Rensselaer Union, Volume 10, Number 47, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 August 1878 — 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 just in the edge of the nver, 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 yards 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 upon its point like a solitary sentinel above the resting-place of the Indian warrior. The Indians were accustomed 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 bow 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 danoes for mundane purposes, found wlmore 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 red man, and finally brought on the Yakima massacre and subsequent war.— Cor. San Francisco Chronicle.