Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/163

 their own way for a third of a century. According to W. H. Gray there were in the country by the fall of 1840 a total of 33 American women, and 36 American settlers, "25 of them with native wives." It was 1836 before any white women came to Oregon Territory to stay, though Jane Barnes, the English barmaid, had arrived at Astoria in 1814 to upset things for a few months with her finery, her blondness and her coquetry. So there were no white women in those early days and after they started to come it was a long time before they were enough to offset the accumulated bachelorhood. But there was plenty of Indian women, presumably in their old biological excess over men — themselves finding hyas kloshe the fair-skinned trappers; and with fathers, chiefs or otherwise, tickled beyond words to have white sons-in-law. The only alternative was celibacy, but the stuff of these robust men was not the stuff of monks.

Love, so big an element in literature, exists in early Oregon literature at all only because there were squaw wives and squaw men. Some examples are here brought together to show that in a field of such neglected or unfriendly observation, there were yet a few who could look on and understand.

Wallulah in Frederic Homer Balch's Indian romance was the daughter of Chief Multnomah and of a white woman from Asia cast ashore in shipwreck on the Oregon coast. She was the "most beautiful woman in all the land of the Wauna." This is the single