The Last Survivor of Collins' Expedition
Robert Stevenson reflects on a grueling 1860 forest clearing journey and the vanished fort on the White River.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
I think I am the last living member of Capt. Collins' lemon expedition which in 1860 cut its way through the forest from Seattle to the other side of the mountains, said Robert Stevenson, a hardy miner on the Similkameen in British Columbia, now stopping at the Occidental. I went out today to Collins' old ranch on White River, where we rendezvoused for the start. It was the first time I have been there since the day we left thirty-three years ago. I could scarcely recognize the surroundings. There were good traces of the old fort on whose parapet Collins had mounted a cannon, but the gun was gone. Many a good story have I heard Collins tell about his fights with the up-river savages. He used to load his old cannon with rivets, sawteeth, scrap iron and all sorts of missiles, and after laying low for the redskins let them have a whole broadside when they were passing the fort in their canoes. I recollect he said that once he got three canoes all in a line and blew them all to pieces at one shot. At one place near Snoqualmie Pass he showed me where he had hung seven of the marauders.
“I used to load his old cannon with rivets, sawteeth, scrap iron and all sorts of missiles, and after laying low for the redskins let them have a whole broadside when they were passing the fort.”
Robert Stevenson’s account of the 1860 expedition highlights the violent dispossession of Indigenous lands during Seattle's early settlement. The 'fort' he describes on the White River was a site of frontier warfare that fundamentally reshaped the region's geography, a history still grappled with in modern land acknowledgments.
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