natives, and was sent across the river in a manner similar to that described, except that not even a basket was used to support himself and wife in mid-air, being upheld merely by a slip-noose.
Procuring horses from the natives, Meek hastened to reach the Dalles, where he made known to Waller and Brewer the condition of the lost companies,[1] and besought their aid; but they rendered no assistance.[2] He succeeded, however, in finding a guide in the person of Moses Harris, who had deserted White's party the first day out from the Dalles, and happened to be at this place. Harris gathered a few horse-loads of food and hurried to the relief of the immigrants, whom he found at the crossing of Des Chutes, and which was not more than thirty-five miles from the Dalles, near where Tyghe Creek comes into this river.[3]
The passage of the river detained them for two weeks,[4] and they arrived at the Dalles about the middle of October, having lost about twenty of their company from sickness. As many more died soon after reaching the settlements, either from disease
- ↑ Hancock's Thirteen Years, MS., 78-81.
- ↑ Elisha Packwood, who was also among the lost immigrants, as they have always been called to distinguish them from those who kept to the beaten path, relates that Meek made great exertions to get a guide and some persons to go to their assistance from the mission, but without success; and says, in plain terms, that it was through sheer heartlessness that he was refused. Morse, who took down Packwood's statement, says it is the testimony of all the old pioneers 'that for rank selfishness, heartlessness, avarice, and a desire to take advantage of the necessities of the emigrants to the utmost, the mission at the Dalles exceeded any other institution on the Northwest Coast. This is a terrible charge, but a conversation with fifty different pioneers who crossed the plains in an early day will satisfy any one of the fact.Morse's Wash. Ter., MS., i. 60-1.
- ↑ Moses Harris, commonly known as Black Harris, or the Black Squire, among mountain men, like others of his class, had the gift of story-telling, and was noted for a famous fiction about a petrified forest which he had seen, on which the leaves and birds were preserved in all the beauty of life, the mouths of the birds still open in the act of singing! Burnett's Recollections of a Pioneer, 155. Harris is described as No. 2, on page 125 of Gray's Hist. Or., and he was, I believe, made a character in Moss' novel of the 'Prairie Flower,before mentioned. One of Stephen Meek's famous stories was of a Rocky Mountain belle with hair eighteen feet long, which was folded up every morning in the form of a pack, and carried on the shoulders of an attendant. San José Argus, Nov. 16, 1867.
- ↑ Palmer's Jour., 64; Bacon's Merc. Life Or., MS., 6.
