DOUGLAS, WYOMING.
At Douglas, Wyoming, 1,177½ miles out from The Dalles, the people at first seemed reluctant to assume the responsibility of erecting a monument, everybody being "too busy" to give up any time to it, but were willing to contribute. After a short canvass, $52 was contributed, a local committee appointed, and an organized effort to erect a monument was well in hand before we drove out of the town.
I here witnessed one of those heavy downpours like some I remember in '52, where, as in this case, the water came down in veritable sheets, and in an incredibly short time turned all the slopes into roaring torrents and level places into lakes; the water ran six inches deep in the streets in this case, on a very heavy grade the whole width of the street.
I quote from my journal:
"Camp No. 95, July 12.—Odometer 1,192. We are camped under a group of balm trees in the Platte bottom near the bridge at the farm of a company, Dr. J. M. Wilson in charge, where we found a good vegetable garden and were bidden to help ourselves, which I did, with a liberal hand, to a feast of young onions, radishes, beets and lettuce enough for several days."
PUYALLUP-TACOMA-SEATTLE.
This refreshing shade and these spreading balms carried me back to the little cabin home in the Puyallup Valley, 1,500 miles away, where we had for so long a period enjoyed the cool shades of the native forests, enlivened by the charms of songsters at peep of day, with the dew dripping off the leaves like as if a shower had fallen over the forest. Having now passed the 1,200-mile mark out from The Dalles with scarcely the vestige of timber life except in the snows of the Blue Mountains, one can not wonder that my mind should run back to not only the little cabin home as well as to the more pretentious residence nearby; to the time when our homestead of 160 acres, granted to us by the Government, was a dense forest—when the little clearing was so isolated we could see naught else but walls of timber around us—timber that required the labor of one man twelve years to remove from a quarter-section of land—of the time when trails only reached the spot; when, as the poet wrote:
"Oxen answered well for team,
Though now they'd be too slow—";
when the semi-monthly mail was eagerly looked for; when the Tribune would be re-read again and again before the new supply came; when the morning hours before breakfast were our only school hours for the children; when the home-made shoe pegs and the home-shaped shoe lasts answered for making and mending the shoes, and the home-saved bristle for the waxen end; when the Indians, if not our nearest neighbors, I had liked to have said our best; when the meat in the barrel and the flour in the box, in spite of the most strenuous efforts, would at times run low; when the time for labor would be much nearer eighteen than eight hours a day.