Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 37.djvu/214

 binding & showing its naked head to us. The child lay upon a board between which & its head was a squirrel skin. On its forehead laid a small square cushon, over which was a bandage drawn tight around pressing its head against the board. In this position it is kept three or four months, or longer, untill the head becomes a fashonable shape. There is a variety of shapes & among them some are sharper than others. I saw a child about a year old whose head had been recently relessed from its pressure as I supposed from its looks, all the back part of it was of a purple colour as if it had been sadly bruised. We are told this custom is wearing away very fast, there is only a few tribes, on this river who practice it.”

It was the custom of the fur traders when traveling to stop before reaching their destination and make their toilets, which meant shaving by the men and change to presentable attire. On this journey such a stop was made at the sawmill of the Hudson's Bay Company, located on the north bank of the Columbia a few miles below the present city of Camas.

At Fort Vancouver Mrs. Whitman finds two English ladies, Mrs. Capendale, wife of the manager of the dairy farm, and Mrs. Jane Beaver, wife of the chaplain of the company. Also Mrs. Douglas, formerly Amelia Connolly, wife of Chief Factor James Douglas and to become in later years the highly respected Lady Douglas of Victoria, British Columbia, her father a gentleman of high rank in service of the company in Canada. Also Mrs. McLoughlin, formerly Marguerite Wadin, whose father, Jean Etienne Wadin, was a Swiss merchant in Canada; she was a woman of instinctive ability. Her daughter, Eloisa Maria, also mentioned, was married sixteen months later to William Glen Rae of the Hudson's Bay Company. One of the gentlemen (as the officers were usually referred to) then at the fort, in addition to the factors, McLoughlin and Douglas, was Doctor William F. Tolmie, trained physician from Scotland, who had arrived in 1833. With these brief introductions to the personnel at Vancouver, the narrative by Mrs. Whitman is con-