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Choppunish women, clad in garments of buckskin carefully whitened with clay, looked with scorn on the women of the Cowlitz and Clatsop tribes, whose only dress was a fringe of cedar bark hanging from the waist. The abject Siawash of Puget Sound, attired in a scanty patch-work of rabbit and woodrat skin, stood beside the lordly Yakima, who wore deerskin robe and leggins.
In all its course from the mouth of the Yakima to the sea, a distance of three hundred miles, the only considerable affluent from the northward is the Cowlitz, which heads in the glaciers of Mount Rainier. The John Day River also heads in the Blue Mountains, and flows into the Columbia sixty miles below the mouth of the Umatilla.
In a letter from Olympia describing the journey she said: "Here I am, October 22, at the head of Puget Sound. This was my route Portland, down the Willamette river twelve miles to the Columbia; then down that river one hundred miles to the mouth of the Cowlitz, Monticello; then ninety miles stage-ride, full sixty of it over the roughest kind of corduroy.
The Indians herein referred to as not living upon the reservation are of the Cowlitz, Chinook, Shoalwater Bay, and Humboldt tribes. They profess to desire a home at the mouth of the Humboldt and Coinoose Rivers, where they originated. Colville and other Tribes. These Indians, numbering 3,349, occupy the north-eastern portion of the Territory.
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.
The road, as located by Engineer Roberts in his report, is laid from the head-waters of Lake Superior in a nearly due westerly line across the State of Minnesota to Red River, near Fort Abercrombie; thence "across the Dakota and Missouri Rivers to the valley of the Yellow Stone, and along that valley to Bozeman's Pass, through the Belt range of mountains; thence down the Gallatin Valley, crossing the Madison River, and over to the Jefferson Valley, and along that to the Deer Lodge Pass of the Rocky Mountains; thence along Clarke's Valley to Lake Pend d'Oreille, and from this lake across the Columbia plain to Lewis or Snake River; down that to its junction with the Columbia; along the Columbia to the Cowlitz, and over the portage to Puget Sound, along its southern extremity, to any part which may be selected."
The seal of Washington was made to bear the Indian word Alké "by and by" or "in the future." It also was a prophecy. He created the counties of Sawanish, Whatcom, Clallam, Chehalis, Cowlitz, Wahkiakum, Skamania, and Walla Walla. Olympia was fixed upon as the seat of government, and measures were taken by the Government for the regulation of the Indian tribes.
As I looked back, in leaving, at the great trees and the exquisitely curved slope of his little clearing, I felt that in the small log house was something worthy of the fine surroundings. OLYMPIA, December 23, 1866. When we reached Cowlitz Landing, we found the river quite different in character from what we had known it before.
But if we could sell produce higher, might we not well lower our standard of an ideal farm? The claim I had taken was described with a touch of apology, in quality falling so far below what we had hoped to acquire. However, we decided to move, and began to prepare for the journey. The wife, baby, bedding, ox yoke, and log chain were sent up the Cowlitz in a canoe.
Their half-breed children are generally excellent canoe-men and hunters, with the vivacity of the father, and the endurance of the mother's race. Marcel Bernier, one of these French Canadians, was one of the early settlers in the Cowlitz Valley; and we have travelled with him between the Columbia River and Puget Sound, and once stopped at his house over night.
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