Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 22.djvu/22



NOTES AND REMINISCENCES OF LAYING OUT

AND ESTABLISHING THE OLD EMIGRANT

ROAD INTO SOUTHERN ORGEON

IN THE YEAR 1846.

By LINDSAY APPLEGATE

After the lapse of thirty-one years (as there has been no history of this circumstance placed before the public), I pro- pose to give a plain statement of facts from notes taken at the time and from memory, giving 1 motives that led to the enter- prise. Our immigration of 1843, being the largest that had ever crossed the plains, our progress was necessarily slow, having to hunt out passes for our wagons over rivers, creeks, deep gullies, digging down the banks where nothing but a pack trail had been before, cutting our way through the dense for- ests before we could reach the valley of the Columbia, and then it appeared as though our greatest troubles had begun; for here we had to encounter cataracts and falls of the Columbia and the broad and lofty Cascades, with their heavy forests.

At Fort Walla Walla, on the banks of the Columbia river, with our teams about exhausted, we were advised to leave our wagons and animals over winter at that place in the care of the Hudson's Bay Co. A portion of the immigrants, includ- ing my two brothers' families and my own, accepted the prop- osition, providing we could secure boats in which to descend the river, as it was supposed we might secure them from the Hudson's Bay Co. Under these considerations we made ar- rangements with the said Company for the care of the latter through the winter. We failed in our efforts to obtain boats ; having a whipsaw and other tools with us, we hunted logs from the masses of drift wood lodged along the river banks, hewed them out, sawed them into lumber, and built boats, and with our families and the contents of our wagons, com-