Mt. Shasta | ©2014 H a v e n
Thirty years later, he told his story to John C. Root who proceeded to gather an exploration team in Stockton, California. 80 people joined the team, but on the day the team was to set out, Brown did not show up. Brown was not heard from again.
A long, long time ago, Tyhee Sahale became angry with the people. Sahale ordered a medicine man to take his bow and arrow and shoot into the cloud which hung low over Takhoma. The medicine man shot the arrow, and it stuck fast in the cloud. Then he shot another into the lower end of the first. He shot arrows until he had made a chain which reached from the cloud to the earth. The medicine man told his klootchman and his children to climb up the arrow trail. Then he told the good animals to climb up the arrow trail. Then the medicine man climbed up himself.
mt rainier admiralty inlet 1792
After a while the waters sank again. Then the medicine man, and his klootchman, and the children climbed out of the cloud and came down the mountain side. The good animals also climbed out of the cloud, Thus there are now no snakes or bad animals on Takhoma.
Long ago, when the world was young, all people were happy, The Great Spirit, whose home is in the sun, gave them all they needed. No one was Hungry, no one
‘Keeper of Fire’ | © 2015 H a v e n
The Great Spirit took the two brothers to the top of the high mountains and wakened them. They saw that the new country was rich and beautiful.
“Each of you will shoot a arrow in opposite directions,” he said to them. “Then you will follow your arrow. Where your arrow falls, that will be your country. There you will become a great chief. The river will separate your lands.”
One brother shot his arrow south into the valley of the Willamette River. He became the father and the high chief of the Multnomah people. The other brother shot his arrow north into the Klickitat country. He became the father and high chief of the Klickitat people.
Then the Great Spirit built a bridge over the big river. To each brother he said, “I have built a bridge over the river, so that you and your people may visit those on the other side. It will be a sign of peace between you. As long as you and your people are good and are friendly with each other, this bridge of the Tahmahnawis will remain.
Building of the the modern day Bridge of the Gods, ca. 1925
Then they began to be sorry for what they had done, and they begged the Great Spirit for fire. “Give us fire, or we will die from the cold,” they prayed. The heart of the Great Spirit was softened by their prayer. He went to an old woman who had kept herself from the wrongdoing of her people and so still had some fire in their lodge.
“If you will share your fire, I will Grant you anything you wish,” the Great Spirit promised her. “What do you want most?”
“Eternal” | ©2015 H a v e n
“You shall be young and beautiful tomorrow morning,” promised the Great Spirit. “Take your fire to the bridge, so that the people on both sides of the river can get it easily. Keep it burning there always as a reminder of the goodness and kindness of the Great Spirit.”
The old woman, whose name was Loo-wit, did as he said. Then the Great Spirit commanded the sun to shine again. When it rose the next morning, it was surprised to see a young and beautiful maiden sitting beside a fire on the Bridge of the Gods. The people, too, saw the fire, and soon their lodges were warm again. For many moons all was peaceful on both sides of the great river and the bridge.
The young men also saw the fire–and the beautiful young woman who attended it. They visited her often. Loo-wit’s heart was stirred by two of them–a handsome young chief from south of the river, whose name was Wyeast, and a handsome young chief from north of the river, whose name was Klickitat. She could not decide which of the two she liked better.
Wyeast and Klickitat grew jealous of each other and soon began to quarrel. They became so angry that they fought. Their people also took up the quarrel, so that there was much fighting on both sides of the river. Many warriors were killed.
The Dalles, Oregon. ca. 1884
Pre-dammed Cascades. 1912(?) author unknown.
——-Clark,Ella (1953) Indians of the Pacific Northwest (renewed 1981). The Regents of the University of California
A Mount Adams Story
Pahto | © 2010 H a v e n
Mount Adams (12,307 feet in altitude), the second highest peak in Washington, stands in the southwestern part of the state. The Klickitat and Yakama Indians called it Pahto. They claimed it as their mountain.
This legend was told by Chief Jobe Charley, with his granddaughter, Hattie Wesley, acting as interpreter. Now eighty-six years old, Jobe Charley heard the story when he was a little boy. When he got his first horse, he rode to Mount Adams and climbed it. Until he saw the eagles up there, he had not believed the story. Many eagles are hatched in the caves in the east side of Mount Adams.
Back when the mountains were people, Sun was a man. He had five mountains for his wives. One was Plash-Plash, where the Goat Rocks are now. Plash-Plash means “white spots.” Another was Wahkshum, west of Satus Pass. The others were Mount Adams, Mount Rainier, and Mount St. Helens. The Indians called all of them Pahto, which means “standing high.” Wahkshum and Plash-Plash were once known as Pahtoes also. I will call only Mount Adams Pahto in this story, for Rainier and St. Helens are not important in it.
Mt. Adams post card from the 1920′s.
