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1home, it was a still more strange home for his wife, who for some years was the only white woman of Cathlamet.

A refined and cultivated young woman, thoroughly educated and accustomed to the best social circles of the Eastern States, with two little babies, was somewhat out of place in the Cathlamet of 1850. The pioneer instinct is one of the strangest instincts of a virile race, and no stranger manifestation of it ever appeared than this. In the long Winter nights the wolves howled within hearing of the little log house, and the young women of today, fearful of a mouse, would not have thought it a cheerful sound. With wolves on one side and an Indian village on the other, the bravest of women might have felt a little timid.

The first few years at Cathlamet were years


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