Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 12.djvu/172



A nameless child of an Indian mother, born in the wilderness amid ice and snow, and a week later laid in an unmarked grave, is a short life history which would seem to have but little interest for those living one hundred years later. The child, however, was the first native of Eastern Oregon to have the blood of the white race in its veins, whose brief but entire lifetime was spent with those early explorers who crossed the continent to Astoria a century ago.

Pierre Dorion, son of the Canadian interpreter, who had accompanied the Lewis and Clark expedition, joined the overland party under Wilson Price Hunt on condition that his wife and two children might be allowed to accompany him, and the identification of the birthplace of his third child who was born on Monday, December 30th, 1811, will do much to determine the route taken by those early explorers who helped to open the way for the settlement and development of the great NorthWest.

The general idea seems to have been that the route of the Hunt expedition, at the time of this episode, lay through what is known as the Wallowa country in north-eastern Oregon, and is so marked on the map of early explorations issued by the Government. The birthplace of the Dorion baby, however, as well as other places along this portion of the route, would seem to be determined by the identification of a locality to which Irving refers three times in his account of the Astoria party, and which the character of the country shows to be in the vicinty of Huntington, Oregon, where the Snake River leaves the great Idaho plains and enters into that great canyon through which even to this day there is no passage.

Irving's description of the travels of Hunt's party shows that they were in the open country through the greater part of November, 1811, following along the banks of the Snake River which the Canadians called "the accursed mad river." During