No subject

by Charlotte Matheny Kirkwood
used by permission
          So Father stored our wagons and the things that we could not take
with us, and putting our extra stock in the mission pasture, we started with
a few pack animals, to make the last one hundred miles into the Willamette
Valley.
       Our provisions were low and we had barely enough to last us, if
everything went well, but everything did not go well.  When we were a day's
travel on the "Lolo Trail" (carry trail) we found in the morning that our
oxen were gone.
       Father sent four of the boys back to look for them, while the rest of
us rode on.  Winter had come and the old guide kept looking up into the sky
and shivering violently and shaking his head.  It was his way of telling us
that it was soon going to snow and that we must hurry on as fast as we
could.

       Father supposed that the oxen had strayed only a short distance and
all day long we were looking for the boys to rejoin us, but night came
without them, and another.  Then in spite of the warnings of the Indian, we
laid over a day.  The sky was growing dark and threatening and it was bitter
cold.  The boys had taken no food at all, for they had expected to be gone
but a few hours.  It was a harrowing situation.  Each day, when we broke
camp, Mother had divided our scanty store of food and had tied a generous
share to a limb over the trail, out of the reach of wolves or other
marauding animals.  Father realized that he must get out of the mountains as
fast as he could, then he could go back to meet the boys.  He knew that they
must have gone all the way back to The Dalles Mission, or they would have
overtaken us.  He hoped that they would be wise enough to stay there till he
returned to them.  One bitter cold night, we made camp up in the very clouds
themselves.  With the exception of some buffalo suet, our food was entirely
gone.  Mother found some Elderberries, bitter unpalatable things, and stewed
them with the suet.  Elderberry soup, she called the seedy, purple mess, and
we tried to eat it, for hunger was pinching us and it was all we had.

       Our boys were somewhere out in the wild forbidding mountains, without
food or shelter, maybe lost entirely.

       One night our little party sat huddled, damp and hungry around our
camp fire.  No one cared to talk, no one dared to talk.  Mother and Lizabeth
cried.  I remember that I sat snuggled under Father's cape.  I could hear
the "wow,wow" of the wind in the pine trees and the trickling splashing of
the water in the mountain stream.  Night birds were calling.  Oh, but it was
a dreary, lonely spot and a lonely, cheerless group that occupied it.

       Finally when I had endured the dreadful depressing silence as long as
I could, I said: "Father sing, sing 'Good old Noah,' and sing it loud."
Father understood.  How his heart must have ached.  His voice echoed and
reached from mountain to mountain.

       In the Morning as we were starting, our guide put his ear to the
ground and listened intently.  Then he sprang up and said: "ting-ting,
ting-ting."  One of our oxen wore a bell and he had heard it.  In a little
while we could all hear it.  We heard it coming nearer and nearer.  And so
our boys were with us again.  We were still hungry and so were they, for two
boys from the mission were with them.  Mother's scanty provisions had been
divided between six instead of four.

       We were all hungry, but we were happy and we knew that one of the
oxen would be killed before real starvation came to us.  We were far from
actually starving, for we still had a bag of suet, so killing the ox would
be a last resort.

       Brother Adam and Cousin Aaron rode on ahead, for we were within sight
of the Willamette Valley.  They hurried on to the Hudson Bay Company's post
at the falls and returned to us with provisions.

       They had a pillow slip full of funny little hard biscuits.  Oh, but
they were delightfully filling.  When Adam came up to us, he reached into
the bag and sewed biscuits over us, as one would sew wheat by hand.  Mother
said: "Adam, that is a foolish thing for you to do."  I was looking at
tender hearted Adam and I knew why he threw the biscuits.  He wanted to turn
attention from himself, and the tears were streaming down his face.

       Late the next evening, we reached the Hudson Bay Company's post, but
the rain had fallen on us all day and we were cold and wet.  Everything that
we had was wet.  There was no shelter for us there, every cranny was filled
to overflowing with the families who had made the trip successfully by raft.
So we pitched our tents and tried as best we could to dry out some of our
bedding.  There was no dry wood to be had and Mother had reached the limits
of her endurance.  She cried and cried, and Lizabeth cried, and Mary cried.
But my hero was his usual cheerful self and I thought the rest of them was a
pretty poor lot to make such a fuss, when they could see as well as I could
that everything must be alright.  In a day or two Father rented one room
from a Mr. Foster and we stayed there till we got a cabin over in the
Tualatin Valley and moved into it.  It was a pretty poor kind of a cabin,
but it had a roof and we surely needed a roof.  That winter it rained almost
without stopping till the first of the next May.


That sounds like the Oregon I remember.