The Log School-House on the Columbia

An elderly woman and a German girl were walking along the old Indian trail that led from the northern mountains to the Columbia River. The river was at this time commonly called the Oregon, as in Bryant's poem:

"Where rolls the Oregon,

And no sound is heard save its own dashings."

The girl had a light figure, a fair, open face, and a high forehead with width in the region of ideality, and she carried under her arm a long black case in which was a violin. The woman had lived in one of the valleys of the Oregon for several years, but the German girl had recently arrived in one of the colonies that had lately come to the territory under the missionary agency of the Rev. Jason Lee.

There came a break in the tall, cool pines that lined the trail and that covered the path with glimmering shadows. Through the opening the high summits of Mount St. Helens glittered like a city of pearl, far, far away in the clear, bright air. The girl's blue eyes opened wide, and her feet stumbled.

"There, there you go again down in the hollow! Haven't you any eyes? I would think you had by the looks of them. Well, Gretchen, they were placed right in the front of your head so as to look forward; they would have been put in the top of your head if it had been meant that you should look up to the sky in that way. What is it you see?"

"Oh, mother, I wish I was-an author."

"An author! What put that into your simple head? You meant to say you would like to be a poet, but you didn't dare to, because you know I don't approve of such things. People who get such flighty ideas into their loose minds always find the world full of hollows. No, Gretchen, I am willing you should play on the violin, though some of the Methody do not approve of that; and that you should finger the musical glasses in the evening-they have a religious sound and soothe me, like; but the reading of poetry and novels I never did countenance, except Methody hymns and the 'Fool of Quality,' and as for the writing of poetry, it is a Boston notion and an ornary habit. Nature is all full of poetry out here, and what this country needs is pioneers, not poets."

There came into view another opening among the pines as the two went on. The sun was ascending a cloudless sky, and far away in the cerulean arch of glimmering splendors the crystal peaks and domes of St. Helens appeared again.

The girl stopped.

"What now?" said the woman, testily.

"Look-yonder!"

"Look yonder-what for? That's nothing but a mountain, a great waste of land all piled up to the sky, and covered with a lot of ice and snow. I don't see what they were made for, any way-just to make people go round, I suppose, so that the world will not be too easy for them."

"Oh, mother, I do not see how you can feel so out here! I never dreamed of anything so beautiful!"

"Feel so out here! What do you mean? Haven't I always been good to you? Didn't I give you a good home in Lynn after your father and mother died? Wasn't I a mother to you? Didn't I nurse you through the fever? Didn't I send for you to come way out here with the immigrants, and did you ever find a better friend in the world than I have been to you?"

"Yes, mother, but-"

"And don't I let you play the violin, which the Methody elder didn't much approve of?"

"Yes, mother, you have always been good to me, and I love you more than anybody else on earth."

There swept into view a wild valley of giant trees, and rose clear above it, a scene of overwhelming magnificence.

"Oh, mother, I can hardly look at it-isn't it splendid? It makes me feel like crying."

The practical, resolute woman was about to say, "Well, look the other way then," but she checked the rude words. The girl had told her that she loved her more than any one else in the world, and the confession had touched her heart.

"Well, Gretchen, that mountain used to make me feel so sometimes when I first came out here. I always thought that the mountains would look peakeder than they do. I didn't think that they would take up so much of the land. I suppose that they are all well enough in their way, but a pioneer woman has no time for sentiments, except hymns. I don't feel like you now, and I don't think that I ever did. I couldn't learn to play the violin and the musical glasses if I were to try, and I am sure that I should never go out into the woodshed to try to rhyme sun with fun; no, Gretchen, all such follies as these I should shun. What difference does it make whether a word rhymes with one word or another?"

To the eye of the poetic and musical German girl the dead volcano, with its green base and frozen rivers and dark, glimmering lines of carbon, seemed like a fairy tale, a celestial vision, an ascent to some city of crystal and pearl in the sky. To her foster mother the stupendous scene was merely a worthless waste, as to Wordsworth's unspiritual wanderer:

"A primrose by the river's brim,

A yellow primrose was to him,

And it was nothing more."

