expressing the joy in our arrival by dancing the old year out and the new one in on the puncheon floor of a new log building finished that day.
Not all, but the most of the immigrants made Linnton their stopping place until they could choose the district of permanent location. Captain Morrison went to the mouth of the Columbia to look for a home. Rees went with him to stop and work at Hunt's sawmill, the first of the kind on the lower Columbia, and just then beginning to cut lumber. Regarding my agreement with Captain Morrison as not carried out until his family were housed and his cattle in Western Oregon, I waited till his return from Clatsop Plains, west of Astoria, and on his return with a large chinook canoe, assisted in getting the family down to the farm of Solomon H. Smith, twelve miles west of Astoria. It rained almost incessantly, and sometimes we were windbound on the voyage, in exposed positions, and had to endure the pitiless storms of wind and rain where dry fuel could not be had. For two such days we lay on the west side of Tongue Point, two and a half miles from Astoria, or Fort George, the worst days we experienced during the entire journey. This was about the fifteenth of January, 1845. The family left its residence the sixth of May, 1844; so we were somewhat over eight months from house to house. The oldest daughter had a severe attack of camp fever while passing the Rocky Mountains, as had Mr. Rees in the Platte Valley. But we all arrived safe and well, feeling poorer in our clothing supply than in anything else. The last two hundred miles of the journey was most uncomfortable by its being midwinter and by being made in boat or canoe.
