BLAZING THE WAY
OR
TRUE STORIES, SONGS AND SKETCHES
OF PUGET SOUND AND OTHER
PIONEERS
BY
EMILY INEZ DENNY
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY THE AUTHOR AND
FROM AUTHENTIC PHOTOGRAPHS
SEATTLE:
RAINIER PRINTING COMPANY, Inc.
1909
Copyright 1899
By
EMILY INEZ DENNY
Published 1909
To My Dear Father and Mother,
Faithful Friends and Counselors,
Whose pioneer life I shared,
This book is affectionately dedicated
By THE AUTHOR
—Miller
PREFACE
BLAZING THE WAY.
In the early days when a hunter, explorer or settler essayed to tread the mysterious depths of the unknown forest of Puget Sound, he took care to “blaze the way.” At brief intervals he stopped to cut with his sharp woodman’s ax a generous chip from the rough bark of fir, hemlock or cedar tree, leaving the yellow inner bark or wood exposed, thereby providing a perfect guide by which he retraced his steps to the canoe or cabin. As the initial stroke it may well be emblematical of the beginnings of things in the great Northwest.
I do not feel moved to apologize for this book; I have gathered the fragments within my reach; such or similar works are needed to set forth the life, character and movement of the early days on Puget Sound. The importance of the service of the Pioneers is as yet dimly perceived; what the Pilgrim Fathers were to New England, the Pioneers were to the Pacific Coast, to the “nations yet to be,” who, following in their footsteps, shall people the wilds with teeming cities, a “human sea,” bearing on its bosom argosies of priceless worth.
It does contain some items and incidents not generally known or heretofore published. I hope others may be provoked to record their pioneer experiences.
I have had exceptional opportunities in listening to the thrice-told tales of parents and friends who had crossed the plains, as well as personal recollections of experiences and observation during a residence of over fifty years in the Northwest, acknowledging also the good fortune of having been one of the first white children born on Puget Sound.
Every old pioneer has a store of memories of adventures and narrow escapes, hardships bravely endured, fresh pleasures enjoyed, rude but genial merrymakings, of all the fascinating incidents that made up the wonder-life of long ago.
Chronology is only a row of hooks to hang the garments of the past upon, else they may fall together in a confused heap.
Not having a full line of such supports on which to hang the weaving of my thoughts—I simply overturn my Indian basket of chips picked up after “Blazing the Way,” they being merely bits of beginnings in the Northwest.
E. I. DENNY.
Note—The poem referred to on page 144 will appear in another work.—Author.
INDEX
SYNOPSIS OF INCIDENTS.
ILLUSTRATIONS
BLAZING THE WAY
PART I.—THE GREAT MARCH
CHAPTER I
CROSSING THE PLAINS.
—Song of the Pioneers.
The noble army of courageous, enduring, persistent, progressive pioneers who from time to time were found threading their way across the illimitable wilderness, forty or fifty years ago, in detached companies, often unknown and unknowing each other, have proved conclusively that an age of marvelous heroism is but recently past.
The knowledge, foresight, faith and force exhibited by many of these daring men and women proclaimed them endowed with the genius of conquerors.
The merely physical aspect of the undertaking is overpowering. To transport themselves and their effects in slow and toilsome ways, through hundreds of miles of weary wilderness, uninhabited except by foes, over beetling mountain ranges, across swift and dangerous rivers, through waterless deserts, in the shadow of continual dread, required a fortitude and staying power seldom equaled in the history of human effort.
But above and beyond all this, they carried the profound convictions of Christian men and women, of patriots and martyrs. They battled with the forces of Nature and implacable enemies; they found, too, that their moral battles must be openly fought year after year, often in the face of riotous disregard of the laws of God and man. Arrived at their journey’s end, they planted the youngest scions of the Tree of Liberty; they founded churches and schools, carefully keeping the traditions of civilization, yet in many things finding greater and truer freedom than they had left behind.
The noblest of epics, masterpieces of painting, stupendous operas or the grandest spectacular drama could but meagerly or feebly express the characters, experiences and environment of those who crossed the plains for the Pacific slope in the midst of the nineteenth century.
—Joaquin Miller.
It is my intention to speak more especially of one little company who were destined to take a prominent part in the laying of foundations in the State of Washington.
Previous to 1850, glowing accounts of the fertility, mildness, beauty and general desirability of Oregon Territory, which then included Washington, reached the former friends and acquaintances of Farley Pierce, Liberty Wallace, the Rudolphs and others who wrote letters concerning this favored land. Added to the impression made thereby, the perusal of Fremont’s travels, the desire for a change of climate from the rigorous one of Illinois, the possession of a pioneering spirit and the resolution was taken, “To the far Pacific Coast we will go;” acting upon it, they took their places in the great movement having for its watchword, “Westward Ho!”
John Denny, a Kentuckian by birth, a pioneer of Indiana and Illinois, whose record as a soldier of 1812, a legislator in company and fraternal relations with Lincoln, Baker, Gates and Trumbull, distinguished him for the most admirable qualities, was the leading spirit; his wife, Sarah Latimer Denny, a Tennessean, thrifty, wise, faithful and far-seeing, who had for many widowed years previous to her marriage to John Denny, wrought out success in making a home and educating her three children in Illinois, was a fit leader of pioneer women.
