Life, adventures, and travels in California

Front matter

I

Pyramid Lake, Oregon .

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1848, by NAFIS & CORNISH.

Preface To The Second Edition

The editor of this new Pictorial Edition of Farnam’s “ Adventures,” has added a History of the Conquest of California, from official documents and other authentic materials. He has also added a summary account of the most recent and celebrated “ Travels in Oregon,” including a description of that new and important addition to our national domain. He has also added fifty-three pages of embellishments appropriate to the several subjects treated in the volume.

The reader will perceive that, thus augmented, the work contains much that is important and interesting to all who feel desirous to watch the onward march of the Cheat Republic.

Chapter I

A Reminiscence — A Spectacle — Oregon — Landward and Seaward — The Great South Sea — Magic Palace — Taking in Studding-sails — Caverns — Storm in Full Blast — Professor of Psalmody — Fur Hunter — A British Tar — An Author — A Seaboat — A Corkscrew — A Flagon — A Conversation about Life in the Northwest — Its Dogs — Logs — Food— Surface — Lords of the North — Frozen Mountains — Moss — Flowers — Potatoes, Oats and Barley — Indian Wives and Sheep— The Arctic Shore — Suicide of a Brave Man — A Solo — Eel Pond — Ghost in the Shrouds — Tumult in Upper and Lower Ocean — Minor Key — War-cry — Special Pleading — The Sea — Wine and Song — To Bed.

In a work entitled “Travels in the Great Western Prairies,” &c., to which the following pages are a sequel, I left my readers off the mouth of Columbia river, in sight of the green coast of Oregon. Lower Oregon ! A verdant belt of wild loveliness ! — A great park of flowering shrubs, of forest pines, and clear streams ! The old unchanged home of the Indian ; where he has hunted the moose and deer ; drawn the trout from the lake, and danced, sung, loved, and warred away a thousand generations. I cannot desire for myself any remembrances of the Past which shall bring me more genuine wealth of pleasurable emotions than those which came to me from that fourth sunset of December, 1840, when I was leaning over the bulwarks of the ship Vancouver, looking back on Oregon, and seaward over the great Pacific! A spectacle of true grandeur ! The cones of eternal snow which dot the green heights of the President’s range of mountains, rose on the dark outline of the distant land, and

SCENES IN THE PACIFIC.

hung glittering on the sky, like islands of precious stones ; so brightly did they shine in the setting sun, and so completely did the soft clouds around their bases seem to separate them from the world below !

The shores of Lower Oregon ! They rise so boldly from the sea ! Themselves mountains sparsely clad with lofty pines, spruce and cedar trees, nodding over the deep !

And then the ground under water ! No flats, no mudbanks there. The cliffs are piled up from the bottom of the ocean ! The old Pacific, with his dark depths, lies within one hundred yards of them ! And the surges that run in from the fury of the tempests, roll with unbroken force to the towering rocks, and breaking with all their momentum at once, making the land tremble, and send far seaward a mighty chorus to the shouting storm !

The Pacific ! the Great South Sea ! It was heaving at our bows ! steadily, wave on wave came and went and follow ■ ing each other in ceaseless march pressed onward ; like the world’s hosts in marshalled files, they hastened past us, as if intent to reach the solid shores, where some resistance would broach their hidden strength and pour their fury out !

Behold, the sea ! Its troubled wastes are bending and toppling with a wild, plashing, friendly sound ; a deep, blue, uncertain vastness ; itself cold and passive ; but under the lash of the tempest, full of terrific life ! Our ship stood staunch upon the palpitating mass, and seemed to love it.

Mizen and mizen-top, main and main-top, fore and foretopsails, and the lower weather studding-sails were out. The breeze from the land which had carried us over the bar still held, every thread of canvass drew7, every cord w7as tight, and as we looked up through the rigging to the sky, the sails, cordage and masts sw7ayed under the clouds like the roofing of some magic palace of olden tales. All hands were on deck ; both watches sat about the windlass; while the second officer and mate looked at the horizon over the weather-bow7, and pointed out a line of clouds crowding ominously up the

TRAVELS IN THE CALIFORNIAS.

southwestern sky. The captain stood upon the companionway? looking' at the barometer. In a little time officers and passengers gathered in a knot on the larboard-quarter.

