Page:Atlantis Arisen.djvu/47

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A TALK ABOUT ASTORIA AND VICINITY.
37

number of whose years was one hundred. His picture, which some one gave me, shows a shrewd character. So, no doubt, looked Com-com-ly, the chief whom Washington Irving describes in his "Astoria," and whose contemporary this venerable savage must have been. His then sightless eyes, in his early manhood beheld the entrance into the river of that vessel whose name it bears. Between that time and the day of his death he saw the Columbia River tribes, which once numbered thirty thousand souls, decimated again and again, until they scarcely counted up one-tenth of that number. Only a few years ago, I am told, there might have been found, on a pretty, level piece of land around Smith's Point west of Astoria, away from the shingly beach, and where on the edge of the forest thickets of wild roses, white spiraea, woodbine, and mock-orange made a charming solitude, an Indian lodge, the residence of the native Clatsop. Exteriorly, the Clatsop residence could not be praised for its beauty, being made of cedar planks, set upright and fastened to a square or oblong frame of poles, and roofed with cedar bark. Outside were numberless dogs, and some pretty girls of ten and twelve years of age, with glorious great, black, smiling eyes. Inside might be seen three squaws of various ages, braiding baskets and tending a baby of tender age, with two "warriors" sitting on their haunches and doing nothing; and salmon everywhere,—on the fire, on the walls, overhead, dripping grease, and smelling villanously, salmon,—nothing but salmon. A conversation with the mother of the little stranger, in jargon, related to the fair complexion of the tillicum. One of the warriors, presumed to be its papa, laughed and declared it all was as it should be. Such are the benefits of civilization to the savage!

I went in search of this aboriginal family and fell in with a different sort of savage,—an Irishman, on a little patch of ground which he cultivates after a fashion of his own, at the same time doing his housekeeping in preference to being bothered with a woman." He is cooking his afternoon meal, which consists of soup made from boiling a ham-bone, with thistles for greens, and a cup of spruce tea. Think of this, unlucky men, bothered with women, who, but for them, might yourselves be subsisting on thistles and spruce tea!

Young's Bay, which forms the southwest boundary of Smith's