Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 16.djvu/172



154 T. C. ELLIOTT

Transportation over this road was controlled by Mr. Orlando Humason, who appears to have been actively connected with nearly everything then going on at The Dalles. Associated with him were a Mr. Fairchild and others not so publicly known but currently understood to include an Indian agent, and at least one army officer. Samuel Johnson, in later years an honored resident of the Walla Walla Valley, was wagon- master; "Chic-chic" Johnson the Indians called him. The equipment consisted of pack trains and large freight wagons drawn by six, eight or ten yoke of oxen. Afterward the Oregon Steam Navigation Co. bought out Mr. Humason and expended one hundred thousand dollars in mules, wagons and other equipment to handle the traffic. This can be better appreciated when it is explained that the charges were $20 per ton or $1.25 per ton per mile for carrying goods over this portage, and except for solids that ton meant forty cubic feet by measurement, not actual pounds avoirdupois. A detailed account of this stretch of road would consume the time of an entire narrative; the oaths uttered by drivers and passengers along its grades and crossings have doubtless sent many a soul to purgatory.

During this transition period farming and stock raising and organized communities began to appear in the Inland Empire. To what extent measured by months and years the Dalles- Celilo obstructions to river navigation held back the beginning of the settlement of the upper Columbia River Basin cannot be stated with exactness, but it is probable that an open river would have meant more to the people then, taking into con- sideration the conditions then, than at any time since. The settlement of the interior country began very slowly. The legislature of Oregon established the county of Wasco during the winter of 1854 (January 11) to include all the territory lying east of the Cascade Range, and Maj. Gabriel J. Rains, who was then stationed at Fort Dalles, said in opposition to this action that only thirty-five white people then actually resided within the proposed county. The legislature of the Territory