The baby's Sunday visit to the ship; the Sunday dinner in the cabin; the presents of delicacies that followed, even from the gruff mate, made me feel that under all this roughness, a tender spot of humanity lay, and that one must not judge by outward appearances too much—that even way out here, three thousand miles from home, the same sort of people lived as those I had left behind me.

"St. Helens, October 7th, 1852.

"Dear Brother: Come as soon as you can. Have rented a house, sixty boarders; this is going to be the place. Shall I send you money?

O. P. M."

The mate importuned me to stay until the cargo was on board, which I did until the last stick of lumber was stowed, the last pig in the pen, and the ship swung off bound on her outward voyage. I felt as though I had an interest in her, but, remembering the forty dollars in the aggregate I had received, with most of it to jingle in my pockets, I certainly could claim no financial interest, but from that day on I never saw or heard the name of the bark Mary Melville without pricking my ears (figuratively, of course) to hear more about her and the old captain and his gruff mate.

Sure enough, I found St. Helens to be the place. Here was to be the terminus of the steamship line from San Francisco. "Wasn't the company building this wharf?" They wouldn't set sixty men to work on the dock without they meant business. "Ships can't get up that creek" (meaning the Willamette), "the big city is going to be here." This was the talk that greeted my ears, after we had carried the wife, (this time in a chair) to our hotel. Yes, our hotel, and had deposited her and the baby in the best room the house afforded.

It was here I made acquaintance with Columbia Lancaster, afterwards elected as the first delegate to Congress from Washington. I have always felt that the published history of those days has not done the old man justice, and has been governed in part, at least, by factional bias. Lancaster believed that what was worth doing at all was worth doing well, and he lived it. He used to come across the Columbia with his small boat, rowed by his own hand, laden with vegetables grown by himself on his farm opposite St. Helens, in the fertile valley of the Lewis River. I soon came to know what Lancaster said of his produce was true to the letter; that if he told me he had good potatoes, he had, and that they were the same in the middle or bottom of the sack as at the top. And so with all his produce. We at once became his heaviest customer, and learned to trust him implicitly. I considered him a typical pioneer, and his name never would have been used so contemptuously had it not been that he became a thorn in the side of men who made politics a trade for personal profit. Lancaster upset their well laid plans, carried off the honors of the democratic nomination, and was elected as our first delegate in Congress from the new Territory of Washington.

One January morning of 1853, the sixty men, (our boarders) did not go to work dock building as usual. Orders had come to suspend work. Nobody knew why, or for how long. We soon learned the why, as the steamship company had given up the fight against Portland, and would thenceforward run their steamers to that port. For how long, was speedily determined, for the dock was not finished and was allowed to fall into decay and disappear by the hand of time.

Our boarders scattered, and our occupation was gone, and our accumulation in great part rendered worthless to us by the change.

Meantime, snow had fallen to a great depth; the price of forage for cattle rose by leaps and bounds, and we found that we must part with half of our stock to save the remainder. It might be necessary to feed for a month, or for three months, but we could not tell, and so the last cow was given up that we might keep one yoke of oxen, so necessary for the work on a new place. Then the hunt for a claim began again. One day's struggle against the current of Lewis River, and a night standing in a snow and sleet storm around a camp fire of green wood, cooled our ardor a little, and two hours sufficed to take us back home next morning.