Clackamas County – More than 7′ Tall
INDIAN SKELETONS ARE UNCOVERED; DEMAND FOR MODERN CONVENIENCES REVEALS SEPULCHRE OF TRIBE THAT IS GONE
GLADSTONE ONCE BURYING GROUND
Dead Didn’t Have Gravestones But March Of Progress Has Found Out Resting Place
The dead in their gravestones laugh As they read between the “born” and the “died” Of the mouldering epitaph.
When Charles Hamilton Musgrove, a struggling newspaper reporter, wrote the lines quoted above down there in Kentucky, he little thought that they might apply to something doing, or long done, way out in Oregon, “Where rolls the Oregon and hears no sound save its own dashings. Yet the dead are there.”
Down in Gladstone on Thursday – Gladstone, that city virtually made by H. E. Cross, who many years ago was the best baseball catcher in all these parts, and is today one of the best lawyers hereabouts – the bones of a race, about exterminated, were uncovered. They were digging a ditch in the good town of Gladstone in which to lay pipes for water, for Gladstone is soon to have a modern water system, when they came upon the bones of men and women, who once owned this whole country. Gladstone, in fact, was once a graveyard for the Clackamas Indians.
O. E. Freytag told a reporter of the Morning Enterprise that his home on Arlington Street and Chicago Avenue had once been part of a great Indian cemetery. He said that several years ago when he spaded the ground for a garden, he found the skeletons of many of the braves of the long ago. He found rare beads and many other trinkets of the tribes that owned the land.
The men digging Thursday for the water plant found the skeleton of a giant. The man must have been more than seven feet tall. But he died. And then the skeletons of women and children were found. All of them lay in the same plot, and all of them had been something once. However, there were no tombstones or anything like that, and these aborigines, who died, thought they were going to sleep for a long time. It is doubtful if they thought their bones would be disturbed. At any rate, they did not erect tombstones to point them out.
Somehow the whole thing recalls those lines of Mr. Musgrove. One may think of them as he may-
The dead in their gravestones laugh As they read between the “born” and the “died”.
- Morning enterprise., June 14, 1912, Image 1