For a while after she had broken the heads of Wahkshum and Plash-Plash, Pahto was happy. Every morning she was the first wife Sun spoke to. She was the tallest mountain around, and she was proud and strong. But she did not remain satisfied. She made up her mind to go across the river and take what she wanted from the mountains south of her.
Mt. St. Helens. ca. 1920′s
All this time the great was watching. He saw the wrong things Pahto was doing. He thought to himself, “There must be a law that any wrongdoing shall be punished.”
But punishment did not come yet. Pahto was so strong and tall that the other mountains said, “We’ll not do anything about what she has done. We’ll just let it go.”
But Klah-Klahnee-You call them the Three Sisters- said among themselves, ”Pahto is too proud and greedy. We must do something.”
Wy’east. Postcard, ca. 1920′s
That is how Klah-Klahnee caused Wyeast to fight Pahto. “If I get the best of her,” Wyeast promised them, “I’ll take all that she has stolen from us.”
But first Wyeast said to Pahto, in a nice way, “I want you to give back half of what you took from us. When the new people come, those who live in are part of the country should have the same food that people near you will have. I am asking you now, in a nice way, for only half of what you took from us. If you give it to me, the new people will have food.”
But Pahto was greedy. ” No, I shall never give you anything,” she said.
So they fought.
Paul Kane painting.
The Wyeast thought, “I’ll leave here and there a little bit of everything she took away-elk, deer, berries, I’ll put some here, some there. Pahto can’t have everything.” So Wyeast shared with the other mountains.
The Great Spirit saw all that happened. He did not try to help Pahto. ”She deserved that punishment,” he thought. “She deserved to lose her head because she destroyed the heads of Wahkshum and Plash-Plash. That will be the law. If people do wrong they will be punished in the same way.”
But after Pahto lost her head, she became mean. Whenever she became angry, she would send a big thunderstorm and much rain. In the winter she would send big snows, and in the spring there would be floods. All through the Yakama Valley there were lakes from the big floods. When the first people came to the earth, they lived only on the mountains.
The Great Spirit was watching. He saw all that happened. At last he said, “I shall make a new head for Pahto. Then she will not be so mean.”
So he sent down a big white eagle with his son, a red eagle, riding on his right shoulder. He put the two eagles on top of Pahto, to be her head. Then he said to her, “I am sending white eagle and his son to you, to be your head. Don’t have hard feelings toward the other mountains. And don’t flood the earth again. Remember that you are the daughter of the Great Spirit.
Pahto answered, “I am glad you have given me the eagles. I will forgive the other mountains, and I will not flood the country anymore.”
Then she raised her right hand and said, “I did not know that the Great Spirit is my father. I am sorry for all wrong things I have done.”
Then the Great Spirit replied, ” I gave the world to you mountains. I put you here and there, where I wanted you to be. Some of you I made high. Some I made low. You should have never destroyed Wahkshum and Plash-Plash.”
Source: (http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/th/read/FOLKLORE/2000-09/0968495643)
Editor of The Pioneer:
(Published in Skamania County Pioneer, January, 1946)
In your editorial “52 Years Old”, which you published on December 21st, last year, you stated among other things that mail came in to Stevenson around 52 years ago via boat from The Dalles or Portland. Permit me, please, to correct that statement. At that time the mail came to Stevenson via rowboat from Cascade Locks. The steamboat, then plying between Upper Cascade Locks and The Dalles, did not carry mail any more after the railroad on the Oregon side of the Columbia River was in operation, which was about in l880.
John Skaar and an unidentified man.
When I came here in 1883 there was no post office on the North side of the Columbia River between Cascade (now North Bonneville) and the White Salmon country. The first post office in that area was established in either 1891 or 1892, near the mouth of Nelson Creek about one mile East of Stevenson and was named “Nelson Creek”. I well remember how happy we settlers were at that time because we could from then on walk (part of the way over a trail) right to the store and post office. No longer was it necessary to make the very inconvenient and often dangerous trip by rowboat to Cascade Locks or to send or receive mail, or to buy groceries. A few years later a post office was established at Stevenson and the post office at Nelson Creek was discontinued. In 1893 the post office “Carson”” was established in Wind River Valley with a twice-a-week mail service and of course we settlers were very much pleased when that event took place.
Carson, as far as the lower valley flat is concerned, had two periods of settlement. Aside from the few very early actual settlers (the Greers, Monaghans, Esterbrooks and St.Martins) the first and temporary settlement took place between 1880 and 1886, at which time a sawmill was in operation where the town of Carson is now. As that sawmill had capacity of sawing 30,000 feet per day, many men were employed at times when the mill ran full time. This sawmill concern took the timber off of more than 1,000 acres and more than half of it they cut unlawfully from government owned land and they got away with it, but once they did not “get by with it” and that incident is worth telling.