She was secretly pleased at Gretchen's wonder and surprise at the new country, but somehow she felt it her duty to talk querulously, and to check the flow of the girl's emotions, which she did much to excite. Her own life had been so circumscribed and hard that the day seemed to be too bright to be speaking the truth. She peered into the sky for a cloud, but there was none, on this dazzling Oregon morning. The trail now opened for a long way before the eyes of the travelers. Far ahead gleamed the pellucid waters of the Columbia, or Oregon. Half-way between them and the broad, rolling river a dark, tall figure appeared.

"Gretchen?"

"What, mother?"

"Gretchen, look! There goes the Yankee schoolmaster. Came way out here over the mountains to teach the people of the wilderness, and all for nothing, too. That shows that people have souls-some people have. Walk right along beside me, proper-like. You needn't ever tell any one that I ain't your true mother. If I ain't ashamed of you, you needn't be ashamed of me. I wish that you were my own girl, now that you have said that you love me more than anybody else in the world. That remark kind o' touched me. I know that I sometimes talk hard, but I mean well, and I have to tell you the plain truth so as to do my duty by you, and then I won't have anything to reflect upon.

"Just look at him! Straight as an arrow! They say that his folks are rich. Come out here way over the mountains, and is just going to teach school in a log school-house-all made of logs and sods and mud-plaster, adobe they call it-a graduate of Harvard College, too."

A long, dark object appeared in the trees covered with bark and moss. Behind these trees was a waterfall, over which hung the crowns of pines. The sunlight sifted through the odorous canopy, and fell upon the strange, dark object that lay across the branching limbs of two ancient trees.

Gretchen stopped again.

"Mother, what is that?"

"A grave-an Indian grave."

The Indians bury their dead in the trees out here, or used to do so. A brown hawk arose from the mossy coffin and winged its way wildly into the sunny heights of the air. It had made its nest on the covering of the body. These new scenes were all very strange to the young German girl.

The trail was bordered with young ferns; wild violets lay in beds of purple along the running streams, and the mountain phlox with its kindling buds carpeted the shelving ways under the murmuring pines. The woman and girl came at last to a wild, open space; before them rolled the Oregon, beyond it stretched a great treeless plain, and over it towered a gigantic mountain, in whose crown, like a jewel, shone a resplendent glacier.

Just before them, on the bluffs of the river, under three gigantic evergreens, each of which was more than two hundred feet high, stood an odd structure of logs and sods, which the builders called the Sod School-house. It was not a sod school-house in the sense in which the term has been applied to more recent structures in the treeless prairie districts of certain mid-ocean States; it was rudely framed of pine, and was furnished with a pine desk and benches.

Along the river lay a plateau full of flowers, birds, and butterflies, and over the great river and flowering plain the clear air glimmered. Like some sun-god's abode in the shadow of ages, St. Helens still lifted her silver tents in the far sky. Eagles and mountain birds wheeled, shrieking joyously, here and there. Below the bluffs the silent salmon-fishers awaited their prey, and down the river with paddles apeak drifted the bark canoes of Cayuses and Umatillas.

Indians spearing fish at Salmon Falls.

A group of children were gathered about the open door of the new school-house, and among them rose the tall form of Marlowe Mann, the Yankee schoolmaster.

He had come over the mountains some years before in the early expeditions organized and directed by Dr. Marcus Whitman, of the American Board of Missions. Whether the mission to the Cayuses and Walla Wallas, which Dr. Whitman established on the bend of the Columbia, was then regarded as a home or foreign field of work, we can not say. The doctor's solitary ride of four thousand miles, in order to save the great Northwest territory to the United States, is one of the most poetic and dramatic episodes of American history. It has proved to be worth to our country more than all the money that has been given to missionary enterprises. Should the Puget Sound cities become the great ports of Asia, and the ships of commerce drift from Seattle and Tacoma over the Japan current to the Flowery Isles and China; should the lumber, coal, minerals, and wheat-fields of Washington, Oregon, Montana, and Idaho at last compel these cities to rival New York and Boston, the populous empire will owe to the patriotic missionary zeal of Dr. Whitman a debt which it can only pay in honor and love. Dr. Whitman was murdered by the Indians soon after the settlement of the Walla Walla country by the pioneers from the Eastern States.

