Historic Hood River
“The Coming of the White Man”
9-21-2016
Notes
I don’t believe in sanitizing history, and apparently the City of Portland Parks Bureau takes a similar view. When I saw this postcard from the era of “manifest destiny” and “the noble savage” I was sure this sculpture was languishing in a warehouse full of culturally inappropriate statues somewhere. But you can see, from this post, “The Coming of the White Man” is still on display in Portland’s Washington Park, though apparently not very easy to find.
charlott
The one Indian looks like he took a white man’s bullet in the side…..
Buzz
"Political Correctness" has never been my forte, but I don’t see why this sculpture would be deemed as culturally inappropriate.
Ralph
Why? What does a "White man’s bullet" look like? It might be a casting flaw.
Arlen Sheldrake
while I don’t spend a lot of time in Washington Park……you now have me on quest as I have lived just a few blocks away from the Park for 45 years…..major project now underway to replace the open air drinking water lakes in the Park…
L.E.
My son is doing construction work in the area of WA. Park. I will tell him to do a walk about during his lunch break.
Native Americans with the most guns and the most horses, practiced their own Manifest Destiny.
The most famous Native American woman in history was probably Sacagawea and she was merely a slave.
L.E.
I just finished a little book printed in 1853 and attributed to Peter Skene Ogden. "Traits of American Indian Life and Character". It gives a good viewpoint from the time he spend in this area.
L.E.
I guarantee that trapper and fur trader Peter Skene Ogden writes with better grammar and spelling than I do.
Lesa Hanners
What is that in the one Indians hand a war club?! If so that is an honest rendering, for the natives certainly didn’t greet the whites with gifts of flowers.
I lost my 4th grt. grandmother, Hannah Willis-Clark to the killing knife of a Tillamook Indian in 1855. She had survived the horrors of cholera on the Oregon Trail, to die three months later at the hands of a murderer. She was an old woman, the wife of Rev. Israel Ludlow Clark, who was absent at the time of her death because he was a circuit riding preacher. The Indian, Eskacuga by name, a member of Chief Kilchis’ band of Tillamook Indians, knifed her and her son, Dr. James Harvey Clark to death and with the help of his two squaws, placed them on their beds, stripped the cabin of its contents, and burned it down over them.
The Clark’s lived on the old Nestucca wagon road, leading from Grand Ronde to Tillamook. Hannah being a good christian woman had fed Eskacuga and his squaws earlier in the day. He seeing a keg of what he thought was whiskey demanded it, but was told it was not whiskey but vinegar. This was the reason given by him for their deaths. Upon his capture, he said he went back in the night for the whiskey. He never made it to trial, but was lynched by a group of whites in Lafayette, where he had been taken for trial. Not long after, a party of armed whites road over the trail from Lafayette to Tillamook where they called out and lynched another Indian, presumable for wearing a vest owned by my 4th grt. grandfather, but in fact the leader of the gang of whites wanted the Indians wife for his own.
The oral tradition of my family, was that Hannah and her son had been killed by Indians, but I was able to prove it, and so much more, for the Oregonian of 1855 was full of the stories of this tragedy, and the lynching of Eskacuga. I also found accounts written by early Tillamook historian, Warren Vaughn who was an eyewitness to these events.
Arthur
One source describes the object in his hand as a "tree branch." I’m not sure what the symbolism is, but I don’t think it’s a club.
DAVID L JOHNSON
If half my people died from white man’s diseases I would of been out for some revenge myself.