It happened in 1886, a short time before they moved the mill to Underwood. There was a stand of timber half a mile west of the mill which they wanted yet. The homesteader who claimed that timber would not, and could not legally, sell the timber, but they were determined to have it and one day they sent in the fallers. The homesteader ordered them off of his land but they threatened to do him bodily harm if he did not leave them alone. The next morning when they came to work they found the road, where it crossed the line, fenced and inside stood the homesteader’s wife with a shotgun threatening to “shoot to kill” anyone who should attempt to cross the line — that helped, they left that timber alone after that. The fact that the shotgun was not loaded they, of course, did not know.
The second and permanent period of settlement started in 1887 when actual settlers took up the logged over land as homesteads. 
In September, 1887 when I moved onto my homestead there were, in all, eight families and five bachelors living in Wind River Valley. As
we could not make a living on the land at first we had to work out or make cordwood, drive it down Wind River once a year, ship to The Dalles by scow and trade it off for goods mostly, as cash money was very hard to get those days. With the turn of the century came a turn for the better to us settlers.
Pioneering had its charm as well as its hardships. We did not know anything about the modern improvements that the modern people now have and we were happy without them.
“Hidden in the glorious wildness like unmined gold.”- John Muir.
“Rock Creek Falls, ca. 1904″ author unknown
Listen to Rock Creek from July, 2014 here:
Warring gods, black snow and deities represented by mountains are central
Wy’east | © 2015 H a v e n
To the Yakama, Klickitat, Cowlitz, Multnomah, Puyallup, Nisqually and other Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest, peaks like Mt. St. Helens embodied supernatural and spiritual forces…”
“…. They didn’t sign away their rainy Eden or sell it, die in warfare, or move
Columbia River Gorge – view of Robin’s Island, Hamilton Mt. (left), Aldrich Butte (center), Table Mountain (right). (source: Oregon State Archives)
Read more of “She Who Watches — Tsagaglalal By Rick Rubin” here
“In August of 1873, a party of men from The Dalles made a horseback trip around Mount Hood with John Divers of Hood River as their guide. They knew the body of water as ‘Big Lake,’ and reached it by following Lake Branch of the Hood River to its source. Arriving at the lake during a typical Lost Lake rainstorm they proceeded to build lean-to shelters by stripping cedar bark from the great trees. On their third night at the lake, while lingering over an evening meal of trout, one of the Diver’s boys said: I wonder if that stuff on those trees would burn?’ and without thinking touched a long strand of dry moss with a red-hot stick he had just used to light his pipe. The moss burst into flame and quickly spread to other trees. They left without stopping to gather their camping gear. Wind swept the fire south and up what was later to become known as Huckleberry Mountain. The purple berries appeared in great number a few years after the fire.
The story remained a family secret for many years and Lost Lake remained ‘lost’ until its official discovery in 1880 by a group of 11 men from Hood River. Leaving town on August 18th they traveled south to the present site of Dee where they experienced their first adventure. In order to reach the west side of the river they had to fell a large tree and then crawl across to the other side. Their animals were hauled across the river with ropes. Reaching the upper West Fork of the Hood River they found the area completely burned over from a forest fire the year. The soft ash quickly filled their shoes and made travel difficult, but they did eventually reach a point high in the hills where, according to their calculations, the lake should have been. It was not there. One of the party said: We must be lost.’ ‘Oh, no,’ replied Smith, a competent surveyor, ‘we know exactly where we are. It’s like the Indian who said he wasn’t lost-his wig-warn was.’ Continuing southward the men finally reached the take and christened it Lost Lake as a result of Mr. Smith’s remark.”
There have long been several versions of how Pe Ell was named, none of which can be authenticated.
‘Main St. Pe Ell, looking north’ | ca.1906
One of those versions, and the more accepted one, is that the name comes from the attempts of the local Indians to pronounce the first name of an early French-Canadian settler, Pierre Charles, who was an ex-Hudson Bay employee. This version has it that the Indians could not pronounce Pierre, and their attempts turned it into Pe Ell. Another version is that P and L were the first initials for Pierre Charles and his Indian wife. Two words were made from the initials: “Pe Ell”. Another distinct version is that Charlie Pershell, a Frenchman, settled in the area and married an Indian maiden. The Indians found it difficult to sound out the “sh” in Pershell so it became Pe Ell. In 1897, the North Pacific Railway built a railroad depot in the town. In 1907 Pe Ell’s population was around 1,000 — larger than it is today. The rich agricultural and timber resources of the region attracted farmers, millworkers, and loggers. By 1909, the town had a bank, three dry goods stores, two general stores, three grocery stores, two barber shops, five saloons, four hotels, a newspaper, a blacksmith, and even an opera house.
Pe Ell was officially incorporated on March 9, 1906.
(excerpt from wikipedia)