The Cascade Massacre

Margaret Iman’s (1834-1924) story is writ in stone is a small, eponymous cemetery on the backside of Stevenson, a river town on the Washington side of the Columbia as she rips a gorge through the Cascades:

Born at Tippecanoe Co., Ind.
1852 Missouri to The Dalles on horse back
Carried motherless babe 500 miles
Took raft downriver to Cascades
1853 met and married Felix G. Iman
Survived Indian War of Mar. 26, 1856
Indians burned home
Had 16 children, 9 boys, 7 girls

Her husband, Felix Iman’s (1828-1902), slab is next to hers. Together they sketch a compelling pioneer story.1

Born DeKalb Co., Mo.
Arrived at Cascades by ox team in 1852
Married Margaret Windsor 1853
1854 built & owned steamer “Wasco”
1855 donation land claim of 323 acres
1858 worked on upper Cascades block house
Built & owned 2 sawmills
Built 1st school. For short time saloon owner.

Aside from a minor error, it hints at the enormous effort the Iman’s put into wresting a home from the forest. Frank, it happens, “was born 24 November 1828 in Monroe, Illinois,” according to “Iman Family Notes: ‘Margaret’ (A Windsor Perspective).”2 It wasn’t Frank who came from DeKalb Co., but rather Margaret, who left for Oregon from there.

It wasn’t an easy departure. Margaret, it turns out, was a runaway. She was born a Windsor, whose mother died when she was about ten years old and was subsequently raised by an archetypically cruel stepmother. By the time she was seventeen, her family was living in DeKalb Co., and by the time she was seventeen she’d decided she’d had it and ran away from home, joining a wagon train headed for Oregon. Her father went after her, dragged her back, and lost her again when he went looking for a river crossing. The second time he let her go. She was subsequently lost to the Windsor family until a descendant in Kansas put an add in the Ladies Home Companion in the 1920s asking if anyone knew what happened to her? One of Margaret’s children, Louis, chanced upon the magazine in a Vancouver, WA barber shop and his wife contacted the folks in Kansas.

The Indian War mentioned on her tombstone actually lasted longer than March 26, although not much. It’s frequently called the Cascade or Fort Rains Massacre and was part of a general Indian war of resistance to the white invaders known as the Cayuse War, of which, probably, the most famous incident was the euphonious Battle Of Seattle. The Imans played a not insignificant role in the events, and their interpretation of what happened differs considerably from the official record. According to James Windsor,3 who refers to the incident as the Yakima attack, the wrong Indians were punished. Sheridan claims4 that the Yakimas forced or coerced the local Cascade Indians into joining the attack, but the Iman’s claim otherwise. Sheridan left us a list of the settlers and soldiers killed in the uprising:

" I append a list of killed and wounded: Killed — George Griswold, shot in leg; B. W. Brown and wife, killed at the sawmill, bodies found stripped naked in Mill creek ; Jimmy Watkius, driving team at mill ; Henry Hagar, shot in Watkins' house, body burned ; Jake Kyle, German boy ; Jacob White, sawyer at mill ; Bonrbon, half-breed, died on the Maty going to The Dalles ; James Sinclair, of the H. B. Company, Walla Walla ; Dick Turpin, colored cook on steamer Alary; Norman Palmer, driving team at mill ; Calderwood, working at mill ; three United States soldiers, names unknown ; George Watkins, lived four days ; Jacob Roush, carpenter, lived six days. Wounded — Fletcher Murphy, arm; P. Snooks, boy, leg; J. Lindsay, shoulder; Jesse Kempton, shoulder; Tommy Price, thigh ; two .soldiers, U. S. Army ; H. Kyle, German ; Moffat, railroad hand; johnny Chance, leg; ]\I. Bailey, leg and arm; J. Algin, slightly'."5

