across, and that I would give him all the buttons on my coat; but he shook his head, and refused. Thinking the fellow did not understand me, I threw the tobacco down, and pointing to the buttons one by one, at last he consented, and off he set at a full trot, and I after him; but just as we had reached his camp at the other end, he pitched it down a precipice of two hundred feet in height, and left me to recover it the best way I could. Off I started after my tobacco; and if I was out of breath after getting up the first bank, I was ten times more so now. During my scrambling among the rocks to recover my tobacco, not only the wag that played me the trick, but fifty others indulged in a hearty laugh at my expense; but the best of it was, the fellow came for his payment, and wished to get not only the buttons but the coat along with them. I was for giving him—what he richly deserved—buttons of another mould; but peace, in our present situation, was deemed the better policy; so the rogue got the buttons, and we saw him no more.
2
Fort Clatsop Seven Years Afterwards
By Alexander Henry
Elliot Coues tells what a hard task it was to edit Alexander Henry's Manuscript Journals consisting of 1642 pages of legal cap. "The composition seemed to me to be that of a man who knew what he wanted to say, and could talk to the point about it, but always wrote round about it, as if he had a notion that writing was some thing different from speaking, needing bigger words and more of them." Henry was a prominent Northwester who arrived at Astoria shortly before it became Fort George. The historical importance of the journal he kept while there, was to add him to Franchere, Ross and Cox to make an authoritative quartet on early Astoria—the historians taking their customary dig at poor old Washington Irving and refusing to use him for a quintet. At Fort George he caught Jane Barnes, blond English barmaid, in her rebound from Governor M'Tavish, the latter, though it had been his idea in a period of romantic fatigue, found that after all he did not like it too well when she had actually rebounded, so that the two men quarreled. They were both drowned, and drowned together, at the mouth of the Col-
