Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 9.djvu/175

From Youth to Age as an American. 157 of the family and compelled a resort to a higher altitude as a means of safety, which proved effective. We had passed the fourth summer in this way, and increasing numbers of ailing people were adopting the same means of cure or recreation, when two hunters of the region penetrated up the main north Santiam about to where the postoffice of Berry now^ is, in search of game range. They had passed the narrowest gorge through which the river cuts its way; the mountains seemed to lower and recede from the river somewhat, and the men began to think they had found the traditional pass to Eastern Oregon. One of the men had traced this tradition up to the writer, who had received it from J. M. Parrish, the missionary- blacksmith who had received it from the Molalla Indians while learning their language in order to be useful to them as a teacher. Information in regard to the pass used by the trap- pers and Hudson's Bay Company's traders I had heard Joseph Gervais himself tell to Henry Williamson while we were driven from his harvest field by a summer shower. The fine old hunter, trapper, trader, farmer, miller, sat by his roomy hearthstone and detailed to the young American home- seeker, Williamson, who Jiad defied the rule or will of Chief Factor McLoughlin, how he had left his home in Quebec in his twentieth year and was on the Arkansas killing buffalo for the New Orleans market when he learned that Wilson G. Hunt was at St. Louis engaging men to go to Oregon ; how he joined Hunt in 1811 and came to Oregon with him; how twenty years later he settled where he sat, as a farmer, and when his family was young, would after harvest take his fam- ily and cross the Cascades by way of the Santiam Valley, making one night's camp in the mountains, would trap and hunt till the rainy season was near ; turn his skins and peltries over to a Hudson's Bay Company trader to be taken to Van- couver via the Dalles, and recross the mountains home again, only camping one night, and wait two weeks before going to Vancouver for his pay. I sat as a listener, just as I had the week previous sat on the porch of the Beers' house and heard Dr. White, sub-agent to the Oregon Indians for the United