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The Mt. Adams Sun, Bingen, WA., April 3, 1952, page 1
Includes portrait

PIONEER’S VIOLIN NOW SILENT; “CODY” CHAPMAN DIES MARCH 20

For six months Cody Chapman’s fingers have been too stiff to play his violin. But his few remaining pioneer friends will never forget how his nimble bow led them to dance the “Strulegin Walse” and “listen to the Mocking Bird” for two thirds of a century.
At the Bingen home of Mrs. Kate Lane, his sister, there is a faded entry in the Bible; Courtland William Chapman, April 24, 1868, East Portland. Between that date and last Thursday morning, March 20, a single life spanned the history of this area.
In 1876, his Connecticut father Noah Chapman returned to Portland after several years of hewing a homestead out of Camas Prairie and persuaded his much reluctant wife to move to Glenwood. At Husum the horrified family got their first taste of the wilderness when a pack-horse which carried the family cook stove was swept to its death in the flooded Rattlesnake.

GLENWOOD

Only 14 people lived in the valley, five of them veterans of Indian Wars. Life was rugged, and 2000 sheep which Noah Chapman tended for their owner in Portland did not simplify their hardship. Early in January of 1881, seven feet of snow fell in three days and was followed by rains which lasted a week.
Rail fences across the valley were covered with water, and the frantic efforts of Cody’s father to shovel the roof of the log sheep barn ended when the building collapsed. In the spring only 800 sheep remained alive. Johnny Conboy and 13 year old Cody salvaged the wool from the dead sheep.
Already young Cody owned his beautiful violin and the silk scarf with which he handled it is still carefully tucked in the old case. Hands that tried to tug a lynx from the throat of a sheep learned to bring music from the violin.

INDIANS

Thousands of Indians made a summer rendezvous of the valley. In Mr. Chapman’s own words, “They started coming early in the spring to gather cams roots, wild onions, sour wheat, wapato, hazel nuts, wild crab apples, cranberries, black-berries and swamp huckleberries which grew in the valley.”
Late in the summer more came on their way to the huckleberry fields on Mt. Adams and to fish and trade along the Columbia. A particular friend was the Indian doctor Harmilk. When Harmilk and Cody were hunting horses in unsettled Trout Lake valley, the boy became very hungry. Harmilk collected three small weeds which they both ate. Their hunger disappeared and even after they reached home did not return for some time.

MEMOIRS

Mr. Chapman’s keen memory produced his memoirs about a year ago. In them he describes the frenzied burial dancing on Memaloose, threshing grain under the feet of running horses, crossing the Columbia on slush-ice waist deep to get a doctor, and simple things like making a broom from a three-inch thick cherry trunk.
Mr. Chapman was proud to call himself a Jack of all trades. During his long life he made his living breaking horses, riding herd, logging, carpentry and masonry. He did not measure his life in hours worked and dollars earned, but in the pleasure he found in such things as his violin.
He was a plain-spoken man whose speech implied more than his words said. One of his last requests was: “If you play my violin, always use gut strings instead if wire.”