Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 9.djvu/146

128 John Minto. us put lip and covered with "shakes" five cabins, sixteen feet square with eaves six feet above the ground, in a week. This was while we waited for our friends with the wagons to reach The Dalles so that we might go to help them down the Colum- bia ; to do which we had, through General McCarver, received promise of a loan of a Hudson's Bay Company's boat by the good Chief Factor McLoughlin. This occupied us a month and I spent nearly as much more helping Captain Morrison domicile his family at Clatsop. Hunt 's mill was built on the brink of a seventy-foot fall of a small stream entering the Columbia about two and one-half miles east of Clifton railroad station. The mill-irons were brought across the plains by ox team in 1843, with the pur- pose of cutting lumber for export. Mr. H. H. Hunt was from Indiana; B. T. Wood, associated with him, was from New York. They looked out the stream for their purpose with the least possible delay, and found one where water power could be applied to cutting timber with the least possible labor, about thirty miles east of Astoria in the bottom of a deep ravine clothed with as fine timber for their purpose as could be found in Oregon. There were sixteen men when I joined them, about January 25, 1845. They had been nearly a year erecting the mill, and had begun to cut without the aid of any team. (I assisted in taking the first yoke of oxen from Oregon City to the mill in July, 1846, in a small scow.) My mining stroke came in good play for cutting trees level with the surface of the ground to facilitate rolling the logs by hand to the saw. It was very slow work with the means at com- mand; it was a good day's run when 3,000 feet, board meas- ure, were cut. A five-foot log was a heavy one to handle by human strength. In 1846, Mr. A. E. Wilson, the first Ameri- can merchant to settle at Astoria, bought B. T. Wood's inter- est in the mill, and he brought into the work the yoke of cattle mentioned, and a force of five Kanakas, under contract with King Kamahamaha of the Hawaiian Islands, at five dollars per month, and salmon and potatoes furnished them for food. They were willing, cheerful workers.