Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 1.djvu/318

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
306
John Minto.

States Department of Agriculture a contribution from the United States Herbarium, Vol. V, No. 2, by Frederick V. Coville—I find one hundred plants described as used by the Klamath Indians, forty-six of which—as seeds, fruits or roots—were used as food by that tribe. No effort has yet been made to enumerate all the kinds of flesh, fish, and insect life used by the native race for sustenance. Lewis and Clark found evidence that the coast native sometimes resorted to searching the beach for fish cast up by the tide. The tribes on the south bank of the Snake River, and southward, used to fire the high, arid plains, where possible, and collect the crickets and grasshoppers thus killed. As late as 1844 these insects were dried and made into a kind of pemmican by pestle and mortar. The Rogue River natives used the grasshopper meal as a delectable food as late as^ 1848, and as late as 1878 the writer saw the chief medicine man of the Calipooyas collecting in a large mining pan the tent caterpillars from the ash trees within four miles of Salem. He asserted most emphatically that they were "close muckamuck' (good food).

For years before and after the last mentioned date the writer knew Joseph Hudson (Pa-pe-a, his native name), the lineal chief of the Calipooyas, who signed the treaty of cession of the east side of the Willamette Valley to the United States . He was the only native of Western Oregon the writer ever talked with who seemed to comprehend, or care for, the consequences to the natives of the appropriation of ownership of the soil by the white race. He had judgment to perceive that the latter had agencies of power and of progress with which his people could not have coped, even at their best estate—which family tradition had handed down to him. This pointed to a time when his people had numbered eight thousand, as he estimated, at which time and later, to the time of his grandfather,