European and American explorers, traders, missionaries, and other travelers made the earliest written observations of the region’s Native Americans. Their recorded impressions of the Native Americans were filtered through their own cultural biases and beliefs.
Meriwether Lewis and William Clark led the Corps of Discovery down the Columbia River to the Pacific Ocean in 1805. The 33-member expedition returned up river in 1806. From March 31st until April 6th they moored in the vicinity of Lady Island. Both Lewis and Clark kept journals recording observations about geography, flora and fauna, and Indian cultures.
Meriwether Lewis’s Journal Entries
The women of these people pierce the cartelage of the nose in which they wear various ornaments … most of the women brad their hair which hanges in two tresses one hanging over each ear.
— April 9, 1806
The men usually cew their hair in two parsels which like the braded tresses of the female hang over each ear in front of the sholder, and gives and additional width to the head and face so much admired by them. these cews are usually formed with throngs of dressed Otterskin crossing each other and not roled in our manner arrond the hair. — April 11, 1806
Lewis’s description of the Camas-Washougal area
Lewis’s description of Cascade Indians’ dwellings
Herbert Beaver’s view of the Native Americans
As an Anglican chaplain at the Hudson Bay Company’s Fort Vancouver from 1936 to 1938, Beaver came into contact with the Chinook, Cascades, and Klickitat Indians who visited and lived near the fort. His negative interpretations of Native American culture and life emerged from the moralistic English social and power hierarchy from which he came. Beaver’s rigid views on morality and religion eventually caused conflict between him and Fort Vancouver’s Chief Factor, John McLoughlin. As a result, Beaver left the fort.
Indeed, it is impossible to conceive of any descendants of that being, who was originally created in the image of God, to be sunk lower in the scale of humanity, of which, if I may so describe them, the[y] are the very excrement. Squalid and indolent, they would starve and go naked, both which they are frequently on the verge of doing, and would suffer famine and nakedness, were it not for the resources of the Company. They have lost the custom of clothing themselves with skins … they are depended, with the exception of fish, on a supply of powder for food. Agriculture is in toto unknown among them …. — Beaver in a March 10, 1837 letter
