Читать книгу The Busy Life of Eighty-Five Years of Ezra Meeker - Ezra Meeker Meeker - Страница 18

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THE FIRST CABIN.

What a charm the words our first cabin have to the pioneer. To many, it was the first home ever owned by them, while to many others, like myself, the first we ever had. We had been married nearly two years, yet this was really our first abiding place. All others had been merely way stations on the march westward from Indianapolis to this cabin. Built of small, straight logs, on a side hill, with the door in the end fronting the river, and with but little grading, for the rocky nature of the location would not admit of it. Three steps were required to reach the floor. The ribs projected in front a few feet to provide an open front porch, with a ground floor, not for ornament, but for storage for the dry wood and kindling so necessary for the comfort and convenience of the mistress of the house. The walls were but scant five feet, with not a very steep roof, and a large stone fire place and chimney—the latter but seven feet high—completed our first home.

The great river, nearly a mile and three-quarters wide, seemed to tire from its ceaseless flow at least once a day as if taking a nooning spell, while the tides from the ocean, sixty miles away, contended for mastery, and sometimes succeeded in turning the current up stream. Immediately in front of our landing lay a small island of a few acres in extent, covered with heavy timber and driftwood. This has long since disappeared and ships now pass over the spot with safety.

Scarcely had we become settled in our new home before there came a mighty flood that covered the waters of the river with wrecks of property impossible to enumerate. Our attention was immediately turned to securing logs that came floating down the river in great numbers. In a very short time we had a raft that was worth quite a sum of money could we but get it to the market. Encouraged by this find, we immediately turned our attention to some fine timber standing close to the bank nearby, and began hand logging to supplement what we had already secured afloat. I have often wondered what we would have done had it not been for this find, for in the course of seven weeks three of us marketed eight hundred dollars' worth of logs that enabled us to obtain flour, even if we did pay fifty dollars a barrel, and potatoes at two dollars a bushel, and sometimes more.

And yet, because of that hand logging work, Jane came very near becoming a widow one morning before breakfast, but did not know of it until long afterwards. It occurred in this way. We did not then know how to scaffold up above the tough, swelled butts of the large trees, and this made it very difficult to chop them down. So we burned them by boring two holes at an angle to meet inside the inner bark, and by getting the fire started, the heart of the tree would burn, leaving an outer shell of bark. One morning, as usual, I was up early, and after starting the fire in the stove and putting on the tea kettle, I hastened to the burning timber to start afresh the fires, if perchance, some had ceased to burn. Nearing a clump of three giants, two hundred and fifty feet tall, one began toppling over toward me. In my confusion I ran across the path where it fell, and while this had scarce reached the ground, a second started to fall almost parallel to the first, scarcely thirty feet apart at the top, leaving me between the two with limbs flying in a good many directions. If I had not become entangled in some brush, I would have gotten under the last falling tree. It was a marvelous escape, and would almost lead one to think that there is such a thing as a charmed life.

The rafting of our precious accumulations down the Columbia River to Oak Point; the relentless current that carried us by where we had contracted our logs at six dollars a thousand; the following the raft to the larger waters, and finally, to Astoria, where we sold them for eight dollars, instead of six per thousand, thus profiting by our misfortunes; the involuntary plunge off the raft into the river with my boots on; the three days and nights of ceaseless toil and watching would make a thrilling story if we had but the time to tell it. Our final success was complete, which takes off the keen edge of the excitement of the hour, and when finished, we unanimously voted we would have none of it more.

At Oak Point we found George Abernethy, former Governor of Oregon, who had quite recently returned with his family from the "States," and had settled down in the lumber business. He had a mill running of a capacity of about 25,000 feet of lumber a day. It was a water power mill, and the place presented quite a smart business air for the room they had. But Oak Point did not grow to be much of a lumber or business center, and the water mill eventually gave way to steam, located elsewhere, better suited for the business.

The flour sack was nearly empty when we left home expecting to be absent but one night, and now we had been gone a week. There were no neighbors nearer than four miles and no roads—scarcely a trail—the only communication was by the river. What about the wife and baby alone in the cabin with the deep timber close by in the rear, and heavy jungle of brush in the front? Nothing about it. We found them all right upon our return, but like the log drivers with their experience, the little wife said she wanted no more of cabin life alone. And yet, like adventures and like experiences followed.

The February sun of 1853 shone almost like midsummer. The clearing grew almost as if by magic. We could not resist the temptation to begin planting, and before March was gone, the rows of peas, lettuce, and onions growing on the river bank could be seen from the cabin door, thirty rods away.

