Joe Meek - Mountain Man and Trapper

Father said to the chief, "I want one of your daughters for my wife." The chief said, "You cannot have one of my daughters. You have a Nez Perce girl already for your wife. Spalding says it is wicked to have more than one wife." My father said, "I know the white man's book also. I will preach a sermon to you and give you a message from the Bible that Spalding has not told you about."

Father preached a sermon to the Indians in their own tongue and told them how Solomon had a thousand wives and how most of the old bible characters had as many wives as they could support, so the chief said to father, "If the white man's Book of Heaven says it is all right to have many wives, you can have one of my daughters," and father selected one of his daughters, a girl 15 years old.

Very few Indian women who lived with white men lived to be very old. When the settlers came the white men were ashamed of their Indian wives and abandoned them and took white girls for wives, buy my father loved my mother and always lived with her.

She died on March 5, 1900. She was 80 years old when she died.

Robert Newell, who had joined Captain Sublette's company when father did, married my mother's sister, so father and Newell were not only friends and comrades but were brothers-in-law.

My uncle, Rober Newell, was born in Ohio in 1807. He died at Lewiston, Idaho, in 1869. My father and he and Caleb Wilkins, brought the first wagons overland to Fort Walla Walla in 1840.

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Excerpted from Oregon Folks by Fred Lockley (1927) Knickerbocker Press, New York

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