Page:Portland, Oregon, its History and Builders volume 1.djvu/963

Rh the Indians used to lie in wet weather and look down upon the building of the settlement. In early times timid women were afraid to pass the spot for fear of arrows. H. C. Stevens has a collection of arrow heads dug from the sand in front of the old Governor Abernethy place on the river, that seems to have been the factory of an ancient arrow maker, scattered with fragments and chippings of stone from far-away fields. The old Indian rancherie at the mouth of the Clackamas was described by Elisha Applegate of 1843 as "a house three hundred feet long, seven feet high at the eaves, the sides being made of cedar puncheons a foot broad and two inches thick, all smooth. Indians said the building was a hundred years old. A porch ran the whole length of the south side, and the main building was divided about every fourteen feet by a partition, while each room had a door on the outside. It was headquarters for the Clackamas tribe which acquired its name from a reduplication and extension of all 'k' sounds as "K-k-klack-kmas."

Another noted spot was the Indian slave mart on the bank of the river at 11th street, where savage Klamaths in canoes brought captive Indian children from southern Oregon, and exchanged with other Indians for blankets and salmon. In the early forties these little Shasta and Rogue river Indian slaves were found all over the Willamette valley, at The Dalles, and down the Columbia. Once Judge and Mrs. Thornton, looking down upon the pitiful scene, had their sympathies so aroused that they, themselves, purchased several abused children, adopted and educated them. They also educated a nephew of the famous chief Leschi, from Puget's sound, and just before the outbreak of the Yakima war Leschi made a visit to him at Oregon City. Peter H. Hatch released one of these unhappy children. Rev. Gustavus Hines also had one that had been rescued from a dead house at The Dalles, where he had been bound to his dead master and fastened in the tomb. The Jennings family educated a very bright Indian boy who is now on the Warm Springs reservation, Indian Dave, the son of an Idaho chief, brought from the Snake river by Major Rinearson in the sixties, is a civilized and popular Indian of Oregon City today; Klamath Susan, the last of her race that ventured here, is a pensioner of the whites in her old age; Sousap, the last of the Clackamas, remains, and Indian Molly, who washes for white people.

Dr. Forbes Barclay, a prominent physician and surgeon of the early day, kept a bateau with an Indian crew, and, on errands of mercy, traversed the rivers from Vancouver to Salem. "Uncle Billy" Vaughan, of 1843, said he had killed many a deer in the thickets along Indian creek by the 7th street steps. In 1845 James McMillen saw Indians chasing a deer that leaped into the Willamette falls and was shot by an Indian below, as it emerged, valiantly battling for its life. As late as the sixties a deer chased by hounds jumped off the bluff, breaking its legs on the rocks near the present Southern Pacific depot. With the last of the deer the Indians departed.

Never town was built on a wilder spot than Oregon City. Wherever a stream leaped down the bluff, it tore a canyon to the river, marking in several cases the present intersections across Main street. The Methodist church, the first west of the Rocky mountains, was built on a wooded knoll that sloped down into Indian creek canyon at 8th street. This creek, rising in springs at Holmesfarm and vicinity back of the bluffs, meandered on to the edge of the precipice at 7th street, where it fell in a wild cascade behind the present Weinhard building ploughing its tumultous way down between the present court house and the E. G. Caufield place, where it leaped again in a second cascade to the Willamette. No wonder the earliest comers looked upon the land as a home of rills and waterfalls, and potential energy for mills.

Indian creek, also called Bull creek, from a fractious Spanish California bull that mired and drowned there before it could be rescued, became the seat of several pioneer industries. Near the foot of the bluff, Nineveh Ford had a tannery, the first in the state, in the days when Oregon City wore moccasins; the second