Chapter XXVI: Building of the Natchess Pass Road

We have seen with what travail the first immigrants passed through the Natchess Pass. We will now tell about that other struggle to construct any kind of a road at all, and so we must need go back a little in our story.

While I had been struggling to get the little wife and baby over from the Columbia River to the Sound, and a roof over their heads, the sturdy pioneers of this latter region set resolutely to work building a wagon road through this pass, to enable the immigration of 1853, and later years, to come direct to Puget Sound.

For unknown ages the Indians had traveled a well-worn but crooked and difficult trail through this pass, followed by the Hudson Bay people later in their intercourse with the over-mountain tribes, but it remained for the resolute pioneers of 1853 to open a wagon road over the formidable Cascade range of mountains to connect the two sections of the Territory, otherwise so completely separated from each other.

Congress had appropriated twenty thousand dollars for the construction of a military road from Fort Steilacoom to Wallula on the Columbia River, but it was patent to all the appropriation could not be made available in time for the incoming immigration known to be on the way.

This knowledge impelled the settlers to make extraordinary efforts to open the road, as related in this and succeeding chapters.

Meetings had been held at various points to forward the scheme and popular subscription lists circulated for prosecuting this laudable enterprise. It was a great undertaking for the scattered pioneers, particularly where so many were newcomers with scant provision yet made for food or shelter for the coming winter.

But everyone felt this all important enterprise must be attended to, to the end that they might divert a part of the expected immigration which would otherwise go down the Columbia or through passes south of that river, and thence into Oregon, and be lost to the new but yet unorganized territory of Washington.

And yet in the face of all the sacrifices endured and the universal public spirit manifested, there are men who would belittle the efforts of the citizens of that day and malign their memories by accusing them of stirring up discontent among the Indians. "A lot of white men who were living with Indian women, and who were interested in seeing that the country remained common pasture as long as possible." A more outrageous libel was never penned against the living or dead. In this case but few of the actors are left, but there are records, now fifty years old that it is a pleasure to perpetuate for the purpose of setting this matter aright, and also of correcting some errors that have crept into the treacherous memories of the living, and likewise to pay a tribute to the dead. Later in life I knew nearly all these sixty-nine men, subscribers to this fund, and so far as I know now all are dead but eight, and I know the underlying motive that prompted this strenuous action; they wanted to see the country settled up with the sturdy stock of the overland immigrants.

The same remark applies to the intrepid road workers, some of whom it will be seen camped on the trail for the whole summer, and labored without money and without price to that end.

It is difficult to abridge the long quotation following, illustrating so vividly as it does the rough and ready pioneer life as Winthrop saw and so sparklingly described. Such tributes ought to be perpetuated, and I willingly give up space for it from his work, "The Canoe and the Saddle," which will repay the reader for careful perusal. Winthrop gives this account as he saw the road-workers the last week of August, 1853, in that famous trip from Nisqually to The Danes. Belated and a little after nightfall, he suddenly emerged from the surrounding darkness where, quoting his words:

"A score of men were grouped about a fire. Several had sprung
up, alert at our approach. Others reposed untroubled. Others
tended viands odoriferous and frizzing. Others stirred the flame.
Around, the forest rose, black as Erebus, and the men moved in
the glare against the gloom like pitmen in the blackest coal
mines.

"I must not dally on the brink, half hid in the obscure thicket,
lest the alert ones below should suspect an ambush and point
toward me open-mouthed rifles from their stack near at hand.
I was enough out of the woods to halloo, as I did heartily.
Klale sprang forward at shout and spur. Antipodes obeyed a
comprehensive hint from the whip of Loolowean. We dashed down
into the crimson pathway, and across among the astonished road
makers—astonished at the sudden alighting down from Nowhere
of a pair of cavaliers, Pasaiook and Siwash. What meant this
incursion of a strange couple? I became at once the center of
a red-flannel-shirted circle. The recumbents stood on end. The
cooks let their frying pans bubble over, while, in response to
looks of expectation, I hung out my handbill and told the society
my brief and simple tale. I was not running away from any fact
in my history. A harmless person, asking no favors, with plenty
of pork and spongy biscuit in his bags—only going home across
the continent, if may be, and glad, gentlemen pioneers, of this
unexpected pleasure.

