Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 8.djvu/126

 118 T. W. DAVENPORT. It was generally understood, from official reports of indus- trial conditions pertaining to the Indians of the Umatilla Agency, that what they were doing under governmental su- pervision and so-called assistance, was the first feeble efforts on their part to get a living by tilling the ground; but I learned that the common impression was entirely erroneous. I recall that in August, 1851, those Indians bartered to the immigrants, en route, green peas, potatoes and other vegeta- bles. I have no knowledge as to the time or means of their beginning such cultivation, but presume that Dr. Whitman, as early as 1840, began the work which was really interrupted by the Government when it located an agency on the Umatilla, more than twenty years later. Certain it is that the best and largest and most available part of the alluvial land was usurped by the agents, with the best intentions probably, but resulting in converting into lookers-on those who had been, for at least twenty years, cultivators of the soil. On my return from the afore-mentioned walk, I visited a little patch of alluvial, maybe an acre in extent, completely enclosed by a natural hedge of willow, alder and balm, matted together with briars and underbrush, growing in a narrow channel, formed by overflow of the Umatilla River. In this se- questered spot, some half-dozen old and cast-off women, called by the Indians, low-ee-ii, had pitched their conical tents, con- structed of poles and whatever they could get for a covering pieces of rawhide with the hair on, fragments of tent cloth thrown away by the immigrants or soldiers, old blankets, shawls, or almost anything that would contribute to shelter their wrinkled skins and pinched bodies. Let no one smile, either through pity or disdain, at such apparent want and evident isolation. Firewood in abundance was at their hand, in the dead branches of trees studded too closely to maintain their verdure in the irrigated trough wherein they grew, and which furnished pure water, as well as trout and salmon that an opulent city-bred epicure might desire in vain. And that stoneless patch of black alluvial,