Sheridan doesn’t supply us with a list of Indians hanged, but a loose sheet of paper in the Oregon Historical Society’s files offers these names: “Chief Chenoweth, Capt. Jo, Tecomcoc or Tecomeoc, Tsy, Sim-sasselas or Sim-Lasselas, Tumalth or Tunwalth (other spellings), Old Skien, Kenwake (sentenced but reprieved on scaffold), and 4 Finger Johnny.”6 In Margaret Iman’s oral memoirs she describes the hanging of the Indians: She recalled they were “hanged on a tree about one mile from where we lived. Some of them, when asked to talk, shook their heads and put the noose around their own necks. Others laughed at those who were hanging.”7

Felix Iman’s schooner, Wasco, also particpated in the repulse. Assigned the task of hauling troops from Portland to The Dalles, the Wasco came under fire from Indians collected where White Salmon is now, across the river from Hood River; but the river is sizable and their balls had no effect. The third steamer to ply the waters between Cascade Locks and The Dalles, she subsequently returned to her trade, albeit for a short period of time. By 1857 she was out of business on the river. A newspaper advertisement from, probably, the 1860s offered passage between Bellingham, WA and Seattle on the “fast and commodious” steamer Wasco for $1; although I can’t be sure it’s the same steamer Wasco.

We can’t reasonably expect Sheridan, who was responsible for the protection of the whites along the river, to admit to hanging the wrong people. Nonetheless, this long quote from James Windsor describes the Iman experience:

Windsor points to this quote to help clarify the situation [of the Indian attack of March 26, 1856]: “I read the settlers in Skamania Co. at the Cascades had been expecting an indian attack for some time. Some of the friendly local indians had been warning the settlers that unfriendly tribes were planning an imminent attack, and for this reason Felix decided to build a new house closer to the river in case the family had to escape by boat. The original Iman house had been farther back from the river by about a mile. Of course no one knew when the attack would come and all were suprised by it. The local indians who were hung had been on friendly terms to the white locals. Indian Jim was one of the ones hung, and he was a good friend of Felix. They were of the Cascade tribe. The motive behind the hangings was anger and racism. Quite a few of the white settlers had lost relatives besides homes in the attack and there was some kind of revenge wanted, and as the Yakimas had all returned back to their land, the Cascades were the only Indians to take revenge one, even though they were innocent. Of course most white people at that time did not like Indians and did not trust them, so of course most of the locals were none too squeamish to get rid of them. Margaret claimed she witnessed the hanging, or at least at some point she claimed to have seen them hanging. Felix was away at the time and when he returned a day or two later he was sorry to hear about the hangings and told the locals that those Indians were all innocent and it was wrong to hang them. At least that is how history has left the story for us. There were also some sordid details a few days after the Yakima attack. There was a friendly indian and his wife and children and they were travelling by boat on the Columbia River near Shepherd's Point. It is said that Samuel Hamilton with some other local men, but not Felix, captured these Indians and their children and raped the woman and then killed them all, children included, in a very cruel way, by strangling them and chopping off their heads. Lt. Philip Sheridan (he later to be famous in the Civil War) was there serving as the commander of the force that had chased off the Yakimas, and Sheridan claimed it was Hamilton and some others whom he named go after the two indians who were then found murdered shortly thereafter. But of course this was hushed up and Sheridan declined to press charges and consequently never spoken of again, so no one prosecuted Hamilton and the others, but it is a sordid story and a sad comment on the history of the area.”8

The sorry story in my research of similar graveyard histories is that it is always the same: the perpetrators rarely see punishment which instead is meted out to the handiest person. Blame is always collective.


