Chief Cheholtz was the only Cowlitz Indian whose life spanned the entire nineteenth century. He was born in 1795, and died on February 19, 1911, living to the ripe old age of 116 years. He witnessed the transition of Indian to White control of the land. He was eleven years of age when the first White people set foot on Cowlitz land. This was Lewis and Clark who camped at the mouth of the Cowlitz River on March 27, 1806. His father was a chief of the Cowlitz known as “King Cheholtz,” and therefore he was of royal blood.
At one Fourth of July celebration in Castle Rock when T. W. Robin was mayor, the bandstand, located on the south side of the Advocate building, was decorated with bunting to be used by the speaker of the day, Chet Studebaker, a lawyer and son of an early pioneer.
Someone suggested to Mr. Robin that Cheholtz give a short talk, if he would do it. The old Indian was soon located, but it took three men to bring him to the mayor.
Cheholtz could speak good English but had difficulty assembling his thoughts before a large crowd, and didn’t like the idea at all. Mayor Robin launched into rapid conversation with him in Chinook Jargon and convinced him to make a speech from the grandstand.
As an introduction in his role as master of ceremonies Mr. Robin said, “Fellow citizens and friends, Castle Rock is the only town in the State of Washington whose speaker of the day is a full-blooded Indian; he was known along the river long before the white men arrived, and is son of King Cheholtz of the Cowlitz Tribe.”
It was an impromptu talk, and Cheholtz had no time to assemble his thoughts, he spoke of remembered incidents, pausing before taking another subject:
“Before the palefaces came we had plenty of game and fish and no one was ever hungry. We killed game as we needed it. The palefaces would wound a deer while hunting and let it go off and die. The Indians never did that. They would hunt an animal they wounded so it wouldn’t suffer. The Great Spirit put creatures in the forests for food and clothing, not to kill as some palefaces do. The same with the salmon in the river and the smelt. Fish were plentiful in the distant past, but White men caught them for sport, and let them rot on the bank. The Great Spirit sent the smelt for the Indian and all the future dwellers along the river, but the palefaces were always wasteful of nature’s bounty. I told my friend, Henry Little, that the day would come when the smelt runs would never be the same again, but he said there would always be large runs up the river. There will come a time when fewer salmon will spawn in the far reaches of the Cowlitz, all due to wasteful palefaces, and greed. When the White men break the laws of nature laid down by the Great Spirit, all future peoples will suffer.”
Old Cheholtz had an attentive audience that day, and we surely know how truly his prophecy has come to pass.
There was a sadness in his voice that day as his thoughts drifted back to the years when his people were counted in the thousands, when they visited other villages in canoes attending powwows and council gatherings.
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Next time: Cheholz, continued.
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Roy I. Rochon Wilson was an elected leader of the Cowlitz Tribe for three decades and is the author of more than 30 books, including several histories of the Cowlitz Tribe. He is a retired ordained Methodist minister and current spiritual leader of the tribe. Wilson lives near Winlock.