Mr. Mann's inspiration to become a missionary pioneer on the Oregon had been derived from a Boston schoolmaster whose name also the Northwest should honor. An inspired soul with a prophet's vision usually goes before the great movements of life; solitary men summon the march of progress, then decrease while others increase. Hall J. Kelley was a teacher of the olden time, well known in Boston almost a century ago. He became possessed with the idea that Oregon was destined to become a great empire. He collected all possible information about the territory, and organized emigration schemes, the first of which started from St. Louis in 1828, and failed. He talked of Oregon continually. The subject haunted him day and night. It was he who inspired Rev. Jason Lee, the pioneer of the Willamette Valley. Lee interested Senator Linn, of Missouri, in Oregon, and this senator, on December 11, 1838, introduced the bill into Congress which organized the Territory.

Some of the richly endowed new schools of Oregon would honor history by a monumental recognition of the name of Hall J. Kelley, the old schoolmaster, whose dreams were of the Columbia, and who inspired some of his pupils to become resolute pioneers. Boston was always a friend to Washington and Oregon. Where the old schoolmaster now rests we do not know. Probably in a neglected grave amid the briers and mosses of some old cemetery on the Atlantic coast.

When Marlowe Mann came to the Northwest he found the Indian tribes unquiet and suspicious of the new settlements. One of the pioneers had caused a sickness among some thievish Indians by putting emetic poison in watermelons. The Indians believed these melons to have been conjured by the white doctor, and when other sickness came among them, they attributed it to the same cause. The massacre at Waülaptu and the murder of Whitman grew in part out of these events.

Mr. Mann settled near the old Chief of the Cascades. He sought the Indian friendship of this chief, and asked him for his protection.

"People fulfill the expectation of the trust put in them-Indians as well as children," he used to say. "A boy fulfills the ideals of his mother-what the mother believes the boy will be, that he will become. Treat a thief as though he were honest, and he will be honest with you. We help people to be better by believing in what is good in them. I am going to trust the friendship of the old Chief of the Cascades, and he will never betray it."

It was summer, and there was to be a great Indian Potlatch feast under the autumn moon. The Potlatch is a feast of gifts. It is usually a peaceful gathering of friendly tribes, with rude music and gay dances; but it bodes war and massacre and danger if it end with the dance of the evil spirits, or the devil dance, as it has been known-a dance which the English Government has recently forbidden among the Northwestern tribes.

The Indians were demanding that the great fall Potlatch should end with this ominous dance of fire and besmearings of blood. The white people everywhere were disturbed by these reports, for they feared what might be the secret intent of this wild revel. The settlers all regarded with apprehension the October moon.

The tall schoolmaster watched the approach of Mrs. Woods and Gretchen with a curious interest. The coming of a pupil with no books and a violin was something unexpected. He stepped forward with a courtly grace and greeted them most politely, for wherever Marlowe Mann might be, he never forgot that he was a gentleman.

"This is my gal what I have brought to be educated," said Mrs. Woods, proudly. "They think a great deal of education up around Boston where I came from. Where did you come from?"

"From Boston."

"So I have been told-from Harvard College. Can I speak with you a minute in private?"

"Yes, madam. Step aside."

"I suppose you are kinder surprised that I let my gal there, Gretchen, bring her violin with her; but I have a secret to tell ye. Gretchen is a kind of a poet, makes rhymes, she does; makes fool rhyme with school, and such things as that. Now, I don't take any interest in such things. But she does play the violin beautiful. Learned of a German teacher. Now, do you want to know why I let her bring her violin? Well, I thought it might help you. You've got a hard lot of scholars to deal with out here, and there are Injuns around, too, and one never knows what they may do.

