The reader may well imagine my feelings, when, upon my return, my tent, wife, baby, and all were gone. We knew before I started on my return trip that smallpox was raging among the Indians, and that a camp where this disease was prevalent was in sight less than a quarter of a mile away. The present-day reader must remember that dread disease had terrors then that, since universal vaccination, it does not now possess. Could it be possible my folks had been sick and had been removed? The question, however, was soon solved. I had scarcely gotten out of sight upon my trip before one of those royal pioneer matrons came to the camp and pleaded and insisted and finally almost frightened the little wife to go and share her house with her which was near by, and be out of danger from the smallpox.

And that was the way we traveled from the Columbia River to Puget Sound.

God bless those earlier pioneers; they were all good to us, sometimes to the point of embarrassment by their generous hospitality.

I can not dismiss this subject without reverting to one such, in particular, who gave his whole crop during the winter of which I have just written, to start immigrants on the road to prosperity, and, in some instances, to prevent suffering.

In consequence of the large immigration and increased demand, prices of provisions had run sky high, and out of reach of some of the recent immigrants with large families. George Bush had squatted on a claim seven miles south of Olympia, in 1845, and had an abundance of farm produce, but would not sell a pound of anything to a speculator; but to immigrants, for seed or for immediate pressing wants, to all alike, without money and without price—"return it when you can," he would say—and so divided up his whole crop, then worth thousands of dollars. And yet this man's oath could not at that time be taken; neither could he sue in the courts or acquire title to the land upon which he lived, or any land. He had negro blood in his veins, and under the law of this great country, then, was a proscribed outcast. Conditions do change as time passes. The wrong was so flagrant in this particular case that a special act of Congress enabled this old, big-hearted pioneer of 1845 to hold his claim, and his descendants are living on it yet.

I have been so impressed with the altruistic character of this truly great man that I have procured this testimonial from a close acquaintance and neighbor, Prof. Ayres, who has kindly written the history of the life of this truly great pioneer.

A GREAT PIONEER—GEORGE BUSH, THE VOYAGER.

The history of the Northwest settlement cannot be fully written without an account of George Bush, who organized and led the first colony of American settlers to the shores of Puget Sound, whose great humanity, shrewd intelligence, and knowledge of the natives, who then numbered thousands about the headwaters of the Sound, had much to do with carrying the first settlers safely through all of the curses of famine and war while the feeble colony was slowly gaining enough strength to protect itself.

Mr. Bush claimed to have been born about 1791 in what is now Missouri, but was then the French Colony of Louisiana, and in the extreme Far West, and only reached by the most daring hunters. His early manhood was spent in the employ of the great trading companies who reached out into the Rock Mountains each season and gathered furs from the Indians and the occasional white trappers.

Bush first began this work (?) with Rabidean, the Frenchman, who made his headquarters at St. Louis, but later on enlisted with the Hudson's Bay Company, which had been given unrestrained dominion over all Canada outside of the settlements in the East, and, not satisfied with that, sent its trading parties down across the national line, where it was safe to do so. It was during this employment with the Hudson Bay Company that Bush reached the Pacific Coast in the late twenties, and while he did not get as far south as Puget Sound (then occupied by the company and claimed as a part of the British Dominion), he learned of its favorable climate, soil and fitness for settlement.