Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/601

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HISTORIANS
553

should include Texas history but not United States history. Since that is the home state of Dr. R. C. Clark, now one of the best known of Oregon historians, he already had the habit of close-up focus before he came and, as a matter of fact, had already written a history of Texas. He was born at Thorp Spring in 1877 and was graduated from the University of Texas in 1901. Four years later he received his doctor's degree from the University of Wisconsin, teaching in Epworth University in Oklahoma City from 1904 to 1905 and in the Pennsylvania State Normal from 1905 to 1907. He has since been with the University of Oregon and is now head of the history department. In addition to his own writings, he has done much for the history of Oregon through the encouragement and guidance he has given to local and state research among graduate students in the history department, and through the counsel he has given the University Library in building up a scholar's collection of Oregon material. He has contributed essays to the Oregon Historical Quarterly, and furnished several articles on Oregonians to the Dictionary of American Biography, including sketches of Abigail Scott Duniway, Harvey W. Scott, Matthew P. Deady, Joseph Dolph and John H. Mitchell. He is author of Beginnings of Texas, 1907; History of the Willamette Valley, 1927; and History of Oregon, 1925, with Robert H. Down and George Verne Blue and in use since its publication as the required text in the elementary schools.

The Food of the Indians

From History of the Willamette Valley, 1927

Fish was the mainstay of Chinook economy, and they were excellent fishermen. They had scoop nets made of fibrous cords of dogbane bark held by willow withes, which were floated by corks of cedar or weighed down by stones. Immense quantities of fish were caught in these nets in still water. . . . Since salmon runs are seasonal, preserving of food by drying had become a habit. The heads of trout were buried in holes lined with straw and skins and covered with skins and earth. The fish were opened and exposed to the sun on the scaffolds and pounded fine after drying. Placed in rush baskets lined with salmon skins, pressed down, covered with skins and wrapped in mats, fish thus prepared would keep for several years.

In contrast with the Chinook diet we find that of the Calapooias was principally vegetarian. They found in all nearly