Reminiscences of a Pioneer | Page 6

digression, which I trust my readers will pardon. It has often been urged that the white man has shown little gratitude and no pity for the aborigines of this country. This I wish to refute. The Indian that brought the word of warning to the white settlers was ever after the object of tender solicitude on the part of those whom he had befriended. I have seen that Indian, then old and possibly worse off for his association with civilization, sitting down and bossing a gang of Chinamen cutting and splitting wood for Dan'l Waldo. The Indian, "Quinaby," always contracted the sawing of the wood at $2.00 per cord and hired the Chinamen to do the work for 50 cents per cord. He had a monopoly on the wood-sawing business for Mr. Waldo, Wesley Shannon, and other old pioneers. It mattered not to "Quinaby" that prices went down, his contract price remained the same, and the old pioneers heartily enjoyed the joke, and delighted in telling it on themselves.
But enough of this. Spring came at last and a new world burst upon the vision of the heretofore almost beleaguered pioneers. We had wintered on a "claim" belonging to a young man named John McKinney, two miles from the present town of Jefferson. He had offered his cabin as a shelter with true Western hospitality, including the free use of land to plant a crop. Accordingly about twenty acres were plowed and sown to wheat. This work was performed by my elder brothers. Meantime my father had started out to look for a claim. Nine miles north of Eugene City he purchased a "claim" of 320 acres, paying therefor an Indian pony and $40 in cash. To this place we moved early in May, and there began the task of building up a home in the western wilds. A small cabin of unhewn logs constituted the only improvement on the "claim," but a new house of hewn logs was soon erected and a forty-acre field inclosed with split rails. We had plenty of neighbors who, like ourselves, were improving their lands, and mutual assistance was the rule.
As summer approached it became necessary to return to our wintering place, where a crop had been sown, and harvest the same. Accordingly, my father, accompanied by my two older brothers, the late Judge J. M. Thompson of Lane County, and Senator S. C. Thompson, Jr., of Wasco, then boys of 12 and 14 years, went back and cared for the grain. The wheat was cut with a cradle, bound into bundles and stacked. A piece of ground was then cleared, the grain laid down on the "tramping floor" and oxen driven around until the grain was all tramped out. After the grain was all "threshed out," it was carried on top of a platform built of rails and poured out on a wagon sheet, trusting to the wind to separate the wheat kernels from the straw and chaff. By this primitive method the crop was harvested, threshed, cleaned, and then sacked. It was then hauled by ox teams to Albany where a small burr mill had been erected by a man named Monteith, if my memory serves me correctly, and then ground to flour.
And then, joy of joys! We had wheat bread. No more boiled wheat, nor flour ground in a coffee mill,--but genuine wheat bread. You, reader, who probably never ate a meal in your life without bread, have little conception of the deliciousness of a biscuit after the lapse of a year. As Captain Applegate once said to the writer, referring to the first wheat bread he ever remembered eating: "No delicacy,--no morsel of food ever eaten in after life tasted half so delicious as that bread." It must be remembered that Captain Applegate crossed the plains in 1843 and was therefore an "old settler" when we arrived. His trials were prolonged only a matter of eight years; but looking back, what an eternity was emcompassed in those eight years.
One of the leading characteristics of the Anglo-Saxon is that on coming to the western hemisphere he brought with him his wife and children,-- his school books, and his Bible. As soon, therefore, as a spot for a home had been selected and a rude shelter of logs erected for loved ones, the neighbors began discussing the question of school. It was finally arranged that we must have a school, and the cabin of a bachelor settler was tendered and accepted, and my father chosen as teacher. Logs were split open and placed on legs, with the flat sides turned up to serve as seats. The floor,--well, Mother Earth provided that. It was sprinkled and swept out with "split brooms" twice daily. To prevent the pupils getting lost in the tall grass of