In the month of August, 1844, we had launched and finished the Calipooiah and went on a pleasure excursion to the mouth of the Columbia. The crew and passengers consisted of Captain Aaron Cook, Jack Warner, Jack Campbell, Rev. A. F. Waller and family, W. H. Gray and wife, A. E. Wilson, Robert Shortess, W. W. Raymond, E. W. Otie, M. B. Otie and J. W. Nesmith. There might have been others on board; if so their names have escaped me. The after portion had a small cabin, which was given up for the accommodation of the ladies and children. Forward was a box filled with earth, upon which a fire was made for cooking purposes. We had our own blankets and slept upon the deck. The weather was delightful, and we listlessly drifted down the Willamette and Columbia rivers, sometimes aided by the wind. Portland was then a solitude like any other part of the forest-clad bank. There were then no revenue officers here under pretense of "protecting" American industries and no custom house boat boarded us.
In four days we reached Astoria, or Fort George, as the single old shanty on the place, in charge of an old Scotchman, was called. The river was full of fish, and the shores abounded in game. We had our rifles along, and subsisted upon wild delicacies. There were then numerous large Indian villages along the margin of the river, and the canoes of the natives were rarely out of sight. The Indians often came on board to dispose of salmon; their price was a bullet and a charge of powder for a fish.
The grand old river existed then in its natural state, as Lewis and Clark found it forty years before. I believe that there was but one American settler's cabin on the banks of the Columbia from its source to the ocean. That was on the south side of the river, and belonged to Henry Hunt and Ben Wood, who were building a saw mill at that point.
On an island near Cathlamet some of us went ashore to visit a large Indian village where the natives lived in large and comparatively comfortable houses. They showed us some articles which they said were presented to them by Lewis and Clark, among which were a faded cotton handkerchief and a small mirror, about two inches square, in a small tin case. The corners of the case were worn off and the sides worn through by much handling. The Indians seemed to regard the articles with great veneration, and would not dispose of them to us for any price we were able to offer.
The only vessel we saw in the river was Her Majesty's sloop-of-war, Modeste, of eighteen guns, under command of Captain Thomas Bailie. We passed her in a long niche in the river, as she lay at anchor. We had a spanking breeze, and with all our sail set and the American flag flying at our mast-head, we proudly ran close under her broadside. A long line of officers and sailors looked down over the hammocks and from the quarter-deck at our unpainted and primitive craft in apparently as much astonishment as if we were the flying dutchman or some other phantom ship from the moon, to plant the stars and stripes upon the neutral waters of the Columbia."
Judge Strong, attorney of the old O. S. N. Company, succinctly begins his narrative at the annual meeting of the Pioneer Association in 1878, by stating what he found upon reaching the Columbia:
"Astoria at that time was a small place, or rather two places, the upper and lower town between which there was a great rivalry. They were about a mile apart, with no road connecting them except by water, and along the beach. The upper town was known to the people of lower Astoria as "Adairville." The lower town was designated by its rival as "Old Fort George," or "McClure's Astoria." A road between the two places would have weakened the differences of both, isolation being the protection of either. In the upper town was the custom house, in the lower, two companies of the First United States engineers, under command of Major J. S. Hathaway. There were not, excepting the mili-
