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 two of the men came up with their loads and their gun (for these portages were made arms in hand), and seeing what was going forward, one of them threw his pack on the ground, fired on one of the Indians and brought him down. He got up again, however, and picked up his weapons, but the other man ran upon him, wrested from him his war-club, and despatched him by repeated blows on the head with it. The other savages, seeing the bulk of our people approaching the scene of combat, retired and crossed the river. In the meantime, Mr. Stuart extracted the arrows from his body, by the aid of one of the men: the blood flowed in abundance from the wounds, and he saw that it would be impossible for him to pursue his journey;. . . Presently they saw a great number of pirogues full of warriors coming from the opposite side of the river. Our people then considered that they could do nothing better than to get away as fast as possible.... abandoning. . . the goods to the natives. While the barbarians were plundering these effects, more precious in their estimation than the apples of gold in the garden of the Hesperides, our party retired and got out of sight.

Ross Cox, or, as some of his comrades knew him, "the little Irishman," has put humor and feeling into the report of his six years on the Columbia, published in London in 1831 as Adventures on the Columbia River. He was employed by Astor until 1813, afterwards entering the service of the Northwest Company. Since he completes the roll call of the Astor literary clerics, it might as well be fully told what the captain of the Tonquin thought of the whole lot, as related by Washington Irving: "Some of the young clerks, who were making their first voyage, and to whom everything was new and strange, were, very rationally, in the habit of taking notes and keeping journals. This was a sore abomination to the honest captain, who held their literary pretensions in great contempt. 'The collecting of materials for long histories of their voyages and travels,' said he, in his letter to Mr. Astor, 'appears to engross most of their attention.' We can conceive what must have been the crusty impatience of the