Democratic Sentinel, Volume 10, Number 32, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 September 1886 — Coffin Rock, Oregon. [ARTICLE]

Coffin Rock, Oregon.

About fifty miles above Astoria -we passed the far-famed Coffin Rock, the indirect cause of the great Yakima war of 1856. It is a huge granite stone in the edge of the river, on the Washington side, and was used from time immemorial as a place of burial by the Indians. It rises about two hundred feet above the water, is several hundred feet in length, covered with a dense forest of pines and fir trees at its base, and on top is bare and broken with immense fissures. A single fir tree stands on its point like a solitary, sentinel above the resting place of the Indian warrior. The IndiansSrere-ac-customed years ago to bring their dead here for interment. The corpse was placed in the canoe used by the departed in life, and at his side, his bows and arrows, his pipe and blankets, and

all he owned on earth, and then he was laid away in some cleft of the rock. Afterward the friends of the departed would return to bring supplies of dried salmon and other edibles which they imagined the dead needed in the hunting grounds of the Great Spirit. Finally the sacrilegious pale-face, being in need of canoes for mundane purposes, found it more convenient to borrow those of the dead braves than to make his own, and acted accordingly, dumping the bones of the departed chiefs into the crevices of the rock, and wearing off their blankets. This, of course, incensed the read man, and finally brought on the Yakima massacre and subsequent war.— Letter to San Francisco Chronicle.