Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 13.djvu/355



Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen :

In these days of wireless and other telegraphs, telephones, railroads and steamships, automobiles and flying machines, those who have no personal recollections of pioneer life cannot realize the privations and dangers, intensified by difficult and often total lack of means of travel and communication, among the people of Oregon in its early years. It is with the thought that a brief recitation of a few incidents connected with the exchange of information between near and remote points in those days would be of interest that this paper is prepared.

The aborigines of the Northwest coast had absolutely no methods of recording events, and no method of communicating intelligence with each other beyond the limits of their voices.

The nomadic or plains Indians on both sides of the Rocky Mountains were skilled in the use of fires, smoke, blankets and gestures to convey to each other information pertaining to their daily affairs, and in the high, clear altitudes have been known to communicate with each other a distance of 60 miles.

Catlin records a rude system of pictographs, marked or burned on prepared skins of animals or bark of trees, whereby many notable feats of Indian chieftains in the matter of horse-stealing, scalp-lifting, or just plain killing, were preserved after a fashion.