I ken there s a storm coinin’ up frae the soo’est,” said the Scotch mate.

“ The clouds loom fast, sir, in that quarter,” said Mr. Newell, the American second-mate. “ I reckon it will be upon us soon.”

Captain Duncan needed no information in regard to the weather on these shores. He was everywhere an accomplished seaman. On the quarter-deck— with his quadrant — on the spars and at the halyards ; but especially in that prophetic knowledge of the weather, which gives the sons of Neptune their control over the elements, he had no superiors.

“ Take in the studding-sails and make all fast on deck,” is the order, issued with quietness and obeyed with alacrity. Water casks, long-boat, and caboose are lashed, ropes coiled up and hung on the pins in the bulwarks, and the hatches put down in storm rig. The wind before which we were running abated, and the horizon along the line of departing light began to lift a rough undulating edge.

“ Take in the mainsail !” “ Go aloft and take a reef in the maintop !” “ In with the fore-main, and let the trysail run !” followed each other in haste, as the sailors moved to the cheering music of their songs in the work of preparing the ship to wrestle with a southwester. Everything being made snug, we waited its coming.

The rough water which appeared a mere speck when the wind came upon the circle of vision, had widened till its extreme points lay over the bows. On it came, widening and elevating itself more and more ! The billows had previouslybeen smooth, or at least ruffled sufficient only to give their gently heaving sides a furzy aspect, while the tops occasionally rose in transparent combs, which immediately crumbled by their own weight into foam down their leeward acclivities. But now a stronger spirit had laid his arm on these ocean

SCENES IN THE PACIFIC.

coursers. The wind came on, steadily increasing its might from moment to moment ! At first it tore the tops of the waves into ragged lines, then rent the whole sui face into fragments of every conceivable form, which rose, appealed and vanished, with the rapidity of thought, dancing like sprites among the lurid moving caverns of the sea ! A struggling vastness ! constantly broken by the flail of the tempest, and as often reunited, to be cleft still farther by a redoubled blast.

The darkness thickened as the storm increased ; and when the lanthorn was lighted in the binnacle, and the nightwatch set, the captain and passengers went below to their wine and anecdotes. Our company consisted of four persons. One was a singing-master from Connecticut, Texas, New Orleans, and St. Louis. He was such an animal as one would wish to find if he were making up a human menagerie ; so positive was he of step, so lofty in the neck, and dignified in the absurd blunders wherewith he perpetually corrected the opinions and assertions of others.

Another was a Mr. Simpson, a young Scotchman of respectable family, a clerk in the service of the Hudson’s Bay Company. This was a fine fellow, twenty-five years of age, full of energy and good feeling, well-informed on general topics, and like most other British subjects abroad, troubled with an irrepressible anxiety at the growing power of the States, and an overwhelming loyalty toward the mother-country and its Sovereign skirts. 1 he other peisonages were the commander, Duncan, and the author.

The Captain was an old British tar, with a heart full of generosity for his friends, and a fist full of bones for his enemies. A glass of cheer with a messmate, and a rope’s end for a disobedient sailor, were with him impromptu productions, for which he had capacity and judgment ; a hearty, five foot nine inch, burly, stout-chested Englishman, whom it was always pleasant to see and hear.

This little company gathered around the cabin table, and all as one listened a moment to the beatings of the tempest

TRAVELS IN THE CALIFORNIAS.

A surge — another — and a third still heavier, beat upon the noble ship and sent a thrill through every timber. On they rolled, and dashed, and groaned. But her iron heart only seemed to gather strength from the conflict, and inspire us with a feeling of perfect safety.

u A fine sea-boat is the Vancouver, gentlemen,” said Captain Duncan, “ she rides the storm like a petrel and with this comfortable assurance we seated ourselves at the table.

