CHAPTER 2
Literature of the Explorers
Up all the rivers that are painted blue.
And all the ranges that are painted gray.
And into those pale spaces where they say:
"Unknown."
JEAN KENYON MACKENZIE.
As has been noted, the earliest explorers of Oregon failed as ethnological investigators, so that the native
people, in whose sight these were the first white men,
sang songs and delivered orations to them which they
made no particular effort to understand or certainly
to record in their voluminous logs and diaries and
chronicles.
They had much to say of another nature and numerous indeed were their accounts. All that were published soon after the explorations were made and that have turned up in manuscript since under the patient search of scholars, would form of themselves a sizable library.
If there had been a Franz Boas among their crews, what might he not have learned with his interviewing skill—with how much gladness would he have utilized the precious opportunities to fill his notebooks.
The old discoverers and explorers of Oregon were casual enough on this score; but observations of an other character they made extensively and to our eternal delight. What a great quantity of enjoyable reading and curious information and vicarious adventures and freshness of style we would have missed without their narratives. Drake was a contemporary of Shakespeare but Shakespeare included only a scant line in one of his plays about New Albion that Drake discovered.