"My quality thus announced, the boss of the road makers, without
any dissenting voice, offered me the freedom of their fireside.
He called for the fattest pork, that I might be entertained right
republicanly. Every cook proclaimed supper ready. I followed my
representative host to the windward side of the greenwood pyre,
lest smoke wafting toward my eyes should compel me to disfigure
the banquet with lachrymose countenance.

"Fronting the coals, and basking in their embrowning beams,
were certain diminutive targets, well known to me as defensive
armor against darts of cruel hunger—cakes of unleavened bread,
light flapjacks in the vernacular, confected of flour and the
saline juices of fire-ripened pork, and kneaded well with drops
of the living stream. Baked then in frying pan, they stood now,
each nodding forward and resting its edge upon a planted twig,
toast-crustily till crunching time should come. And now to every
man his target! Let supper assail us! No dastards with trencher
are we.

"In such a platonic republic as this a man found his place
according to his powers. The cooks were no base scullions; they
were brothers, whom conscious ability, sustained by universal
suffrage, had endowed with the frying pan. Each man's target of
flapjacks served him for platter and edible table. Coffee, also,
for beverage, the fraternal cooks set before us in infrangible
tin pots—coffee ripened in its red husk by Brazilian suns
thousands of leagues away, that we, in cool Northern forests,
might feel the restorative power of its concentrated sunshine,
feeding vitality with fresh fuel.

"But for my gramniverous steeds, gallopers all day long,
unflinching steeplechase, what had nature done here in the way of
provender? Alas! little or naught. This camp of plenty for me was
a starvation camp for them.

"My hosts were a stalwart gang. I had truly divined them from
their cleavings on the hooihut (road). It was but play for any
one of these to whittle down a cedar five feet in diameter. In
the morning this compact knot of comrades would explode into a
mitraille of men wielding keen axes, and down would go the dumb,
stolid files of the forest. Their talk was as muscular as their
arms. When these laughed, as only men fresh and hearty and in
the open air can laugh, the world became mainly grotesque; it
seemed at once a comic thing to live—a subject for chuckling,
that we were bipeds with noses—a thing to roar at; that we had
all met there from the wide world to hobnob by a frolicsome fire
with tin pots of coffee, and partake of crisped bacon and toasted
doughboys in ridiculous abundance. Easy laughter infected the
atmosphere. Echoes ceased to be pensive and became jocose. A
rattling humor pervaded the feast, and Green River[14] rippled
with noise of fantastic jollity. Civilization and its dilettante
diners-out sneer when Clodpole at Dive's table doubles his soup,
knifes his fish, tilts his plate into his lap, puts muscle into
the crushing of his meringue, and tosses off the warm beaker
in his finger bowl. Camps by Tacoma sneer not at all, but
candidly roar at parallel accidents. Gawkey makes a cushion of
his flapjack. Butterfingers drops his red-hot rasher into his
bosom, or lets slip his mug of coffee into his boot drying by the
fire—a boot henceforth saccharine. A mule, slipping his halter,
steps forward unnoticed, puts his nose in the circle and brays
resonant. These are the jocular boons of life, and at these the
woodsmen guffaw with lusty good nature. Coarse and rude the jokes
may be, but not nasty, like the innuendoes of pseudo-refined
cockneys. If the woodsmen are guilty of uncleanly wit, it differs
from the uncleanly wit of cities as the mud of a road differs
from the sticky slime of slums.

"It is a stout sensation to meet masculine, muscular men at the
brave point of a penetrating Boston hooihut—men who are mates—men
to whom technical culture means naught—men to whom myself am
naught, unless I can saddle, lasso, cook, sing and chop; unless
I am a man of nerve and pluck, and a brother in generosity and
heartiness. It is restoration to play at cudgels of jocoseness
with a circle of friendly roughs, not one of whom ever heard the
word bore—with pioneers who must think and act and wrench their
living from the closed hand of nature.

"* * * While fantastic flashes were leaping up and illuminating
the black circuit of forest, every man made his bed, laid his
blankets in starry bivouac and slept like a mummy. The camp
became vocal with snores; nasal with snores of various calibre
was the forest. Some in triumphant tones announced that dreams of
conflict and victory were theirs; some sighed in dulcet strains
that told of lovers' dreams; some strew shrill whistles through
cavernous straits; some wheezed grotesquely and gasped piteously;
and from some who lay supine, snoring up at the fretted roof of
forest, sound gushed in spasms, leaked in snorts, bubbled in
puffs, as steam gushes, leaks and bubbles from yawning valves in
degraded steamboats. They died away into the music of my dreams;
a few moments seemed to pass, and it was day.