I had nearly forgotten Tom, the cabin-boy ; a mere mouse of a lad ; who knew the rock of a ship and the turn of a corkscrew as well as any one ; and as he was spry, had a short name, a quick ear, and bore the keys to the sideboard and some things elsewhere, all well-bred stomachs would not fail to blast my quill, If I omitted to write his name and draw his portrait.

Well, Torn was one of those sons of old England, who are born to the inheritance of poverty, and a brave heart for the seas. Like many thousand children of the Fatherland, when the soil refused him bread, he was apprenticed for the term of seven years to seamanship. And there he was, an English sailor-boy, submitting to the most rigorous discipline, serving the first part of his time in learning to keep his cabin in order, and wait at the table, that when, as he was taught to expect, he should have a ship of his own, he might know how to be served like a gentleman. This part of his apprenticeship he performed admirably. And when he shall leave the cork-screw and the locker for the quarter-deck, I doubt not he will scream at a storm, and utter his commands with sufficient imperiousness to entitle him to have a Tom of his own.

a Tom,” said Captain Duncan, u bring out a flagon of Jamaica, and set on the glasses, lad. This stosrn, gentlemen, calls for cheers. When Neptune labors at this pace, he loves his dram. Fill gentlemen, to absent wives.” This compliment to the sacred ascendency of the domestic affections was timely given. The storm howled hideously for our lives, our families were far distant over seas and moun-

SCENES IN THE PACIFIC.

tains, the heart was pressed with sadness : we drank in silence and with swimming eyes.

A pleasant conversation followed this toast, in which each one of our little band exhibited himself in his own way. The Captain was a hearty old Saxon, who had inherited from a thousand generations, a love for home, its hearth and blazing evening fire, its old oaken table, its family arm-chair, and the wife who presided over that temple of holy affections. In him, therefore, we had the genuine spirit of those good old times when man used his physical and mental powers, to build about his heart the structures of positive happiness, instead of the artificial semblances of these, which fashion and affectation draw around the modern home.

Our professor of psalmody was the opposite of this. He had, when the red blood of youth warmed his heart, in the ways of honest nature, spoken sweet things to a lovely girl, won her affections, promised marriage, and as his beard grew became a gentleman ; that is, jilted her. He, therefore, was fond of freedom, could not be confined to so plain and quiet a business as the love of one woman, and the care of a family of children. “ It was quite horrid, indeed it was, foreman who had any music in his soul ; the mere idea was concentrated picra to his moral stomach ; the thought, bah ! that a gentleman could ever think of being a daddy, and trotting on his paternal knee a semi-yearling baby.”

Mr. Simpson was from the braes of Scotland. For many years he had lived an isolated and roving life, among the nows, morasses, and lakes of the wilderness, which lies west and north-west of Hudson’s Bay. He had been taught his catechism at kirk, and also a proper respect for the ties of the domestic sentiments. But the peculiar idea of manliness which grows up in those winter realms of danger, privation, and loneliness, had gradually habituated him to speak of these relations as desirable mainly when the body had expended its energy in striding mountains, in descending rocky

TRAVELS IN THE CALIFORNIAS.

torrents with boats laden with furs, and in the other bold enterprises of these daring traders.

