to cross the plains with wagons, and were among the leaders
of that host of nearly a thousand people whose coming Ameri-
canized Oregon.
The Applegate brothers spent one winter at the Methodist Mission at Champoeg on the Willamette River, and then selected claims in the Salt Creek Valley at the foot of the Coast Mountains, about fifteen miles west of the present city of Salem, and there the subject of this sketch was born. After seven years spent there the three brothers removed to the then wilderness of the Umpqua County, and made their homes in the fertile Yoncalla Valley, close neighbors to the Umpqua and Calapooia bands of Indians, who yet remained in their native habit and outnumbered the white settlers many times to one. The judicious and equitable treatment of these Indians by the Applegate brothers and their neighbors established cordial relations with them, and many of the young Indians became the efficient aids of the settlers in caring for their stock and in the various labors incident to the improvement and culti- vation of their farms. When the Rogue River War of 1853 occurred a number of them enlisted in the company of Captain Lindsay Applegate and went to assist in protecting the strag- gling first settlements in the Rogue River country from the depredations of the warlike Rogue Rivers and Shasta Scotons. The initial treaty with the Indians of the Northern sections of the Umpqua Valley was made at the log cabin home of Captain Lindsay Applegate in 1854 by Special Indian Agent Rev. H. H. Spaulding, a man well-known by historians, and the companion and missionary colaborer of the lamented Dr. Marcus Whitman, who, with others, was assassinated at his Waiilatpu Mission, November 29, 1847. So far as our record runs the Spaulding treaty was never violated, either by these Indians nor by the original settlers of the Umpqua Valley. Lindsay Applegate remained ten years in the Umpqua Valley, and there the subject of this sketch secured the rudiments of a practical education in the peripatetic common schools and in the rather ambitious development of one of these known as the Yoncalla Institute, an educational institution now only known to the historian.
