Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/160

 Their father, old Chief Coboway of the Clatsops, was indeed a man with eligible daughters. The Great Spirit, in wayward gratuity, touched two little girls in the same wigwam and left them with that mysterious grace which "if you have, it doesn't matter whether you have anything else—and if you don't have, it doesn't matter what else you have," but in his capricious giving the Great Spirit also takes away, granting only a lease and never a deed, and here is a newspaper report nearly one hundred years later:

Wheeler, Or., Feb. 6 (1934)—(Special.)—Mrs. Isabel Gervais Hackman, one of the few remaining Nehalem Indians, took her life last night by drinking poison.... Mrs. Hackman was descended on her mother's side from an illustrious line of Indian leaders and on her father's side from one of the earliest white settlers in the state of Oregon, Joseph Gervais. She was over 60 years old, but she had no exact record of her age. She was born in Tillamook county, at Fisher's point on Nehalem bay, and claimed to be a princess of the now extinct line.

So it was at "Willamette settlement." How it was with the Mountain Men and their Nez Percé wives in the region of Fort Hall in 1 836, is told in the History of Oregon by W. H. Gray, who came out with Whitman and Spalding. Eight "mountain hunters" are presented in sketches, not by name but anonymously by number, with the introductory statement that most of them found "their way eventually into the settlement of Oregon, and becoming active and prominent men in the organization of the provisional government, as also good citizens." Six of the eight had native wives, and, although it was before the bona fide institution of marriage had come to the region, Gray's accounts, for a lay missionary, are liberal and tolerant. He even tells without being shocked how he found No. 1 teaching the innocent lips of his little half-breed papoose "just beginning to speak a few words" to form syllables of blasphemy. Following is a condensed quotation of his sketch of No. 7: