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I wrote a few weeks ago about John Rogers James, a 10-year-old who crossed the Oregon Trail in 1851 with his parents, Samuel and Anna, and his siblings, then lived near Portland and the Clackamas River for a year before traveling north to settle on the Grand Mound Prairie, where they arrived on Oct. 12, 1852.
That morning, they left Joseph Borst’s home near the Chehalis River at present-day Centralia and the park that bears his name. They traveled through the woods past the home of Sidney and Nancy Ford and arrived at a little log cabin “looking lonely and forsaken on the big prairie with big, tall timbers, 250 and 300 feet high, on the river bottom,” with two large springs of good water nearby, James wrote in his recollections compiled before his death in 1929.
Near the river’s edge east of the mound was a small village of two Native American families—the Hatstute and We-i-We families. We-i-We had a wife and three sons — Tesian, Colallowan, and Heom.
Samuel and Anna Marie (Foxwell) James, along with their children — Samuel II, Thomas, William, John Rogers, Ann Elizabeth, Richard Oregon, and Allen, and Mary — slept inside the cabin at Grand Mound and used the oxen and a plow to break the ground for planting. After their stock wandered four or five miles away, they fenced the land to contain the livestock. They sawed timber into planks for a raft to ship goods downriver to Grays Harbor. When they first arrived, young John Rogers James recalled seeing only a wild band of ponies on the prairie.
He wrote about learning the Chinook Jargon to communicate with natives, first while living in the Clackamas area, after two of the James brothers — Thomas and John Rogers — lost their ponies. A local resident, John Welsh, told them the words to say in their search: “Mica manich cewtan?” (Did you see my horse?)
They quickly expanded their vocabulary and could converse fairly well during their first year in Oregon Territory.
“It has always been a great advantage to be able to talk in the Chinook language,” James wrote, noting that it would be difficult to learn all the tribal languages. “With a vocabulary of two or three hundred words, we could converse, trade, and traffic with the Indians from California to British Columbia and Alaska without any inconvenience.”
He shared a few distinctions in the language — “claxta” for who and “icta” for what or that, “cumtax” for understand, “tickey mucka muck” for I want something to eat, “ca mika clatawa” for where are you going, “icta mika tickey” for what do you want, and “clahoua six” for how do you do, sir.
“We just picked up the language without very much effort, like a boy learning to eat peanuts,” James wrote. “I used to be called upon to explain and interpret the Sunday school lessons to the Indian.”
A Native elder, Old Suwaloupop, spoke to John Rogers about being at Point Chehalis, a peninsula between South Bay and the Pacific Ocean near present-day Westport, nearly 60 years earlier when Captain Robert Gray entered what’s now Grays Harbor. He told the boy that although the “Bostons” gave them muskets without bullets, only blank cartridges or loose powder, “they had a great time firing off the muskets and making so much noise,” James wrote.
When he attended the funeral for his brother Thomas in 1871, James wrote that a young man from Nanaimo on Vancouver Island paid tribute to his brother by saying he had taught them good lessons and then quoting Scripture: “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoso believeth on me shall not perish but have everlasting life.”
“I thought after hearing this Indian boy talk that way my brother’s mission on earth was for good,” James wrote.
Two feet of snow covered the ground on the prairie for nearly a month during the winter of 1852 and ’53, which made it difficult to find grass for the cattle to eat.
“One day two men came wading through the snow,” James recalled. “One of them was leaning on the arm of the taller man.”
The tall man, Enoch Chapman, who settled on the Cowlitz River, asked for accommodation, but Samuel James, thinking the man might be drunk, said they were in poor shape to care for anyone.
“Well, my dear sir,” Chapman said. “This man is perishing.”
“Oh, well, come right in,” the elder James said.
Chapman explained that he and his companion, Dr. James H. Roundtree, had traveled down the Columbia to Astoria and up the beach to Shoalwater Bay and then to Gray’s Harbor, but while traveling up the Chehalis River, their canoe capsized near the mouth of the Black River. They then followed a trail to the James cabin. Dr. Roundtree’s feet were badly frozen, and he spent the winter recovering in the cabin.
“When Father and Brother Samuel were gone on a three-day trip to Tumwater and Olympia for supplies, Brother Allen, five years old, took sick with the croup and died before Father got home,” James wrote. “It seemed no death occurring in the family distressed us more than this, as we had come so far into the wilderness. We had a very strong attachment for each other.”
