Page:Portland, Oregon, its History and Builders volume 1.djvu/102

64 And now we reach that development of the surface of the earth when it is possible for man to subsist in this region. And we find the Indian. Where did he come from? He was not created here. He was not evolved here. For not a single bone of him has ever been unearthed from the ancient sedimentary or rock deposits hereto described. From all the discoveries and investigations of science, this species of man must have started in Europe or Asia Minor. There is but one specie of man, and he could have had but one origin. There are different races of men which have been produced by environment and they each interbreed with the others. Different species of animals are not fertile with other species. This proves the one origin of all men. How then did the Indian get to America? How did he get to Portland, Oregon? He may have come over from the east coast of Asia on the last lingering floes of the glacial ice-cap, or he may have drifted across in some unfortunate canoe or elementary boat set afloat in the Pacific streams of Siberia. But how he reached this region is not so important as his character when the white man found him here.

One hundred years ago the Indian owned this whole country. He might well have sung with Robinson Crusoe:

He was to some extent a weaver, basket maker, canoe builder, stone ax and mortar maker, was expert in taking fish with a spear, and wild animals with the bow and arrow, whose skins he dressed for clothes and bedding. He was purely a child of nature, harbored no selfishness but the satisfaction of his immediate wants, and was quick to see the utility value of such articles of civilized life as would more efficiently serve the purposes of his simple wants than the simple instruments he then possessed. He believed in a great spirit who had made the heavens and the earth, and who had given the land and the water to all his children in common. He was the original socialist—the man who lived a socialist, fought for his lands as a socialist, and died in the belief that the white man robbed him of his God-given birthrights.

From this basis, and from small beginnings, the city of Portland has grown. The Indian had no more idea of the money value of his skins than a five year old child; as witness the instance already mentioned of his giving eight thousand dollars worth of sea otter skins for an old chisel that did not cost a dollar. In the grasp of the Indian mind he could catch more otter, but he might never have another opportunity to get a chisel, which would be more useful to him in carving a canoe out of a log than the stone ax he had made himself. But as lightly as it was esteemed by the Indian in the beginning of his bartering with the white man, the fur trade was a veritable gold mine. From the time that Captain James Hanna came over from China in a small brig of only sixty tons in the year 1785, as the pioneer fur trading ship to the northwest Pacific coast, down to the time of the discovery of the Columbia river by Gray, the number of fur trading ships numbered about fifty, and the value of the furs obtained from Indians in exchange for goods and trinkets of very trifling value must have amounted to millions of dollars. A dollar's worth of goods or trinkets, beads, fish hooks, and the like, would in the trade for furs, which would be sold in China and the proceeds invested in tea, silks or rice shipped to London or New York, bring twenty-five dollars as an average profit. Often three or four hundred dollars worth of goods would be sent out from the ship, or distributing depot, to the Indians, or trapper's camp, and there traded for furs that would sell in China for three or four thousand dollars. Bright colored calicoes, blankets, hats, axes, knives, kettles, beads, brass ornaments, and tobacco would be changed for furs at the rate of one dollar for ten or twenty, owing