“Benjamin has gone to his fathers.  We shall never see Young Eagle’s plume again!

“Boston tilicum, be our chief.  We have come to school.”

Mr. Mann turned to Gretchen.  Her young face was lovely that morning with sympathy.  He said in a low voice: 

“You see our work in life.  Do you understand?  Will you accept it?”

She understood his heart.

“I will do whatever you say.”

* * * * *

In 1859 a great Indian Reservation was established in what is known in Oregon as the Inland Empire of the Northwest.  It contained about two hundred and seventy thousand acres, agricultural land and timber-land.  The beautiful Umatilla River flows through it.  The agency now is near Pendleton, Oregon.  Thither the Umatillas were removed.

Marlowe Mann went there, and Gretchen as his young wife, and in their home Mrs. Woods for many years could have been heard singing hymns.

Their home stood for the Indian race, and the schoolmaster and his wife devoted themselves to the cause of Indian education.  Through the silent influence of Mr. Mann’s correspondence with the East, Indian civilization was promoted, and the way prepared for the peaceful settlement of the great Northwest.

Gretchen taught the Indians as long as she lived.  Often at evening, when the day’s work had been hard, she would take her violin, and a dream of music would float upon the air.  She played but one tune at last as she grew serenely old.  That tune recalled her early German home, the Rhine, her good father and mother, and the scenes of the great Indian Potlatch on the Columbia.  It was the Traumerei.

Her poetic imagination, which had been suppressed by her foster-mother in her girlhood, came back to her in her new home, and it was her delight to express in verse the inspirations of her life amid these new scenes, and to publish these poems in the papers of the East that most sympathized with the cause of Indian education.

The memory of Benjamin and the old chief of the Cascades never left her.  It was a never-to-be-forgotten lesson of the nobility of all men whose souls have the birthright of heaven.  Often, when the wild geese were flying overhead in the evening, she would recall Benjamin, and say, “He who guides led me here from the Rhine, and schooled me for my work in the log school-house on the Columbia.”

Such is not an overdrawn picture of the early pioneers of the Columbia and the great Northwest.

Jason Lee was censured for leaving his mission for the sake of Oregon—­for turning his face from the stars to the sun.  Whitman, when he appeared ragged at Washington, was blamed for having left his post.  The early pioneers of the great Northwest civilization lie in neglected graves.  We are now beginning to see the hand of Providence, and to realize how great was the work that these people did for their own country and for the world.