The Letters of Whitfield Chase

Here are the letters written throughout the 1850s. They follow Whitfield from New York to Oregon via the Oregon Trail, then up to Washington, "Vancouver's Island", San Francisco and back to Vancouver Island.

Of note is Whitfield's description of travelling from the coast inland to the gold fields: "In the first place by 150 miles of Ocean navigation in a frail canoe and then again for the same number of miles through a country the most wild imaginable, infested with hostile savages and up the rapid current of a stream whose navigation is often interrupted by rapids by cataracts and by canyons where the swollen river rolling in a broad channel becomes suddenly contracted and forced through a bed worn in the solid rocks which rise like a wall of masonry, perpendicular for hundreds of feet towards the clouds, almost shutting out the light of heaven and seeming to overhang the turbid waters below which rush with fearful velocity through these frightful chasms whirling, eddying, foaming and dashing with a roar that is deafening with such fury and violence against these ramparts of granite as would dash into ten thousand atoms any boat or canoe which unfortunately should be caught within the grasp of the mad waves...." Whew!