BUILDING THE NATCHESS PASS ROAD—[CONCLUDED.]

Allen's party left Steilacoom for this work July 30th, (1853), and was still at work on the 26th of September, when he wrote: "We will be through this week, having completed the western portion of the road." With twenty men in sixty days and over sixty miles to cut, he could not be expected to build much of a road.

The other party, under Kirtley, left Olympia, thirteen strong, July 19th, and was back again August 20th, and so could not have done very effective work on the east slope, as it would take at least a third of the time to make the trip out and back from their field of labor.

With a view of trying to settle the disputed points, I wrote to my old time friend, A. J. Burge, one of the Allen party, to get information from first hands, and have this characteristic reply:

This man I have known for over fifty years, and it touched me to think at the age bordering on eighty, he should get up out of a sick bed to comply with my request. He has written the truth, and some of the information we could get in no other way.

It seems that some people live a charmed life. Burge was shot by a would-be assassin a few miles out from Steilacoom over forty years ago, the bullet going through his neck, just missing the jugular vein.

While it is a complete digression, nevertheless, just as interesting here as elsewhere, so I will tell the story of this shooting to further illustrate conditions of early settlement on the Nisqually plains. The man with the thirteen cows and thirty calves mentioned elsewhere, lived near Burge. The most desperate character I ever knew, Charles McDaniel, also was a near neighbor, but a friend of Andy, as we used to call Burge. Both lost stock that could be traced directly to their neighbor, Wren, the man with the extra calves, but it was no use to prosecute him as a jury could not be procured that would convict. I had myself tried it in our court with the direct evidence of the branded hide taken from him, but a bribed juryman refused to convict. For a few years and for this district and with the class previously described as occupying the country adjacent to Steilacoom, there seemed to be no redress through our courts. Finally Burge and McDaniel waylaid their neighbor a few miles out from Steilacoom, tied him to a tree, and whipped him most unmercifully. I have never yet given my approval to mob law and never will, believing that it is better to suffer awhile, bide one's time until laws can be enforced, rather than to join in actions that will breed contempt for law and lead to anarchy; but, if ever there was a justifiable case of men taking the law in their own hands, this was one of them, and is introduced here to illustrate a condition of affairs that had grown up which seemed well nigh intolerable. After the whipping Wren was warned to leave the country, which he could not well do, tied to a tree as he was until third parties discovered and released him, but which he speedily did, although the wealthiest man in the county. No prosecutions followed, but in the lapse of time a colored man appeared at Steilacoom and spent much time hunting herbs on the prairies, until one day Burge was going home from Steilacoom in his wagon, when this centre shot was fired with the result as related. The colored man disappeared as mysteriously as he came, but everyone believed he had been hired to assassinate Burge and McDaniel, and as afterwards proven was the case.

But the trouble was not ended here. The lawless neighbor had gone, but not lawlessness. The old story that lawlessness begets lawlessness was again proven. McDaniel and others concluded that as Wren was gone, they could prey upon his land holdings, which for twenty-five years in Pierce County was no more than squatter's rights, in consequence of that intolerable claim of the Puget Sound Agricultural Company, mentioned elsewhere. At this, most of the community rebelled and warned McDaniel, but to no purpose, until finally he was shot down on the streets of Steilacoom, or rather a vacant lot in a public place, and lay for hours in his death struggles uncared for, and his pal murdered in the wagon that was carrying him to a scaffold. The two had been waylaid, but had escaped, only to meet their fate in a more public manner. Burge narrowly escaped a like fate at the hands of the mob, because of his near neighborship with McDaniel and of his participation with him in the first instance that had led up to the final catastrophe. But Burge was an honorable man, though rough in manner, yet just in his dealings, while McDaniel was a gambler and a blackleg of the very worst imaginable type. The Indian war had brought to the front many vicious characters, and the actions of some officials in high places had encouraged lawlessness, so, as a community, the nearby country round and about Steilacoom was scourged almost beyond belief.

And yet there were genuine pioneer settlements in not very far off regions of this storm center of lawlessness, where the law was as cheerfully obeyed as in any old and well settled community, where crime was scarcely known, and where family ties were held as sacred as any place on earth, and where finally the influence spread over the whole land and the whole community leavened.

By these incidents related it will be seen that pioneers were neither all saints nor all sinners, but like the older communities had their trials other than the supposed discomforts incident to pioneer life.

The reader may not have noticed that Burge in his letter mentions that there are still trees (he means logs), yet to be seen with the three notches cut in them, where the immigrant road had been cut. I had forgotten the third notch, but it all comes back to me now that he has mentioned it. These logs that we bridged up to and cut the notches in for the wheels in most cases had to have the third notch in the center to save the coupling pole or reach from catching on the log, especially where the bridging did not extend out far from the log to be crossed. Oftentimes the wagon would be unloaded, the wagon box taken off, the wagon uncoupled and taken over the obstruction or down or up it, as the case might be, to be loaded again beyond.

It will be noticed by Mr. Himes' letter that their party came all the way up the canyon and crossed the Natchess River 68 times while I crossed it but thirty odd times. At or near the 32d crossing, the road workers took to the table land and abandoned the lower stretch of the canyon, and through that portion the train which Mr. Himes refers to was compelled to cut their own road for a long stretch. But that part reported cut was certainly a hard road to travel, and we had to work more or less all the way down the mountain; as Colonel E. J. Allen, who is yet alive, quaintly put it in a recent letter: "Assuredly the road was not sandpapered." I should say not. I think the Colonel was not much of a teamster and had never handled the goad stick over the road or elsewhere, as I did, else he would be more sympathetic in responses to outcries against the "execrable shadow of a road."

Nelson Sargent, mentioned by Mr. Himes, still lives and is a respected, truthful citizen, but he certainly did take great risks in leading that first train of immigrants into that trap of an uncut road up the Natchess River. The whole party narrowly escaped starvation in the mountains and Sargent a greater risk of his neck at the hands of indignant immigrants while in the mountains, if we may believe the reports that came out at the time from the rescued train. However, I never believed that Sargent intended to deceive, but was over-sanguine and was himself deceived, and that Kirtley's failure to continue in the field was the cause of the suffering that followed.

Allen sent 300 pounds of flour to Wenass and a courier came to Olympia, whereupon "Old Mike Simmons," Bush, Jones, and others, forthwith started with half a ton of flour, onions, potatoes, etc., and met them beyond the outskirts of the settlement. All that was necessary those days for a person to get help was to let it become known that some one was in distress and there would always be willing hands without delay; in fact, conditions almost approached the socialistic order of common property as to food, by the voluntary actions of the great, big hearted early settlers, as shown in other instances related, as well as in this. God bless those early settlers, the real pioneers of that day.

The Indian Leschi, who we have seen contributed to the work, utilized the road to make his escape with seventy of his people, after his disastrous defeat at the hands of the volunteers and United States troops in March, 1856, to cross the summit on the snow, so that after all, in a way, he received a benefit from his liberality in times of peace.

Two years after the opening of the road, the Hudson Bay Company sent a train of three hundred horses loaded with furs, from the interior country to Fort Nisqually, with a return of merchandise through the same pass, but never repeated the experiment.