Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 5.djvu/188

178 PETER H. BURNETT. and that we could use Oregon tea. There grows among the fir timber of that country a small aromatic vine which makes a very pleasant tea, about as good as the tea made from the sassafrass root in the Western States. On another occasion, while I was judge of the supreme court, a young hired man, my son D wight, and myself had on our last working-shirts. It was in harvest time, and where or how to procure others I could not tell. Still I was so accustomed to these things that I was not much perplexed. Within a day or two a young man of my acquaintance wrote me that he desired me to unite him in marriage with a young lady whose name he stated. I married them, and he gave me an order on a store for $5, with which I purchased some blue twilled cotton (the best I could get), out of which my wife made us each a shirt. The material wore well; but, having been colored with log-wood, the shirts, until the color faded from them, left our skins quite blue. I never felt more independent than I did on one occasion, in the fall of 1847. In the streets of Oregon City I met a young man with a new and substantial leather hunting shirt, brought from the Rocky Mountains, where it had been pur- chased from the Indians. I said to him, "what will you take for your leather hunting shirt?" He replied, "seven bushels of wheat." I said at once, "I will take it." I measured out the grain and took the article. I knew it would last me for several years. I found it a most excellent article of dress in clear weather for rough work. I wore it to the California gold mines in the fall of 1848, and after my arrival there during most of the winter of 1848-49. A nephew of mine took it with him to the mines in the spring of 1849, and it was lost to me. I regretted this loss, because I desired to pre- serve it as a memento of old times. It was made of the best dressed buckskin, with the flesh side out, to which the dust would not adhere; and it was easily kept neat and clean for that reason. For the first two years after our arrival in Oregon we were frequently without meat for weeks at a time, and sometimes