These, with their grown-up sons and daughters, children and grandchildren, began the great journey
The names of these brave-hearted ones, ready to dare and endure all, are as follows:
John Denny, Sarah Latimer Denny and their little daughter, Loretta; A. A. Denny, Mary A. Denny and their two children, Catherine and Lenora; C. D. Boren, Mrs. Boren and their daughter, Gertrude; the only unmarried woman, Miss Louisa Boren, sister of Mrs. A. A. Denny and C. D. Boren; C. Crawford and family; four unmarried sons of John Denny, D. T. Denny, James, Samuel and Wiley Denny.
The wrench of parting with friends made a deep and lasting wound; no doubt every old pioneer of the Pacific Coast can recall the anguish of that parting, whose scars the healing years have never effaced.
The route followed by our pioneers was the old emigrant road along the north side of the Platte River, down the Columbia and up the Willamette to Portland, Oregon Territory, which they afterwards left for their ultimate destination, Puget Sound, where they found Nature so bountiful, a climate so moderate and their surroundings so ennobling that I have often heard them say they had no wish to return to dwell in the country from whence they came.
Past the last sign of civilization, the Mormon town of Kanesville, a mile or two east of the Missouri River, the prairie schooners were fairly out at sea. The great Missouri was crossed at Council Bluffs by ferryboat on the 5th of May. The site of the now populous city of Omaha was an untrodden waste. From thence they followed the beaten track of the many who had preceded them to California and Oregon.
Hundreds of wagons had ground their way over the long road before them, and beside this road stretched the narrower beaten track of the ox-drivers.
On the Platte, shortly after crossing the Missouri, a violent thunderstorm with sheets of rain fell upon them at night, blowing down their tents and saturating their belongings, thereby causing much discomfort and inconvenience. Of necessity the following day was spent in drying out the whole equipment.
It served as a robust initiation in roughing it; up to that time they had carefully dressed in white night robes and lay down in neatly made beds, but many a night after this storm were glad to rest in the easiest way possible, when worn by travel and too utterly weary of the long day’s heat and dust, with grinding and bumping of wheels, to think of the niceties of dainty living.
For a time spring smiled on all the land; along the Platte the prairies stretched away on either hand, delightfully green and fresh, on the horizon lay fleecy white clouds, islands of vapor in the ethereal azure sea above; but summer came on apace and the landscape became brown and parched.
The second day west of the Missouri our train fell in with a long line of eighteen wagons drawn by horses, and fraternizing with the occupants, joined in one company. This new company elected John Denny as Captain. It did not prove a harmonious combination, however; discord arose, and nowhere does it seem to arise so easily as in camp. There was disagreement about standing guard; fault was found with the Captain and another was elected, but with no better results. Our pioneers found it convenient and far pleasanter to paddle their own canoes, or rather prairie schooners, and so left the contentious ones behind.
Long days of travel followed over the monotonous expanse of prairie, each with scarcely varying incidents, toils and dangers. The stir of starting in the morning, the morning forward movement, the halt for the noonday meal, cooked over a fire of buffalo chips, and the long, weary afternoon of heat and dust whose passing brought the welcome night, marked the journey through the treeless region.
At one of the noonings, the hopes of the party in a gastronomic line were woefully disappointed. A pailful of choice home-dried peaches, cooked with much care, had been set on a wagon tongue to cool and some unlucky movement precipitated the whole luscious, juicy mass into the sand below. It was an occurrence to make the visage lengthen, so far, far distant were the like of them from the hungry travelers.
Fuel was scarce a large part of the way until west of Fort Laramie, the pitch pine in the Black Hills made such fires as delight the hearts of campers. In a stretch of two hundred miles but one tree was seen, a lone elm by the river Platte, which was finally cut down and the limbs used for firewood. When near this tree, the train camped over Sunday, and our party first saw buffaloes, a band of perhaps twenty. D. T. Denny and C. D. Boren of the party went hunting in the hills three miles from the camp but other hunters had been among them and scattered the band, killing only one or two; however they generously divided the meat with the new arrivals. Our two good hunters determined to get one if possible and tried stalking a shaggy-maned beast that was separated from the herd, a half mile from their horses left picketed on the grassy plain. Shots were fired at him without effect and he ran away unhurt, fortunately for himself as well as his pursuers. One of the hunters, D. T. Denny, said it might have been a very serious matter for them to have been charged by a wounded buffalo out on the treeless prairie where a man had nothing to dodge behind but his own shadow.
On the prairie before they reached Fort Laramie a blinding hailstorm pelted the travelers.
D. T. Denny, who was driving a four-horse team in the teeth of the storm, relates that the poor animals were quite restive, no doubt suffering much from their shelterless condition. They had been well provided for as to food; their drivers carried corn which lasted for two hundred miles. The rich grass of five hundred miles of prairie afforded luxurious living beyond this, and everywhere along the streams where camp was made there was an abundance of fresh herbage to be found.
Many lonely graves were seen, graves of pioneers, with hopes as high, mayhap, as any, but who pitched their silent tents in the wilderness to await the Judgment Day.
A deep solemnity fell upon the living as the train wound along, where on the side of a mountain was a lone grave heaped up with stones to protect it from the ravages of wolves. Tall pines stood around it and grass and flowers adorned it with nature’s broidery. Several joined in singing an old song beginning