"Well, schoolmaster, you never heard nothin' like that violin. It isn't no evil spirit that is in Gretchen's violin; it's an angel. I first noticed it one day when husband and I had been havin' some words. We have words sometimes. I have a lively mind, and know how to use words when I am opposed. Well, one day when husband and I had been havin' words, which we shouldn't, seein' we are Methody, Gretchen began to cry, and went and got her violin, and began to play just like a bird. And my high temper all melted away, and my mind went back to the old farm in New England, and I declare, schoolmaster, I just threw my apron over my head and began to cry, and I told Gretchen never to play that tune again when I was talking to husband for his good.

"Well, one day there came a lot of Injuns to the house and demanded fire-water. I am Methody, and don't keep any such things in the house. Husband is a sober, honest man. Now, I've always noticed that an Injun is a coward, and I think the best way to get along with Injuns is to appear not to fear them. So I ordered the stragglers away, when one of them swung his tommyhawk about my head, and the others threatened to kill me. How my heart did beat! Gretchen began to cry; then she ran all at once for her violin and played the very same tune, and the Injuns just stood like so many dumb statues and listened, and, when the tune was over, one of them said 'Spirits,' and they all went away like so many children.

"Now, I thought you would like to hear my gal play between schools, and, if ever you should get into any trouble with your scholars or Injuns or anybody, just call upon Gretchen, and she will play that tune on the violin."

"What wonderful tune is it, madam?"

"I don't know. I don't know one tune from another, though I do sing the old Methody hymns that I learned in Lynn when I am about my work. I don't know whether she knows or not. She learned it of a German."

"I am glad that you let her bring the instrument. I once played the violin myself in the orchestra of the Boston Handel and Haydn Society."

"Did you? Then you like it. I have a word or two more to say about Gretchen. She's a good gal, and shows her bringing up. Teach her reading, writing, and figures. You needn't teach her no grammar. I could always talk without any grammar, in the natural way. I was a bound-girl, and never had much education. I have had my ups and downs in life, like all the rest of the world. You will do the best you can for Gretchen, won't you?"

"Yes, my dear madam, and for every one. I try to make every one true to the best that is in them. I am glad to have Gretchen for a scholar. I will speak to her by and by."

How strange was the scene to Gretchen! She remembered the winding Rhine, with its green hills and terraced vineyards and broken-walled castles; Basel and the singing of the student clubs in the gardens on summer evenings; the mountain-like church at Strasburg; and the old streets of Mayence. She recalled the legends and music of the river of song-a river that she had once thought to be the most beautiful on earth. But what were the hills of the Rhine to the scenery that pierced the blue sky around her, and how light seemed the river itself to the majestic flow of the Columbia! Yet the home-land haunted her. Would she go back again? How would her real parents have felt had they known that she would have found a home here in the wilderness? Why had Providence led her steps here? Her mother had been a pious Lutheran. Had she been led here to help in some future mission to the Indian race?

"Dreaming?" said Mrs. Woods. "Well, I suppose it can't be helped. If a body has the misfortune to be kiting off to the clouds, going up like an eagle and coming down like a goose, it can't be helped. There are a great many things that can't be helped in this world, and all we can do is to make the best of them. Some people were born to live in the skies, and it makes it hard for those who have to try to live with them. Job suffered some things, but-I won't scold out here-I have my trials; but it may be they are all for the best, as the Scripture says."

These forbearing remarks were not wholly meant for Gretchen's reproval. Mrs. Woods liked to have the world know that she had her trials, and she was pleased to find so many ears on this bright morning open to her experiences.

She liked to say to Gretchen things that were meant for other ears; there was novelty in the indirection. She also was accustomed to quote freely from the Scriptures and from the Methodist hymnbook, which was almost her only accomplishment. She had led a simple, hard-working life in her girlhood; had become a follower of Jason Lee during one of the old-time revivals of religion; had heard of the Methodist emigration to Oregon, and wished to follow it. She hardly knew why. Though rough in speech and somewhat peculiar, she was a kind-hearted and an honest woman, and very industrious and resolute. Mr. Lee saw in her the spirit of a pioneer, and advised her to join his colony. She married Mr. Woods, went to the Dalles of the Columbia, and afterward to her present home upon a donation claim.

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