Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 16.djvu/360



332 JOHN GILL

McLoughlin and to help in getting the Morrisons established in their new illahee. 1

They began their journey at Linnton, where Captain Mor- rison had first intended to settle. The promoter of that early metropolis, McCarver, had already boomed and "founded" an important city on the Mississippi, and subsequently selected the site of Tacoma as the metropolis of the Sound country and did much to make it what he believed it would be. And he was not far wrong about Linnton. It is today a suburb of the greatest city of the Columbia.

When the Morrisons arrived at the head of navigation on the Skippanon, the winter day was closing. Between the landing and Solomon Smith's log cabin, which was to be their home for the winter, was a half-mile of swamp, knee-deep in mud and water, choked with thickets and fallen trees. Through this the family staggered in the twilight, Mrs. Mor- rison carrying a baby in her arms, to the blessed bit of high land where the station we know as Columbia Beach is now. The swamp and the thickets and briers and crowding alders are still there. One sees enough of them from the window of the train to pity any of God's creatures that even now might have to grope his way from Morrison's to the Skippanon at nightfall.

The place was very dear to John Minto. He had come with Morrisons the previous summer across the plains, and Martha Morrison had become the apple of his eye. I warrant he often sang Burns' beautiful song: "Mary Morrison," but fondly saying "Martha" in lieu of Mary. He went down there in his canoe from his claim in the hills south of Salem, courting; and when he married Martha he took her by a better trail to the canoe at the landing on the Skippanon and paddled with her across the bay, up the sheltered channels of the Cathlamet illahee; up the broad Columbia, with several "camps" along the route ; and then on again up the Multnoma, as our Willamette then was called (and that should be the

i A Chinook jargon word meaning country or home.