From him we obtained a description of some portions of that vast country occupied by the Hudson’s Bay Company; and some information on other topics connected with it. Life in the Company’s service was briefly described. Their travelling is performed in various ways at different seasons of the year and in different latitudes. In Oregon their journeys are chiefly made in Mackinaw boats and Indian canoes. With these they ascend and descend the various streams, bearing their cargoes, and often their boats, from the head-waters of one to those of another. In this manner they pass up the Cowelitz and descend the Chihilis with their furs and other goods ; thus do they reach the head-waters of the northern fork of the Columbia, pass over the Rocky Mountains, and run down the rivers and lakes to Canada. F arther north on the east side of the Rocky Mountain range, they travel much on foot in summer, and in winter (which is there the greatest part of the year) on sledges drawn by dogs. Ten or twelve of these animals are attached to a light sledge, in which the man sits wrapped in furs and surrounded by meat for his carnivorous steeds and provisions for himself. Thus rigged, the train starts on the hard snow crust, and make eighty or one hundred miles before the dogs tire. When the time for rest comes, they are unharnessed, fed, tied to the bushes or shrubs, and the traveller enveloped in furs, addresses himself to sleep under the lea of a snow-bank or precipitous rock. When nature is recruited the train is again harnessed and put on route. The Aurora Borealis, which flames over the skies of those latitudes, illuminates the country so well, that the absence of the sun during the winter months offers no obstacles to these journeyings. Drawn by dogs over mountain and plain, under heavens filled with electric crackling light, the traveller feels that his situation harmonizes well with the sublime desolation of that wintry zone. In this manner these adventurous men travel from the mouth of Mackenzie’s river to York on Hudson’s Bay and to Canada.

Their dwellings are usually constructed of logs in the form of our frontier cabins. They are generally surrounded by pickets, and in other respects arranged so as to resist any attack which the neighboring Savages may make upon them. They are usually manned by an officer of the Company and a few Canadian Frenchmen. In these rude castles, rising in the midst of the frozen north, live the active and fearless gentlemen of the Hudson Bay Company. The frosts of the poles can neither freeze the blood nor the energy of meh who spring from the little Island of Britain. The torrid, the temperate, and the frozen zones alike hear the language and acknowledge the power of that Wonderful race.

The food of these traders is as rude as their mode of life. At most of the Forts they live almost exclusively on the white and other kinds of fish ; no vegetables of any description are obtainable; an occasional deer or woods buffalo or musk ox is procured ; but seldom is their fare changed from the produce of the lakes and streams. At a few of their stations not even these can be had ; and the company is obliged to supply them with pemican. This is buffalo meat dried, finely pulverized, mixed with fat and service berries, and secured in leathern sacks. They transport this from latitudes forty-eight and nine to different places on Mackenzie’s river, and other parts of the extreme north. Wild fowls, geese and ducks afford another means of subsistence. At York and other posts in the neighborhood of lakes, large numbers of these fowl are taken in the summer season, and salted for winter use. But with all their painstaking, these gentlemen live but poorly ; on a diet of flesh alone, and that of an indifferent quality. Hardy men are these lords of the snow. Their realm embraces one-ninth of the earth. This immense territory Mr. Simpson informed us has a great variety of surface.

On the north-eastern portion lie extensive tracts of perpetually frozen mountains, cut by narrow valleys filled with travels in the californias.

fallen cliffs, among which dash and roar numerous rivers on their way to the frozen sea. Scarcely any timber or other vegetation grows in these wastes. A lonely evergreen or a stunted white birch takes root here and there, and during the few weeks of vsummer, mosses and linchens present a few verdant spots in the damp recesses of the rocks. But cold winds, laden with hail and sleet, howl over the budding of every green thing ! The flowers can scarcely show their petals and set their seeds, before winter with its cracking ices and falling snow embraces them !

The section of country which lies about Mackensie’s river, differs from that described, in having dense forests skirting portions of the valleys, and large plains of moss and linchen, on which feed the deer, buffalo, musk-ox and moose. The river itself is, in summer months, navigable for batteaux several hundred miles. It is well stored with trout, salmon, white and other fish. But the winters there also scarcely end, before they begin again their work of freezing land, stream, and sea.

The extensive country lying on the head waters of the streams which run northward into the Frozen Ocean, eastward into Hudson’s Bay, and southward into the Canadian waters, is composed of swamps, broken at intervals with piles of boulders and minor mountains, and dotted with clumps of bushes, plots of hassocks, and fields of wild rice. The waters of these table -lands form many lakes and lofty cascades on the way to their several destinations. The roar of these on the dreadful frozen barrenness around, Mr. Simpson represented to be awful in the extreme ; so wild, hoarse, and ringing are their echoes.

