"Waal," he answered, with a twinkle in his eye, "we war reading the ' Scottish Chiefs ' in the mountings when the little gal came, so I named her Helen Mar." The trappers passed on and took up farms west of the Willamette, where their descendants live to this day. Soon after, the famous Captain Bridger sent his little Nez Perce" daughter Mary Ann to the Whitman school. On his first journey Dr. Whitman had cut an Indian arrow from the back of Bridger, a feat of surgery that gave him great fame in the mountains.
At the Indian camp a little half-breed Spanish boy abandoned by his Cayuse mother lay in a hole in the ground. The Indian children were amusing themselves lighting sticks in the camp-fire and burning spots on his little bare body. An old squaw passed by heavily laden with her lord's saddles and bridles and blankets; with a jerk that might have dislocated the infant's arm, she snatched him away from his tormentors, tossed him on top of her burden, and running across the Walla Walla on the teetering foot-log laid him down at the door of the mission. So now the Whitmans had three adopted half-breed children to take the place of the flossy-haired Alice.