1 I’ve covered most of this story in previous blogs, so it may seem familiar. To an extent, I’ve plagiarized myself. The new material primarily concerns the “massacre.”
2 James Windsor, Draft, Iman Family Notes (with footnotes and editing by Steve Iman)[http://www.imanfamily.net/skamania/windsor.html].
3 Ibid.
4 Mea culpa for not having noted the references for this information. A case of casually reading through the Net for other information, reading this, and filing it away in my memory bank only to not be able to find the source when I went looking again. You’d think I’d learn.
5 Philip Sheridan as recorded in History of the Pacific Northwest: Oregon and Washington.
6 OHS 929.379272; R 179 cem. Ramsey, D. G., Skamania Co. WA Burial Lists.7 Another lost reference. I searched and searched but have yet to refind this memoir online, but I know it’s there. Trust me.
8 James Windsor; Op Cit.

Lift that Barge, Tote that Bale Working Skiffs

Cove Cemetery (Cove, OR)
It’s tempting, when considering maritime motifs on cemetery markers, to hark back to our liquid origins and suggest that boats on tombstones recall ancient associations with the water, but I don’t think that’s the case. Certainly, burning bodies on the banks of the Ganges before floating them down river smacks of primordial memory, but I think that water-craft images on Oregonian tombstones are on a par with other vehicular images, which fall into two rough classes: occupational and recreational. You’re either working that boat, or you’re drifting around dreaming.

Tombstone vehicular images, whether of wheeled, water, or air craft, are almost invariably masculine symbols. Occasionally they’re shared with a spouse, especially if one considers RVs, but primarily they’re a man’s world. Women might engrave their monuments with flowers, pets, or a piano (guys get guitars), but men are more likely to carve an image of something that moved. There are occupational images of things other than planes, trains, and automobiles — loggers get represented out here often and I’ve seen a printing press on one stone once — but there’s something primal about boys and things that move, be it skateboards or jet planes. Maybe it’s testosterone: tombstone images of big pieces of equipment are a way for a guy to display his cajones to the world forever. But movement is important. You don’t see images of desks or sales counters or drill presses or labs or cubicles or die stamps on tombstones. It’s train engines, tractor-combines, bow picking gill-netters, or 747s. If it doesn’t move, it’s not worth telling eternity about.

Oaklawn Memorial Park (Corvallis, OR)
Working boats tend to require bigger water than pleasure craft. There aren’t a whole lot of working boats on inland rivers and lakes, save for guide boats and a scattering of minor occupations such as catfish noodlers and frog catchers. A lot of the working boats found on tombstones are military craft, which, I suppose, is a category all of its own. I’m no expert on naval ships, they’re all destroyers to me, though I’ve had two engravings of the aircraft carrier USS Lexington. Naval personnel, of course, are drawn from the entire country and I don’t know if there’s any statistically significant increase of personnel drawn from coastal versus inland communities, but I rather doubt it. In any event, one would expect to find engravings of military craft following normal patterns of personalization over the entire country. I would further suspect that tombstone personalization might be ubiquitous but not uniform across the country; although I have nothing upon which to base that presumption.

River View Cemetery (Portland, OR)
In the set of photos accompanying this post, therefore, there is nothing that geo-locates a tombstone image of a Navy vessel, and to a certain extant the same is true of most of the other commercial craft depicted on local memorial, although there are a few boats pictured which could come from few other places. They aren’t exclusive to the Oregon Territory, but they’re otherwise uncommon and restricted to specialized areas.

Offhand, I’d guess that commercial cargo ships and tankers, while theoretically drawing their work force from the entire country just as the Navy does, in reality share a degree of crossover with the fishing community. There is to an extent an oceanside community that enjoys connections among itself separate from the world a few miles inland, and members of which transfer from one type of vessel to another as opportunity arises. Or, perhaps, as prudence demands. That and the on again/off again, nature of the shipping business — one tends to work several months or years straight and then take several months off — means that it’s easier to maintain seaside employment if one lives close to the sea to begin with; and consequently one is more likely to find engravings of commercial craft in seaside communities than inland. Axiomatic, one might say.

