Multnomah made the lovely princess his wife, and
Sea-Flower showed the spirit of a queen. She
tried to introduce among the Indians something of
the refinement of her oriental home. From her the
degraded medicine -men and dreamers caught a gleam
of the majestic lore of Buddha; to the chiefs-in-coun-
cil she taught something of the grave, inexorable
justice of the East, that seemed like a higher devel
opment of their own grim unwritten code. Her in
fluence was very great, for she was naturally eloquent
and of noble presence. More than one sachem felt
the inspiration of better, purer thoughts than he had
ever known before when the " war-chiefs woman "
spoke in council. Strange gatherings were those :
blood-stained chiefs and savage warriors listening all
intent to the sweetest of Indian tongues spoken
in modulations that were music; the wild heart of
the empire stirred by the perfumed breath of a
woman!
She had died three years before the events we have been narrating, and had left to her daughter the heritage of her refinement and her beauty.
saved at the hands of the Indians; while the cases of beeswax that have been disinterred on the sea-coast, the oriental words that are found ingrafted in the native languages, and the Asiatic type of countenance shown by many of the natives, prove such wrecks to have been frequent in prehistoric times. One of the most romantic stories of the Oregon coast is that which the Indians tell of a buried treasure at Mount Ne- halem, left there generations ago by shipwrecked men of strange garb and curious arms, treasure which, like that of Captain Kidd,has been often sought but never found. There is also an Indian legend of a ship wrecked white man named Soto, and his comrades (See Mrs. Victor s "Oregon and Washington "), who lived long with the mid-Columbia Indians and then left them to seek some settlement of their own people in the south. All of these legends point to the not infrequent occur rence of such a wreck as our story de