We are informed that there are considerable tracts of arable land on the western side of Hudson’s Bay, occupied by several settlements of Scotch : that these people cultivate nothing but potatoes, oats, barley, and some few garden vegetables ; and are altogether in a very undesirable condition. He also informed us of a tract of tillable land,

SCENES IN THE PACIFIC.

lying some hundreds of miles northeast of Lake Superior, on which Lord Selkirk had founded a colony ; that this settlement contains about three thousand people, composed chiefly of gentlemen and servants, who have retired from the Company’s service with their Indian wives and half-breed children. They cultivate considerable tracts of land, have cattle and horses, schools and churches, a Catholic Bishop and a Protestant preacher of the English Church. Some years since a Mr. McLeod, from this settlement, went to Indiana and purchased a very large drove of sheep for its use. But in driving them a thousand miles over the prairies, their fleeces became so matted with poisonous burrs, that most of them died before reaching their place of destination.

Mr. Simpson related a few incidents of an exploring expedition, which the Company had despatched to the northern coast of America. The unsatisfactory results of those fitted out by the home goverment, under Parry, Franklin, Ross, and Back, which had been partially furnished with men and means by the Company, led it at length to undertake one alone. To this end it despatched, in 1S38, one of its officers, accompanied by our friend Simpson’s brother, well furnished with men, instruments, and pro\isions on this hazardous enterprise. I have since been informed, that this Mr. Simpson was a man of great energy and talent— the one indeed on whom the Company relied for the success of the undertaking. From his brother I learned only that the unexplored part of the coast was surveyed, that the waters of Davis’ Strait were found to flow with a strong current westward, and enter the Pacific through Behring’s Strait ; and that Greenland consequently is an island or continent by itself ! The Mr. Simpson of this expedition isnow known to the civilized world to have trodden the ices and snows, and breathed the frozen air of that horrid shore ; and by so doing to have added these great facts to the catalogue of human knowledge ; and having become deranged in consequence of his incredible sufferings, to have blown out his own brains on the field of his glorious travels in the califorsias.

deeds. Our companion, poor fellow, was happily ignorant of that sad event, and spoke of the expedition only as one of great hardship, yet such as he would have gladly shared. His brave kinsman was then dead !

When Mr. Simpson pausedin these interesting narrations, our piofessor of psalmody, who had been beating the table with a tuning-fork, opened a solo upon Texas. He had been in that country, and was, in his own estimation, as familiar with its rivers, plains, forests and destiny, as with the paths across his father’s sheep pasture. Galveston was a London ln embryo : Sam Houston had inherited the knee-buckles and shoe-knots of Washington’s patriotism : the whole country was an Eden in which he had obtained the best site for a grist-mill and the finest pond for eels ! In short, we were informed in a tone of self-consequence, at least an octave above mi , on any known scale of conceit, that himself and a brace of fellow blades, on hearing that the government had offered a bounty of land to emigrants, went thither, remained long enough to perfect their title to a share of the public domain, and were then obliged by pressing business to return to the States and leave others to fight and die for freedom.

He had a belief that the Californias would make a respectable abode for man, if it were conquered by a bold arm, a little music, and made into a Republic by a man, he did not mention his own name, whose character for bravery, intelligence and taste for the fine arts, he did not say psalmodv, would draw around him the unemployed intellect and courage of the States. In conclusion he modestly remarked, that he himself was destined to the Californias, but did not say that he intended to open there a revolutionary singing-school.

While this conversation was going on, the good old ship was struggling with the tempest. She headed northwesterly, and as the storm and swells came from the southwest, she at one time lay in the trough of the sea, and then, as the wave bore down upon her, swayed to the leeward a

moment, rocked upon its summit, and as the surge passed

SCENES IN THE PACIFIC.

on, reeled to the windward and slid into the trough again. This is the bitterest motion of a ship at sea, whether he whom it staggers be a “ land lubber” or u salt.” I he latter finds it difficult to take his watch -walk from the windlass to the fore-stays, and swears that such a lullaby is as unworthy of the ocean god as it is unseemly for a decent sailor, to stand, at one instant with one leg clewed up and the other out, and the next clewed the other way, and be compelled, at each change, to brace himself back in the attitude of being frightened to death by a ghost in the shrouds.