"* * * If horses were breakfastless, not so were their masters.
The road makers had insisted that I should be their guest,
partaking not only of the fire, air, earth and water of their
bivouacs, but an honorable share at their feast. Hardly had
the snoring ceased when the frying of the fryers began. In the
pearly-gray mist of dawn, purple shirts were seen busy about the
kindling pile; in the golden haze of sunrise cooks brandished
pans over fierce coals raked from the red-hot jaws of flame that
champed their breakfast of fir logs. Rashers, doughboys, not
without molasses, and coffee—a bill of fare identical with last
night's—were our morning meal. * * *

"And so adieu, gentlemen pioneers, and thanks for your frank,
manly hospitality! Adieu, 'Boston tilicum,' far better types
of robust Americanism than some of those selected as its
representatives by Boston of the Orient, where is too much
worship of what is, and not too much uplifting of hopeful looks
of what ought to be.

"As I started, the woodsmen gave me a salute. Down, to echo
my shout of farewell, went a fir of fifty years' standing.
It cracked sharp, like the report of a howitzer, and crashed
downward, filling the woods with shattered branches. Under cover
of this first shot, I dashed at the woods. I could ride more
boldly forward into savageness, knowing that the front ranks of
my nation were following close behind."

The men who were in that camp of road workers were E. J. Allen, A. J. Burge, Thomas Dixon, Ephraim Allen, James Henry Allen, George Githers, John Walker, John H. Mills, R. S. More, R. Foreman, Ed. Crofts, Jas. Boise, Robert Patterson, Edward Miller, Edward Wallace, Lewis Wallace, Jas. R. Smith, John Burrows, and Jas. Mix.

The names of the workers on the east slope of the mountains are as follows: Whitfield Kirtley, Edwin Marsh, Nelson Sargent, Paul Ruddell, Edward Miller, J. W. Fonts, John L. Perkins, Isaac M. Brown, James Alverson, Nathaniel G. Stewart, William Carpenter, and Mr. Clyne.

The Pioneer and Democrat, published at Olympia, in its issue of September 30th, 1854, contains the following self-explanatory letter and account that will revive the memory of many almost forgotten names and set at rest this calumny cast upon the fame of deserving men.

"Friend Wiley: Enclosed I send you for publication the statement
of the cash account of the Puget Sound emigrant road, which has
been delayed until this time, partly on account of a portion of
the business being unsettled, and partly because you could not,
during the session of the last legislature, find room in your
columns for its insertion. As you have now kindly offered, and as
it is due the citizens of the Territory that they should receive a
statement of the disposition of the money entrusted to me, I send
it to you, and in so doing close up my connection with the Cascade
road, and would respectfully express my gratitude to the citizens
for the confidence they have reposed in me, and congratulate them
upon the successful completion of the road."

"JAMES K. HURD."

RECEIPTS.

By subscription of John M. Swan, $10.00; S. W. Percival, $5.00;
Jos. Cushman, $5.00; Milas Galliher, $5.00; C. Eaton, $5.00;
Chips Ethridge, $5.00; Wm. Berry, $5.00; J. C. Patton, $5.00; T.
F. McElroy, $5.00; James Taylor, $5.00; George Gallagher, $5.00;
J. Blanchard, $5.00; Weed & Hurd, $100.00; Kendall Co., $50.00;
G. A. Barnes, $50.00; Parker, Colter & Co., $30.00; Brand &
Bettman, $25.00; J. & C. E. Williams, $25.00; Waterman & Goldman,
$25.00; Lightner, Rosenthal & Co., $10.00; A. J. Moses, $10.00;
Wm. W. Plumb, $10.00; Isaac Wood & Son, $15.00; D. J. Chambers,
$20.00; John Chambers, $5.00; McLain Chambers, $10.00; J. H.
Conner, $5.00; H. G. Parsons, $5.00; Thomas J. Chambers, $20.00;
Puget Sound Agricultural Co., $100.00; Wells, McAllister & Co.,
$30.00; Henry Murray, $25.00; L. A. Smith, $25.00; Chas. Wren,
$25.00; James E. Williamson, $10.00; H. C. Mosely, $5.00; J.
M. Bachelder, $5.00; Lemuel Bills, $25.00; W. Boatman, $15.00;
W. M. Sherwood, $5.00; James Barron, $5.00; S. W. Woodruff,
$5.00; R. S. More, $5.00: John D. Press, $5.00; Samuel McCaw,
$5.00; Philip Keach, $10.00; Abner Martin, $20.00; George
Brail, $10.00; T. W. Glasgow, $10.00; McGomery, $10.00; Thos.
Tallentire, $10.00; Garwin Hamilton, $5.00; John McLeod, $25.00;
Richard Philander, $5.00; W. Gregg, $5.00; David Pattee, $20.00;
Thomas Chambers, $50.00; W. A. Slaughter, $10.00; W. Hardin,
$15.00; L. Balch, $50.00; W. W. Miller, $10.00; J. B. Webber,
$25.00; J. W. Goodell, $10.00;——Kline, $10.00; A. Benton Moses,
$5.00;——Parsons, $5.00; H. Hill, $5.00; by amount received for
horse, $35.00; by amount received for horse (Woods), $35.00; by
subscription of Nelson Barnes, $30.00. Total, $1,220.00. Deduct
amount note from Lemuel Bills, $25.00. Whole amount received as
per subscription paper, $1,195.00.

