Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 8.djvu/27

 RECOLLECTIONS OF AN INDIAN AGENT. 19 is had in the newspapers, only those bid who are in the deal, as it is useless for others to do so. The practice of combining against the Government for mutual profit is so common that all agents are regarded in the same unenviable light. I said to one of the older merchants : ' ' It is easy to say that all the agents pilfer in this way, but what do you know about it?" His answer was : " I say all because all that I know about are guilty. The agent at Warm Springs, at the Grande Ronde, at the Umatilla, at the Siletz does so, and I presume that the rest of them do the same. Oh, there is nothing very strange about it." On my return to the Umatilla, I found that Mr. White had progressed rapidly in taking the census, but upon going over the lists with him we very soon discovered that, with a few exceptions, neither of us could pronounce the names so that the Indians recognized them. At that late date such a result was very annoying, but there was only one remedy ; to take it over again with a well defined alphabet. Having learned the phonetic alphabet in 1848, I could write and pronounce any name, however difficult, and with that solvent in my possession, the many-syllabled and otherwise unpronounceable Indian names flowed as easily from the pen as ancestral Eng- lish, and the work of census taking became the most interest- ing part of my duty. Mr. White was somewhat crestfallen at the outcome of his half month's labor but I consoled him with the assurance that the learned secretary of the commission that negotiated the treaty under which we were acting met with no better success. The Indians whose names they signed to the treaty were living, but no human being could find them by pronounc- ing the written names. The fault is with the alphabet, which is totally inadequate to the function required of it. Lexico- graphers cannot succeed with it until they have, by certain diacritical marks, made of it a phonetic alphabet, but it is clumsy and complex and wholly unfitted for every-day use. Hence we are all incompetent to accurately represent human speech, with our present alphabet, and though every educated