Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 24.djvu/208

 Dr. Marcus Whitman, paying him six dollars a hundred for it.

"We stopped a couple of days with Dr. Whitman. As I told you, there were only four wagons in our train when we got to Whitman's Mission, our wagon, that of Captain Jolly, old man Tobe Brawley and that of Jerry Starr. Jolly and Brawley were both preachers, so they had plenty to discuss with Dr. Whitman, who was also a preacher. The Indians had stolen some of our stock and so Captain Jolly and my father were kind of suspicious of the Indians. The Indians of the Whitman mission were acting rather surly ; they had had a lot of measles and a good many of the Indians had died. Captain Jolly and my father both thought it wasn't safe for the Whitmans to stay at the mission that winter and they urged him to come on down to the valley. Dr. Whitman said he couldn't very well move this year, though he was planning to move to The Dalles, where he had bought property. He said several times before the Indians had become restless and surly but he had always been able to talk them out of it and he thought he could do so this time also. He wasn't able to fix up the trouble this time, though, for less than a month after we left, he and his wife and a lot of the others there were killed by the In- dians. Whitman was a tolerably heavy-set man, about my size, but better looking. His wife was a large woman and had a rather pleasant voice. She was very polite and agreeable to the emigrants. After visiting the Whitmans for a couple of days, we pulled on to The Dalles where we put our wagons on rafts to float down the Columbia River, while the women and children went in a Hudson Bay batteau. We camped on the Oregon side of the Columbia just at the head of the island across from Fort Vancouver. We camped there six weeks, during which time father looked around to find a good claim to settle on. He finally decided to go to the mouth of the Columbia. We settled on Clatsop Plains, our claim joining