Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/74

 Letter to Weld, Apr. 3, 1835

This Wappato Island (Sauvie's Island) which I have selected for our establishment is about 15 miles long and about average of three wide. On one side runs the Columbia on the other the Multnomah (Willamette). It consists of woodlands and prairie and on it there is considerable deer and those who could spare time to hunt might live well but a mortality has carried off to a man its inhabitants and there is nothing to attest that they ever existed except their decaying houses, their graves and their unburied bones of which there are heaps. So you see as the righteous people of New England say providence has made room for me and without doing them more injury than I should if I had made room for myself viz killing them off. I often think of the old knot of cronies about the town with whom I used to spend so much time especially of an evening. When I sit down in my lodge on the ground and contrast the past with the present and wonder if the future will give as much difference and which way the difference will be for better or worse?

James Clyman's Diaries and Reminiscences, though the "Note Book, 1844–46," was cited by Bancroft, have only in recent years come into their own as source material and have been eagerly utilized by historians of the West. On March 20, 1822, he answered an advertisement in the Missouri Republican and became one of William Henry Ashley's "young men" at $1 a day. He made a journey to Oregon in 1844. It took nine small notebooks to hold his Diaries, written amidst the scenes and events they described, often "with the little notebook resting upon his knee beside the camp fire at night." When he died in 1881 in California at the age of 90, he left a good many poems, composed during the last two years of his life, though two selections given here show that he was something of a bard 37 years earlier. "His tastes were poetic and literary," says Charles L. Camp. "...He had the feelings of an author and poet, but he was innocent of the forms of grammar, spelling and punctuation."