Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 13.djvu/287

REMINISCENCES OF SEVENTY YEARS 279 made as good flour there then as any mill does in Oregon today. He bought the bulk of all the wheat that was raised in Oregon at that time, paid the farmer or whoever had the wheat with paper on Ermatinger or the Hudson's Bay store. They in turn would pass it to the credit of the wheat man, then he would draw orders in favor of any person or persons to the full amount due him and those orders were good until they were taken in. It made no difference how many hands they had passed through or when it was presented, it would be put to your credit ; and you could draw on it a dollar at a time or take it all up then if you wished which they would really prefer. I just state this to show how business was done before there was any money in the country and the people got along just as well as they do now and in some respects better. For they could not run their hands into their pockets then and call up all hands to take a drink. They could get a bottle of good Hudson's Bay brandy and then call up all hands to drink it, but there was virtually no drinking done in Oregon. There is more whiskey and beer drunk now in Portland in ten minutes than was consumed in Oregon from 1845 to 1848. There was a man by the name of Dick McCary who started a large distillery in the woods down the river between Portland and Oregon City. It consisted of one big kettle and a few coils of some kind of piping. He made what was called Dick McCary's Best. It was made out of Sandwich Island black strap molasses and it "would make drunk come mighty quick," as the Irishman said. But it was soon found out by the Indians. So a posse of law-and-order men went down from Oregon City and pitched the whole thing into the river and would have pitched Dick in, too, but he was not to be found. There were rigid Oregon laws against selling any kind of intoxicating drinks to Indians, which of course was right, for at times they owned the country and outnumbered the whites two to one, and a drunken heathen is the worst heathen in the world. But after the government had organized a territorial govern- ment in Oregon, appointed a governor and supreme judge, plenty of whiskey soon followed the flag. But the Oregon law