Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/25

 The present account can only scratch the surface of this extensive and fascinating field. If research continues at its present intensified rate we may still be able, before all the remembering descendants of the old Indians die, to secure at least a representative amount of the literature of the native tribes of Oregon.

In recent years men have worked with compensatory zeal, in a race with silencing death—clever men who can draw a whole book from a wrinkled squaw. They travel hundreds of miles, knowing that another summer might seal that book forever. Long in the future they can still station one of themselves to watch the excavations for a great dam and can still dig into the buried sites of ancient villages, but whatever of great value they find it will not be poetry and song, for the earth will remain mute and cannot give up a literature that was never written.

The one exception is in picture writing, the Bayeux Tapestry of Oregon palisades. This, though its literary significance is clouded, has been included as one of the nine classifications of form into which our heritage of literature from the Oregon Indians may be divided, as follows: 1, songs; 2, poetry; 3, harangues and orations; 4, dreams; 5, myths; 6, legends; 7, tales; 8, geographic names; 9, petroglyphs.

The first three songs are taken from The Northwest Coast; or, Three Years' Residence in Washington Territory, by J. G. Swan, published in 1857. They are Chinook or Chehalis songs and of these