Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 8.djvu/133

 RECOLLECTIONS OF AN INDIAN AGENT. 125 That this speech was favorably received, was evident by merely inspecting the audience. I admired it myself from its ingenuity, but more from the free, fearless, but respectful manner of its delivery. It transported the older ones to the halcyon days of youth, and as I looked at aged Stickas, who was an attentive and apparently a burdened listener, I queried how he would reconcile the reactionist proposition of Howlish Wampo with the presence of Dr. Whitman, from whom he had received the Christian faith, to him more prized and priceless than the spontaneous abundance which fed their ancestors. The orator (for I must think of Howlish Wampo as an orator) had on his costly cloak, the gift of a military officer, and in my reply I included that, with many other things he had received from the whites. "Howlish Wampo, I visited at your camp the other day and saw you eating nice biscuit, spread with butter and syrup, and drinking coffee with sugar and cream ; you had plates, knives, forks and spoons; your family had axes to chop their wood, which was hauled on a wagon; your wife was wearing fine woven garments and you had on pants, coat, shirt and cloak, and none of these comfortable, convenient, and now necessary things would you have if it were not for the white man. Just think of it ! Take away the things the white man brought you and see how you would be left. You would have to give up that cloak, your hat, coat, shirt, stockings, and put on skins. The fine military saddle and bridle the officer gave you, would have to go. There would be no more raised superfine flour biscuit and your wife and children would have to go to the camas grounds again. You could hunt with bows and arrows as of old and expect to get one deer for every section of land, but now, with the means the white man has provided, you can depend upon getting a hundred times as much meat on a section. Now, looking the subject all over, are you -willing to give up all these good things and the practicability of many more from the same source, in order to be freed from the white man's whiskey? There is a proper use for whiskey,