The landsman, may perhaps feel too much awe to swear at the great deep, employed in its sublime labors ; or if he dare profane thus the majesty of his Maker’s movements, his noble self is usually the object of so much solicitude as to deny him any adequate opportunity of doing so. His stomach will demand much of the attention which he would fain bestow upon other objects ; and it will scarcely be refused what it requires. We sat at the table till eight bells. A delightful chit-chat we had ; such a variety of wisdom, such splendor of reminiscence, such bolts of reason rending and laying bare all the mines of thought were there !

But this and all that we had in expectancy that night ended not in smoke ; that would have been land-like ; but in a stealthy withdrawal of our company, one at a time, to pay their tribute to Padre Neptune, ihe singing master struck minor key first ; the fur hunter followed with his war-cry ; the Green Mountain lawyer came to the encounter with a throat full of special pleading ; and after a hot melee each surrendered, on such terms as he could procure, all claim to the inborn rights of a quiet stomach and clean nose ; and turned in. The night was passed by us in the cabin in clinging to our berths. The seamen on deck struck the bells, changed the watch, and stood out like iron men on the tide of that terrible tempest ! Their thrilling “ 0 he oe” occasionally cut sharply and cheeringly into the hoarse cadences of the storm ! Every other sound of living thing was buried in the clangor of the elements.

The next morning opened with gloomy grandeur. The clouds brightened by the first rays of the sun in detached spots only, appearing and disappearing in rapid succession, intimated that the whole mass of serial fluid was fleeing at a fearful pace before the unabated tempest. As the light increased into full day, the canopy hung so dark and densely down the heavens, that night appeared to have retained the half of its dominion. It need not touch the water as fogs do ; but the massive heavy fold left between itself and the surface of the ocean, a space apparently three hundred yards in depth. That was a sight to wonder at. I could conceive of nothing in nature so far beyond the power of words to portray. Does the simile of a boundless tomb, vaulted with mourning crape, shaken by fierce winds, half lighted, filled with death-screams, represent it? I cannot tell : but such an idea rose as I looked out upon the scene.

Old Ocean, too, was in a glorious mood. I had often seen the Atlantic lay with his mighty bosom heaving to the sky, calm and peaceful like a benevolent giant slumbering on a world of lesser things ; or, to use no figure, I had seen it slightly agitated, every particle tremulous under a soft breeze, every drop sending back the sunshine, or multiplying indefinitely the stars of a clear June night. I had seen it when the swells were torn by a “dry squall,” or an hour’s “blow,” and heard its icebergs crack and plunge ; and seen its fearful waterspouts marching so near me that I could hear their awful roar ! But I had not seen it raised and rent, in the height of its tumult and power. All this was now before me in the great Pacific.

At ten o’clock the storm had gained its utmost strength. The ship was laid to. The waves were dashing over her bulwarks. The Captain was standing braced upon the weather quarter, dressed in a long pea-jacket, stout seapants and boots, an oil- cloth cap covering head and shoul-

IS ders. The watch on duty were huddled under the weather bow and lashed to the stays to prevent being washed overboard. The second mate stood midship, holding fast to the rigging. All were looking at the storm. The ship herself lay like a lost water bird, rising, falling, buried and mounting again, among the overwhelming waves.

The appearance of the sea ! — Who can describe it 1 Like the land, it had its valleys, and mountains, and streams. But its vales, instead of flowers and grasses, were covered with wisps of torn water ; the mountains instead of snowy peaks, were billows, crested with combs of light blue water, tipped with foam, perpetually tumbling down and forming again, as the floods rushed on, lashing one another. And the streams were not such as flow through meadows and woodlands among creeping flower vines ; but swift eddies, whirling through the heaving caverns of the sea.