Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 1.djvu/313

Rh some cases of a small canoe used on the Lower Columbia root gathering, or by the husband or sons in hunting water fowl. Such a wife becoming a widow—supposing her dead husband a chief, succeeded by a son by another of his wives, or by a brother, unfriendly and jealous of her influence,—would not be a totally helpless outcast. She would have the means of gathering her own subsistence. This, however, was above the common lot of native widows. The same custom of destroying the property of the dead prevailed amongst natives of the Willamette Valley when the American home builders first came; and it was a common sight to come upon a recently made grave and scare the buzzards or coyotes from feasting on carcasses of horses slain to the departed, the grave itself being indicated by the cooking utensils and tawdry personal adornments of the deceased. Under this custom there was no property left for distribution by the average native. A chief, living with thrifty care for his family, might leave slaves to be divided among his sons or daughters, as some few did, but often when the heirs were sons or daughters of different mothers bitter family feuds were a natural result, and the law of might decided. There was no marriage record, no law to distribute fairly what might justly belong to the widow and the fatherless, no individual ownership of land, no definite boundaries to districts claimed by tribes. Thus the whole polity of the native race here limited the exertions of the people to seeking a present subsistence, or, at the most, enough to tide them over from one season to another. Diversity of seasons has a much more intimate relation to the food supply of the wild life than to a people who have arrived at the agricultural stage of evolution. Many wild animals and feathered game have sufficient of the instinct of the passenger pigeon and squirrel of the Atlantic seaboard to induce them to migrate from districts in which