Afterward, their father read the Bible and conducted family worship “as consolation for our bereavement,” he said.
Two We-i-We brothers — Tesian and Colallowan — dug the grave and brought two wide cedar boards from the roof of their house to make the coffin for Allen.
“We made a lonely little procession to the grave by some little fir trees to the west of the cabin,” James wrote. “Dr. Roundtree hobbled out on crutches, and some Indians stood around the grave with us as Father read the burial service.”
Early settlers met in the grove at Goodell’s Point to celebrate the Fourth of July with the firing of guns and clarinet playing by Mr. Lum, a bachelor described by James as an exceptional man, a sort of genius, who stuffed all sorts of birds and animals and kept them in his cabin.
Blackberry-picking season in the summer of 1853 prompted Native Americans to camp near their cabin, but then smallpox broke out.
“Father was always immune from smallpox, and Mother had had a siege of it before she left England, and Brother Thomas had it when on a trip across the Atlantic to England with Father three or four years before,” John Rogers James wrote. “The rest of us were all taken down. Father had a good method of taking care of smallpox patients, and Mother and Brother Thomas were good nurses, so we all pulled through. Father worked with the Indians and advised them as to the best way to care for themselves and brought most of them through, though some died.”
As a teenager, John James worked for L.D. Durgan, who stocked goods in his front room to sell to passersby. Durgan was a clever and social man and a politician while his wife, Lucette, was timid about being left alone. Durgan later built his home on top of the mound and, with Augustus Gangloff, started a nursery of apple, pear, and plum trees. The old settlers — the Bushes, Fords and Borsts — provided garden seeds to the newcomers.
Samuel James the elder bought lots in Olympia, Tumwater and elsewhere, even trading oxen to purchase the land. The family threshed wheat and ground it into meal for breakfast. Many travelers stopped at their cabin on the way to Puget Sound.
George Bush, a Black man who had settled on a prairie near Tumwater, sold the James patriarch seven sheep at seven dollars a head. He told his younger children to watch the sheep, but they wandered off, and coyotes killed all but one ewe. Then, in the summer of 1855, they purchased 41 head from James McAllister. John James had saved $7.50 and sent it along to buy one sheep. The family’s herd soon expanded to nearly 500 head.
By the fall of 1855, quite a few emigrants had settled in the Scatter Creek Valley north of Centralia and the Skookumchuck area north of present-day Bucoda. They settled on the name of Grand Mound for their well-organized settlement.
“The prairies afforded pasturage for their stock and an opportunity to get crops of grains and vegetables growing and cows to milking,” John Rogers James wrote. “The immediate neighborhood of Grand Mound became a good neighborhood with church and school and Sunday school.”
In his recollections, James wrote about the locations of early pioneers who staked out property under the Donation Land Claim Act of 1850, which offered 640 acres of free land for a couple, or 320 for a single man 18 or older. The amount of land would be reduced to 160 acres and then, after 1854, it would cost $1.25 an acre. The act expired on Dec. 1, 1855.
Frequent arguments broke out over politics, with some in favor of slavery and others against it. One time at a political convention at Durgan’s, men lined up as either Democrats or Whigs, and Samuel James stood all alone as an “Abolitionist” or “Free Soiler.” Andrew McCormack walked over to stand with him.
“He was a big, hearty Scotchman,” James wrote, “and would laugh and say, ‘I did not wat to see Mr. James standing there all alone.’”
The early settlers gathered for church services, and the church-going element prevailed, keeping in check public dances, card playing, and drinking.
James Biles installed the first tan yard for making leather, and Jack Quinnup and Bill Cooper built the first brick kiln.
George Waunch in the north part of present-day Centralia on Waunch Prairie was known far and wide for his skill in fixing broken rifles. In fact, the natives called the expert gunsmith “Chickaman George,” meaning metal. People brought old flintlocks, rifles, and other arms to him for repairs. He also was known as an excellent blacksmith.
“They would go and stay all day with him, help do the cooking and blow the bellows, as that was the only assurance that they would get the work done,” James wrote. “I remember Father worked quite a while and helped get dinner, and the bill was only 50 cents for the work done.”
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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at memoirs@chaptersoflife.com.
