BURR OSBORN, SURVIVOR HOWISON EXHIBITION, 1846 363
his heading a gang with a crow-bar to break open the "Spirit Room" for whisky, when Captain Howison leveled a six- shooter at his head and told him if he made a single stab he would blow his head off. McEver and his followers claimed they wanted to die happy. Joe Cotton, I remember as being cox- swain on the boat that I belonged to, and when the schooner struck the breakers, we were sounding for the channel in a whale boat. I met Cotton some thirty years ago, at a reunion at Grand Rapids ; he then lived in Saranac, Michigan, but he is dead now. George Getchel, who was my particular chum, hailed from Belfast, Maine.
The schooner Shark was a U. S. surveying vessel. Like the Peacock, we started out of Baker's Bay with a good favorable breeze, when all of a sudden the wind died out and. we drifted on to the breakers. We had sounded and buoyed the channel from Cape Disappointment to Fort Vancouver, kedging the vessel all the way. The Shark drew thirteen feet of water, so that we could not get over the bar at the mouth of the Wil- lamette River until we placed her guns on a lighter. The Shark's crew landed on Clatsop Beach. The first fire we built after landing was out of some of the wreck of the U. S. Sloop- of-War Peacock, that had drifted on the beach.
There were seventy-six men in our crew besides the offi- cers. I have told Mr. Bowlby all I could think of about As- toria, and the river to Vancouver. Vancouver was a Hudson's Bay trading post for furs taken in from the Indians so was Astoria.
I first met the Shark in Honolulu. I had made the passage from New Zealand to the Sandwich Islands in a whale ship, got stranded in Honolulu and shipped on the Shark, us "Jack- ies" being informed that we were being sent up to the Oregon territory to settle a dispute about the boundary line between B. C. and Oregon. Great Britain wanted the Columbia River for the boundary, but Uncle Sam said "54-40 or fight," but we did not see any fight with the British for the matter was settled in Washington, D. C., and us "Jackies" were set to work finding the channel of the river to Vancouver to keep us out of mischief, I suppose.
