Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 9.djvu/89

I From Youth to Age as an American. 77 thing we must to collect at least four months' provisions that we might place them in a flat boat and float west and south- to settle on the banks of the pleasant Ohio," perhaps. In a few weeks we had done this and tied up at Pittsburg to bid farewell to friends, daughters and sisters. I went to Wash- ington County to summons the last married of those. Found she could not come, and found a chance for work. Returned to Pittsburg and reported— to find father had been dissuaded from risking floating down the river so late in the season. I hurried back to Washington County and took the waiting job —mining coal at one cent per bushel of eighty-four pounds. It was sold on a platform arranged so that farmers could do their own loading. They paid in cash, or produce at cash prices: instance— fresh beef at two and one-half cents a pound; a barrel of good cider at one dollar, barrel returned when empty. I teased my sister, with whom I boarded, by eating that delicious beef without salt or other addition— telling her I was training for life in the buffalo country. I hunted rabbits and shot muskrats, to get my hand in," I said. I crossed and recrossed the Merino sheep pastures of Hon. John H. Ewing, ex-M. C, to learn in Oregon later his relation to fine wool sheep husbandry, and that at this very date James G. Blaine, his kinsman, made his home with Ewing while a student at Washington College. The first money I had to spare was invested in a book of adventures of frontier life— some touching Pittsburg and Brady's Bend. The title page had the following lines: "Who be you that rashly dare, To trace in woods the forest child;— To hunt the panther to his lair, The Indian in his native wild?" They thrilled me, and I read of Braddock, Washington, Wayne, Boone, Brady, Kenton, Wetzi I, Bede, Crockett and Putnam; little dreaming I would chase the wild wolf to his den— dig to him and shoot him in it; climb a fir tree and find a lynx in it, and shoot him ; trace a panther to his lair on a