This list of subscribers to the road fund will revive memories of almost forgotten names of old-time friends and neighbors, and also will serve to show the interest taken by all classes. It must not for a moment be taken this comprises the whole list of contributors to this enterprise, for it is not half of it, as the labor subscription far exceeded the cash receipts represented by this published statement. Unfortunately, we are unable to obtain a complete list of those who gave their time far beyond what they originally had agreed upon, but were not paid for their labor.

The Columbian, published under date of July 30th, 1853, says:

"Captain Lafayette Balch, the enterprising proprietor of
Steilacoom, has contributed one hundred dollars in money towards
the road to Walla Walla. To each and every man who started from
that neighborhood to work on the road, Captain Balch gives a lot
in the town of Steilacoom. He is security to the United States
Government for a number of mules, pack saddles and other articles
needed by the men. He furnished the outfit for the company who
started from that place with Mr. E. J. Allen, at just what the
articles cost in San Francisco."

Mr. Hurd's expenditure is set out in his published report, but none of it is for labor, except for Indian hire, a small sum. We know there were thirty men at work at one time, and that at least twelve of them spent most of the summer on the work and that at least fifty laborers in all donated their time, and that the value of the labor was far in excess of the cash outlay.

By scanning the list the "Old Timer" will readily see the cash subscribers and road workers were by no means confined to Olympia, and that many of the old settlers of Pierce County are represented, and even the foreign corporation, the Puget Sound Agricultural Company, came down with a heavy subscription. Everybody was in favor of the road. Such can also pick out the names of those "white men who were living with Indian women" among the liberal subscribers to the fund for opening the road.

Nor were the Indians lacking in interest in the enterprise. A. J. Baldwin, then and for many years afterwards a citizen of Olympia, and whom it may be said was known as a truthful man, in a recent interview, said:

"We all put our shoulders to the wheel to make the thing go. I
helped to pack out grub to the working party myself. It seemed
to be difficult to get the stuff out; entirely more so than to
get it contributed. I was short of pack animals one trip, and
got twelve horses from Leschi, and I believe Leschi went himself
also."[15]

"Do you remember how much you paid Leschi for his horses?"

"Why, nothing. He said if the whites were working without pay and
were giving provisions, it was as little as he could do to let
his horses go and help. He said if I was giving my time and use
of horses then he would do the same, and if I received pay then
he wanted the same pay I got. Neither of us received anything."

These were the Indians who were actually driven from their farms into the war camp, leaving the plow and unfinished furrow in the field and stock running at large, to be confiscated by the volunteers, at the outbreak of the Indian war of 1855.

And such were the road workers in the Natchess Pass in the fall of 1853, and such were the pioneers of that day. Fortunate it is we have the testimony of such a gifted and unbiased writer as Winthrop to delineate the character of the sturdy men who gave their strenuous efforts and substance that their chosen commonwealth might prosper.

FOOTNOTES:

[14] This should read Green Water. This camp was far up in the mountains and the stream referred to came from the main range and not from the glaciers of the great mountain, and hence was a sparkling, dancing rivulet of clearest water. Green River is forty miles or more farther down the mountain.

[15] Baldwin is mistaken. Queimuth, Leschi's brother, went as guide and packer, but Leschi doubtless supplied the horses.