One day I noticed some three-cornered bits of potatoes that had been cut out, not bigger than the end of my finger. These all ran to a point as though cut out from a pattern. The base, or outer skin, all contained an eye of the potato. The wife said these would grow and would help us out about seed when planting time came, and we could have the body of the potatoes to eat. That would have seemed a plausible scheme had we been able to plant at once, but by this time we had been forcibly reminded that there was another impending flood for June, incident to the melting of the snow on the mountains, a thousand miles away as the channel ran. But the experiment would not cost much, so the potato eyes were carefully saved and spread out on shelves where they became so dry that they would rattle like dry onion sets when handled. Every steamer outward bound carried potatoes for the San Francisco market, until it became a question whether enough would be left for seed, so that three and even four cents per pound was asked and paid for sorry looking culls. We must have seed, and so, after experimenting with the dried eyes, planted in moist earth in a box kept warm in the cabin, we became convinced that the little lady of the household was right, so ate potatoes freely even at these famine prices. Sure enough, the flood came, the planting delayed until July, and yet a crop was raised that undug brought in nearly four hundred dollars, for we did not stay to harvest them, or in fact, cultivate them, leaving that to another who became interested in the venture.

In April, the word began to pass around that we were to have a new Territory to embrace the country north of the Columbia River, with its capital on Puget Sound, and here on the Columbia we would be way off to one side and out of touch with the people who would shortly become a great, separate commonwealth. Besides, had we not come all the way across the plains to get to the Sea Board, and here we were simply on the bank of a river—a great river to be sure, with its ship channel, but then, that bar at the mouth, what about it? Then the June freshet, what about that?

So, leaving the little wife and baby in the cabin home, one bright morning in May, my brother Oliver and myself made each of us a pack of forty pounds and took the trail, bound for Puget Sound, camping where night overtook us, and sleeping in the open air without shelter or cover other than that afforded by some friendly tree with drooping limbs. Our trail first led us down near the right bank of the Columbia to the Cowlitz, thence up the latter river thirty miles or more, and then across the country nearly sixty miles to Olympia, and to the salt sea water of the Pacific sent inland a hundred and fifty miles by the resistless tides, twice a day for every day of the year.

Our expectations had been raised by the glowing accounts about Puget Sound, and so, when we could see in the foreground but bare, dismal mud flats, and beyond but a few miles, of water with a channel scarce twice as wide as the channel of the great river we had left, bounded on either side by high table, heavily timbered land, a feeling of deep disappointment fell upon us, with the wish that we were back at our cabin on the river.

Should we turn around and go back? No, that was what we had not yet done since leaving our Indiana home eighteen months before; but what was the use of stopping here? We wanted a place to make a farm, and we could not do it on such forbidding land as this. Had not the little wife and I made a solemn bargain or compact, before we were married that we were going to be farmers? Here, I could see a dense forest stretched out before me quite interesting to the lumberman, and for aught I know, channels for the ships, but I wanted to be neither a lumberman nor sailor, and so my first camp on Puget Sound was not cheerful and my first night not passed in contentment.

Olympia at the time contained about 100 inhabitants. It could boast having three stores, a hotel, a livery stable, and saloon, with one weekly newspaper, then publishing its thirtieth number. A glance at the advertising columns of this paper, the "Columbian," (named for what was expected would be the name of the new Territory) disclosed but few local advertisers, the two pages devoted to advertising being filled by announcements of business other than in Olympia. "Everybody knows everybody here," said a business man to me, "so what's the use of advertising." And it was thus with those who had been in the place for a few weeks, and so it continued all over the pioneer settlements for years. To meet a man on the road or on the street without speaking was considered rude. It became the universal practice to greet even strangers as well as acquaintances, and to this day I doubt if there are many of the old settlers yet devoid of the impulse to pass the time of day with hearty greetings to whomsoever they may meet, be they acquaintances or strangers.

Edmund Sylvester in partnership with Levi L. Smith, located the claims where the town of Olympia is built, in 1848. Mr. Smith soon after died, leaving Sylvester as sole proprietor of the town, where I saw him, as it will appear, five years later. It is said that Colonel I. N. Ebey suggested the name Olympia, which was not given to the place until after Mr. Sylvester's flight to the gold mines of California and return in 1850.

But we could not stay here at Olympia. We had pushed on past some good locations on the Chehalis, and further south, without locating, and now, should we retrace our steps? Brother Oliver said no. My better judgment said no, though sorely pressed with that feeling of homesickness, or blues, or whatever we may call it. The resolve was quickly made that we would see more of this Puget Sound, that we were told presented nearly as many miles of shore line as we had traveled westward from the Missouri River to Portland, near sixteen hundred miles, and which we afterwards found to be true.

But how were we to go and see these, to us unexplored waters? I said I would not go in one of those things, the Indian canoe, that we would upset it before we were out half an hour. Brother Oliver pointed to the fact the Indians navigated the whole Sound in these canoes, and were safe, but I was inexorable and would not trust my carcass in a craft that would tip so easily as a Siwash canoe. When I came to know the Indians better, I ceased to use such a term, and afterwards when I saw the performances of these apparently frail craft, my admiration was greater in degree than my contempt had been.

Of the cruise that followed on Puget Sound, and in what manner of craft we made it, and of various incidents of the trip that occupied a month, I must defer telling now, and leave this part of the story for succeeding chapters.