CORRESPONDENCE

with families and bachelors most of the

103

way from

this place to

Vancouver, a distance of forty-five miles. The next week I took the steamer356 for The Dalles; ascended the broad, deep Columbia twenty-five miles to the mouth of Dog- River, 357 a considerable stream tumbling down with great rapidity from the snowy sides of Mt. Hood. Here I found Br. Coe, late postal agent for Oregon, and This settlement consists of three white families, but wife. soon be swollen to fifty or 100. The steamer having left on the 29th of November, to save a weeks delay and an me, exorbitant price for an Indian and horses, I took my postbags and traveling apparel on my back at ten A. M. and took the emigrant trail, which lay over high mountains and will

although the thawing of the frozen ground coming in constant contact with my India rubber boots rendered the traveling exceedingly slippery, I reached the

through deep

first

defiles, and,

settlement, three miles

from The Dalles, a distance of

eighteen miles, at four P. M., unusually fatigued, yet grateful to the gracious Giver for strength to perform even the physical labors of a pioneer missionary. I found twenty-four families, including three or four of the officers and soldiers, in this place

and

vicinity, beside a

married Indian

number of white men who had

women and some

thirty or forty single

men

and farming, and gambling, as I had good reason to 358 Here are stationed two or three companies of suppose. government troops to defend our frontiers from Indian in trade

invasion.

Here

also are constantly a considerable

number of

who

dwell here Indians, amounting cultivate small fields of potatoes, corn and melons. Here too the Roman Catholic Church have a mission established to forty or fifty families,

and

with the Indians and have set up their claim to 640 acres of land for the mission, immediately below the town and extending almost to the river bank. 859 356 This steamboat was probably the "Mary," the first steamer to run between the Cascades and The Dalles. Bancroft, His. of Wash., Idaho and Mont., p. 145357 This is the present Hood River. It was called Dog Creek, because in the early forties some immigrants camping there were reduced to dog meat for food.

George H. Himes. 358 See note 309. 359 This claim of the Roman Catholics was later set aside. They were, however, allowed to retain about half an acre of ground for a building site. Bancroft, Hist, of Ore., 11:292.