Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/172

 Christendom,

The conventional price is expressed in blankets. Blankets paid to papa, buy: five, a cheap and unclean article, a drudge; ten, a tolerable article, a cook and basket-maker; twenty, a fine article of squaw, learned in kamas-beds, and with skull flat as a shingle; fifty, a very superior article, ruddy with vermilion and skilled in embroidering buckskin with porcu pine-quills; and one hundred blankets, a princess, with the beauty and accomplishments of her rank. Mothers in civili zation will be pleased to compare these with their current rates. 9 Phil Sheridan's Rogue River Wife Never Forgot By Mrs. Elizabeth Collins This poignant little chronicle of a woman's love may not be found in General Sheridan's own two-volume story. Mrs. Elizabeth Collins was a pioneer of 1844. Her recollections are contained in Polk County Pioneer Sketches, compiled by a chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution and published by Earle Richardson of the Polk County Observer. Mrs. Collins in the same sketch tells about another squaw, who, when deserted by her white husband for a white girl, sought to bring repentence to her lover through vicarious suicide — by taking their little half-breed papoose down to the Yamhill River and drowning him. Of a less melancholy but more sensational nature is her explicit mention of the squaw wife and two half-breed children of General Grant. This is not without foundation in other old settler talk, but a competent investigator, after working on the matter for several months, had to report that he could find nothing definite, although he discovered a few intangible clews that might have served as the basis for such reports or have grown out of them. Could this man, even with all the power he afterwards possessed, have commanded silence to such a degree and for so long — could he have obliterated from all certain knowledge the existence of three human beings, if they had ever existed ? We know of the tears he wiped away when at Fort Vancouver he received in the mail from St. Louis the tracery of his real baby's hand. Was this only another and a parallel contradiction in one whose tenderness was like a woman's towards his own small sons but who could view the slaughter of other men's sons at Shil