Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 19.djvu/243



In harmony with other efforts of like character in the State of Washington for the purpose of establishing permanent monuments to designate points of general public interest, a pioneer picnic was given on the thirtieth of last June in an apple orchard adjacent to the site of the garden which marked the "il-li-he" or home of the noted Yakima Indian chief Ka-mi-a-kin over seventy years ago. This point is situated on the Ahtanum creek about eighteen miles west of the present city of Yakima. The Yakima County Pioneer Association, David Longmire, President, and John Lynch, Secretary, was instrumental in getting the assemblage together primarily as an annual social and neighborhood function, but really to arouse interest in the locality by submitting an excellent programme of pertinent historical significance in order to emphasize the importance of the event.

The president of the day was Mr. Fred Parker, of Yakima. The invocation was given by Rev. George Waters, a full-blooded Yakima Indian, and a convert to the Methodist Episcopal church in 1862 by James H. Wilbur, a pioneer minister, who came to Oregon from Lowville, N. Y., via Cape Horn, in 1847, who organized the first church in Portland in 1848, and built the first building for church purposes in 1850. Later in the exercises of the day Mr. Waters made an address reminiscent in character. An historical paper was submitted by Mrs. A. J. Splawn, whose husband, recently deceased, was an Oregon Pioneer of 1852, and who, at the time of his death, March 2, 1917, had been a resident of Yakima Valley nearly sixty years. This paper was placed in an iron tube which was driven into the ground beside the main traveled county road to mark the site of the future monument.

In the address by Mrs. Splawn allusion was made to the irrigating ditch made by Chief Ka-mi-a-kin, the water being taken from a branch of the Ah-tan-um and was about one-