Woodbine/Green Mountain Cemetery (Rainier, OR)
Of the pictured vessels, several are of interest and a couple are very place-specific. Woodbine cemetery, where the image of the tugboat is found, perches above the Columbia River at Rainier, OR, halfway between Portland and the coast, a highly likely place for a tugboat captain to live. Tugs ply both the Columbia River and the open ocean, dragging barges around the world; though I imagine that different vessels, not to mention crews, do different tasks, and it’s not a matter of one tug fits all. Unlike fishing boats, the miscellaneous cargo ships depicted on tombstones are probably not the ship owners proud portraits, as the stones are generally more modest than large ship owners might desire, and more likely represent career vessels. It’s hard to tell just looking at a stone.

Wind River Memorial Cemetery (Carson, WA)
The log tender from a headstone at the small river town of Carson, WA, though, is indubitably a place-specific working boat, evident from the scene shown along with the craft. The body of water is neither ocean nor river nor even a lake (note the leaping fish) but rather a mill pond where logs are stored until processed. Almost miniature little tugs push and pull logs and rafts around these pond, or at least did so in times past, when life was flusher; and that’s what’s memorialized on the stone.

Iman Cemetery (Stevenson, WA)
But it’s the image of the small steamer “Wasco,” in the tiny, eponymous Iman Cemetery on the edge of the river hamlet of Stevenson, WA, that is not only place-specific, but historic, as well. The Wasco was built by one Felix Iman (the eponym) in 1854 and was the third steamer to run between Cascade Locks and The Dalles on the Columbia River. I suggest that non-natives search Google Images for the “Cascades of the Columbia” and “Cascade Locks” to get an idea of what kind of country we’re talking about. The Columbia slices a gorge straight through a snowcapped mountain range here, the Cascades, beginning at The Dalles and ending at the outskirts of Portland. Cascade Locks is in the middle. It’s a world-class chunk of geography.

The first wagon train of immigrants came through the gorge in 1843, making the Wasco an early economic venture for the white population. Iman quickly sold the Wasco and went into the saloon business, from which he immediately exited, as well. Both Felix and his wife, Margaret Windsor Iman have modern markers with brief histories etched into the stones. Hers is particularly dramatic:

Born at Tippecanoe Co., Ind.
1852 Missouri to The Dalles on horse back
Carried motherless babe 500 miles
Took raft down river to Cascades
1853 met and married Felix G. Iman
Survived Indian War of Mar. 26, 1856
Indians burned home
Had 16 children, 9 boys, 7 girls

That was not the half of it. (Notes on her life from an oral transcript of, perhaps, c. 1915 are available on line.)

The Indian attack which she mentions was part of a general uprising in 1856 as a result of a broken treaty on the part of the whites (I know you may find that hard to believe). During the fray the Wasco came under fire from Indians collected where White Salmon is now, across the river from Hood River; but the river is sizable and their balls had no effect

Earlier this month (on the 11th to be exact) I wrote a bit about the Palmer/Bell grave site, on the Washington State side of the Bridge of the Gods (modest name, no?) Norman Palmer, who is buried there with his sister, perished in the same uprising.

Eventually, the Indians were subdued and nine of them hanged, including one who was, according to Mrs. Iman, definitely not guilty; but revenge is often not meted out to the perpetrators of a crime, nor is it necessary. Any Indian will/would do. Mrs. Iman wrote of the hanging that they were “hanged on a tree about one mile from where we lived. Some of them, when asked to talk, shook their heads and put the noose around their own necks. Others laughed at those who were hanging.”

In any event, with the Wasco pulling barges of troops from Portland, the whites won and the steamer subsequently returned to her trade, albeit for only a short period of time. By 1857 she was pretty much out of business on the river. A later newspaper advertisement, from probably the 1860s, offered passage between Bellingham, WA, and Seattle on the “fast and commodious” steamer Wasco for $1; although I can’t be sure it’s the same steamer Wasco. Good price, though.

Lift that barge,
Tote that bale;
Get a little drunk,
And land in jail.

Woodbine/Green Mountain Cemetery (Rainier, OR)