin. On the steamer from San Francisco to Portland or Victoria meals are
included in the fare.

When you are once in Portland, a vast region opens itself to you, if you
are an adventurous tourist. You may take boat at Celilo, above the Dalles,
and steam up to Wallula, where you take stage for Elkton, a station on
the Pacific Railroad, in Utah; this journey shows you the heart of the
continent, and is said to abound in magnificent scenery. I have not made
it, but it is frequently done. If you have not courage for so long an
overland trip, a journey up to the mouth of Snake River and back to
Portland, which consumes but a week, will give you an intelligent idea of
the vastness of the country drained by the main body of the great Columbia
River.

The great plains and table-lands which lie east of the Cascades, and are
drained by the Columbia, the Snake, and their affluents, will some day
contain a vast population. Already enterprising pioneers are pushing into
the remotest valleys of this region. As you sail up the Columbia, you will
hear of wheat, barley, sheep, stock, wool, orchards, and rapidly growing
settlements, where, to our Eastern belief, the beaver still builds his
dams, unvexed even by the traps and rifle of the hunter.

[Illustration: ANCIENT HAWAIIAN IDOL.]

APPENDIX.

CONTRIBUTIONS OF A VENERABLE SAVAGE TO THE ANCIENT HISTORY OF THE HAWAIIAN
ISLANDS.[A]

TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH OF M. JULES REMY, BY WILLIAM T. BRIGHAM.

[I am indebted to Mr. William T. Brigham, of Boston, the
translator of the following "Contributions of a venerable Savage,"
and the author of a valuable treatise on the volcanoes of the
Sandwich Islands, as well as of several memoirs on the natural
history of the Islands, for his kind permission to use this very
curious fragment, with his additions, in my volume. The original
I have not been able to lay my hands on. It gives a picturesque
account of the Hawaiian people before they came into relations
with foreigners. It should be remembered by the reader that
Mr. Remy is a Frenchman, and that his relations with the Roman
Catholic missionaries somewhat colored his views of the labors of
the American missionaries on the Islands.

The "contributions" in this translation of Mr. Brigham were
privately printed by him some years ago, and the following note
by him explains their origin. It will be seen that Mr. Brigham
translated the Mele, or chant of Kawelo, from the original.]

One evening, in the month of March, 1853, I landed at Hoopuloa, on the
western shore of Hawaii. Among the many natives collected on the beach
to bid me welcome and draw my canoe up over the sand, I noticed an old
man of average size, remarkably developed chest, and whose hairs,
apparently once flaxen, were hoary with age. The countenance of this
old man, at once savage and attractive, was furrowed across the
forehead with deep and regular wrinkles. His only garment was a shirt
of striped calico.

A sort of veneration with which his countrymen seemed to me to regard him
only increased the desire I at first felt to become acquainted with
the old islander. I was soon told that his name was Kanuha, that he
was already a lad when Alapai[1] died (about 1752), that he had known
Kalaniopuu, Cook, and Kamehameha the Great. When I learned his name
and extraordinary age, I turned toward Kanuha, extending my hand. This
attention flattered him, and disposed him favorably toward me. So I
resolved to take advantage of this lucky encounter to obtain from an
eye-witness an insight into Hawaiian customs before the arrival of
Europeans.

A hut of pandanus had been prepared for me upon the lava by the care of
a missionary. I made the old man enter, and invited him to partake of my
repast of poi,[2] cocoa-nut, raw fish, and roast dog. While eating the poi
with full fingers, Kanuha assured me that he had lived under King Alapai,
and had been his runner, as well as the courier of Kalaniopuu, his
successor. So great had been Kanuha's strength in his youth that, at the
command of his chiefs, he had in a single day accomplished the distance
from Hoopuloa to Hilo, more than forty French leagues. When Cook died, in
1779, the little children of Kanuha's children had been born. When I spoke
of Alapai to my old savage, he told me that _it seemed to him a matter of
yesterday_; of Cook, _it was a thing of to-day_.

From these facts it may be believed that Kanuha was not less than one
hundred and sixteen years old when I met him on this occasion. This
remarkable example of longevity was by no means unique at the Hawaiian
Islands a few years since. Father Marechal knew at Ka'u, in 1844, an
aged woman who remembered perfectly having seen Alapai. I had occasion to
converse at Kauai with an islander who was already a grandfather when he
saw Captain Cook die. I sketched, at this very Hoopuloa, the portrait of
an old woman, still vigorous, Meawahine, who told any who would hear her
that her breasts were completely developed when her chief gave her as wife
to the celebrated English navigator.

Old Kanuha was the senior of all these centenaries. I took advantage of
his willing disposition to draw from him the historical treasures with
which his memory was stored. Here, in my own order, is what he told me
during a night of conversation, interrupted only by the Hawaiian dances
(_hulahula_), and by some pipes of tobacco smoked in turn, in the custom
of the country.

OF GOVERNMENT AND SOCIETY WITH THE ANCIENT HAWAIIANS.

The soil was the property of the king, who reserved one part of it for
himself, assigning another to the nobles, and left the rest to the first
occupant. Property, based on a possession more or less ancient, was
transmitted by heritage; but the king could always dispose, according to
his whims, of property of chiefs and subjects, and the chiefs had the same
privilege over the people.

Taxes were not assessed on any basis. The king levied them whenever it
seemed good to him, and almost always in an arbitrary way. The chiefs
also, and the priests, received a tribute from the people. The tax was
always in kind, and consisted of:

Kalo, raw and made into poi; Potatoes (_Convolvulus batatas_, L.) many
varieties; Bananas (_maia_) of different kinds; Cocoa-nuts (called _niu_
by the natives); Dogs (destined for food);[3] Hogs; Fowls; Fish, crabs,
cuttle-fish, shell-fish; Kukui nuts (_Aleurites moluccana_) for making
relishes, and for illumination; Edible sea-weed (_limu_); Edible ferns
(several species, among others the _hapuu_); Awa (_Piper methysticum_,
Forst.); Ki roots (_Cordyline ti_, Schott.), a very saccharine vegetable;
Feathers of the _Oo_ (_Drepanis pacifica_), and of the _Iiwi_ (_Drepanis
coccinea_): these birds were taken with the glue of the _ulu_ or
bread-fruit (_Artocarpus incisa_); Fabrics of beaten bark (_kapa_)
and fibre of the _olona_ (_Boehmeria_), of _wauke_ (_Broussonetia
papyrifera_), of _hau_ (_Hilasens tiliasens_), etc.; Mats of Pandanus and
of Scirpus; Pili (grass to thatch houses with); Canoes (_waa_); Wood for
building; Calabashes (serving for food vessels, and to hold water); Wooden
dishes; Arms and instruments of war, etc., etc.

A labor tax was also enforced, and it was perhaps the most onerous,
because it returned almost regularly every moon for a certain number of
days. The work was principally cultivating the _loi_, or fields of kalo,
which belonged to the king or chiefs.

The Hawaiian people were divided into three very distinct classes; these
were:

1. The nobility (_Alii_), comprising the king and the chiefs of whatever
degree;

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