oblivious to the spirit of his mother's eye and movement, continued repeating the offers to sell to us his tribal claim to the lands lying between Tongue Point and Cathelamett, that he had begun on our arrival. He was but a youth, not so tall as his stately old mother appeared in her robe ( of what I afterwards concluded was badger skins, but may have been mistaken), and he seemed mentally incapable of appreciating the influences then forming around him and his people, which appropriated their lands, while not one of them had the spirit to assert a right or raise the question of justice against the action of the white race. This was, with perhaps one exception, the cleanest, most self-respecting body of natives left on the Lower Columbia in 1845, where Lewis and Clark had, only forty years before, enumerated, by information from the natives, thirteen thousand eight hundred and thirty below the cascades and between that and the ocean. I do not believe that thirteen hundred could be found w T ithin the same limits at the latter date. There was not in all that distance, to my knowledge, a single man of the race who had the intelligence and public spirit combined to appear before the authorized agents of the United States ten years later and plead for the rights of their people in the treaties made south of the Columbia. It is questionable whether there was one in all the country north of Rogue River who would have done so of his own motion, had not the humane General Palmer and J. L. Parrish, as agents, advised the Indians to act. It is not to be understood from this that all good and all beauty had departed from the native life. When J. L. Parrish was in charge of Methodist mission property, in 1845, a white man from Oregon City appeared temporarily at Solomon S. Smith's to solicit the hand of a young woman named Oneiclam in marriage. The young woman civilly and modestly declined the honor, saying such a
