Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 1.djvu/319

Rh Chief San-de-am, his people used the circle hunt, driving the deer to a center agreed upon, by young men as runners, the point to drive to being selected as good cover to enable the bowmen to get close to the quarry. From him the information was gained as a family tradition that about 1818 eight men, carrying packs on their backs and coming from the north, reached his grandfather's village, near where the town of Jefferson now is. They were set across, and, going southward, they conveyed to other natives that they had crossed San-de-am 's river. The whites shortened the name to Santiam, as they did Yam-il to Yam hill. These eis;ht men returned after several ~ months and brought the first horses the Calipooyas ever saw. They sold a mare and colt for forty-five beaver skins. Joe, as he was familiarly called, a man of truth and honor, could not but mourn the fate of his people. Being in a small way his banker for small loans ( he working for me) I know he was kept poor by the general worthlessness of his tribe, as it was one of the functions of a Calipooya chief to help the weak and good for nothing members of his tribe. This man honestly performed any rough and common contract labor (he would never work for day wages), carrying his burden of sorrow for his people's condition to where the wicked and low can no longer trouble. The writer received from him many hints and plain statements as to the mental capacity or mode of reasoning of the native race. Custom led them to appeal to him in troubles resulting from drunken rows. A young dandy of the tribe, getting into the power of the law for knifing a woman in a camp fray, would appeal to Joe, as chief, for financial help, with no more sense of shame than an Irish landlord who had wasted his property in riotous living would have in spunging off his former tenants to a green old age. There are many people of the white race who cannot help being partici-