Autobiography of John C Lawrence As re-transcribed by Sarah Athay and Emily Goodey. Contributed by Emily Goodey, (great-great granddaughter of J. C. Lawrence) The Story of my life By John C. Lawrence Until a few years ago I knew almost nothing of my ancestors back of my grandfather on my father's side. One day the thought occurred to me: "Will I be so soon forgotten?" The thought prompted me to find out what I could about my people, who they were and from whence they came. I regret there was so little I could find out about them beyond mere names. It is for the purpose of leaving a better record for my children and my children's children that I am writing this story of my life, Hugh is to type it with a copy for each of the children. I know they will care for it as I would care for what my father wrote, had he done what I am doing. Beyond a letter written by him nearly sixty years ago I have little of what he thought and said while living, Of my mother I have a much clearer remembrance as she lived several years after father's death and I have a number of her letters. My thought at this time is not an attempt at a mere biography. While there will be some chronological order to what I may write I want the story to picture, as nearly as may be, some of the scenes along the pathway I have trod in life and if the people and the custom as I found them. This will mean a good many digressions from the story in the main. The story is not intended for others than my own family. This means it is not written for publications nor for the public, so I will feel free to write in a purely personal vein. There can be nothing egotistical in the fact that I may use the pronoun the first person singular. It must necessarily be that way. It is to be the story of my life not that of some one else. I was born near Mt. Gilead in Morrow County Ohio, January 22, 1861. That was the first important event in my life. The place of birth was on a farm about three miles from Mt. Gilead, which was the county seat. This was an 80 acre farm which had belonged to my mother's father, William Montgomery. He and his bride, who had been Jane Smith, had come from Virginia near the North Carolina line in about the year 1830. They left the locality of Green Springs, just south of Abbingdon, which had been the family home for many years. How many years I cannot say. Mother often spoke of her family dying out. In the later years I visited Abbingdon for the purpose of finding out something about the Montgomery family. After some inquiry I found an old lady past seventy, who was born a Montgomery. When I told her I wanted to find out something about the Montgomery family she said. "So would I. I have lived here all my life and not since I was a little girl have I know anyone by the name of Montgomery." That discouraged me. If she knew nothing after a long life spent here how could I hope to find out anything. So I came away. This little old lady had the sweet, kindly face, which I think was typical of the Montgomery's. I saw three of mother's cousins a few years ago, quite old ladies then, who had the expression I remembered on mother's face. While I felt this old Virginia lady must be related to our family I could of course find no proof. The court house records gave quite a long list of Montgomerys. One of them had deeded a tract of land near Green Springs to a Presbyterian Church as long as it worshipped according to the Westminster confession of faith. As this was the boyhood home of my grandfather Montgomery I think it reasonable to think that it was one of the family who gave the deed. The restriction that title was to run according to the Westminster confession of faith would indicate he was a Presbyterian. That grandfather was a soldier of the Revolution I have from my Aunt Elizabeth Lawrence who knew the family. She said he was buried with the honors of war. Of my Grandmother, Jane Smith, I know nothing as to ancestry beyond the fact that her maiden name was Smith. I have heard rumors that some of her relatives were wealthy. This should not be held against them nor is it much in their favor. It was said they were of Irish descent. In fact, I remember mother saying her mother's mother was from Ireland. Once, as a child I told some one my grandmother was an Irish-man. I did not understand until much later why me statement raised a laugh. The Montgomery family was of course Southern. This was in slave territory. Whether the family owned slaves or not I do not know. Presumably they did. A monument to the confederate dead stands on the court house square at Abbingdon. Looking south from the square, which is on a little eminence, you can see over the timbered country, nearly level, the six miles to where the little hamlet of Green Springs, which I never saw, lies close to the North Carolina line. To the north are the Cumberland mountains, the town of Abbingdon being apparently as close to the mountains as the railroad could be located which skirted the base. On the farm on which I was born grandfather Montgomery and his bride made their home when Ohio was in a crudely pioneer state. He built and operated a little saw mill in which he worked. It was while at work in the mill that in lifting he ruptured a blood vessel with caused his death. Grandmother returned to Virginia with her three children of whom mother, Lucretia, was oldest and her brothers John and James. And in Virginia mother spent a few years of her childhood with her mother's people. But grandmother Montgomery sickened from what was then always called consumption and returned to Ohio to be buried beside grandfather on the homestead. When I stood by their graves a few years ago and read the inscription on the tombstone I realized how young they were at death. Grandfather died at 27 and grandmother at 29. I suppose she was younger as she survived him a few years. In 1898 I visited the Montgomery homestead in Morrow County, Ohio, near Mt. Gilead, which mother inherited. It gave me a strange sensation to stand on the spot where I was born. The house had been torn down but the spring showed its former location. I was disappointed in one thing. I had often told Jessie of a ditch which ran near the house. There was neither ditch nor any sign there had even been one. But a woman who lived across the road and who was a young lady when we lived there said there had been a ditch as I remembered. The graves of grandfather and grandmother Montgomery were in an orchard just above where the house had stood. I looked on it with a feeling of reverence. The trees were the largest apple trees I had ever seen, apparently 50 feet high and covering with the branches an area of nearly that much in diameter. Probably not so much but without measurement that was the impression made on my memory. My father, George Lawrence, was the son of Charles Lawrence whose home was two miles east of Lexington, in Richland County, Ohio. Mother, after her mother's death, had been raised by a relative, Martha Piper, who lived near grandfather Lawrence, so father and mother were school mates. I saw the patent to grandfather Lawrence's farm, signed by President Madison. The place is now owned by Joseph Lawrence, a half uncle. LAWRENCE FAMILY HISTORY There is a state park called the Serpent's (park) not far from Rice's Landing. It's land which John Lawrence owned. Grandfather's father was John Lawrence of Rice's Landing, Pennsylvania, the son of John Lawrence who was the original ancestor. John Lawrence, our first American ancestor, with Catherine, his wife, maiden name unknown, came from Germany in the eighteenth century, probably about 1745. Some of the relatives fix that date for no particular reason that I know. One says it was early in that century. He died in 1818. As the Lawrences of the earlier generations lived to the age of about 75 years he was probably born about 1743. He may have been older at his death and consequently born earlier. This is purely speculative but has to do with varying traditions in the family history. One tradition has it that a widow Lawrence came over with several boys. Another that several brothers came together but became separated in America. Both might be true. My father when I was a child of eight read a letter from his father who gave the latter tradition, saying they were ship wrecked and thus scattered, one brother in Canada, another in New England and another in Maryland or Virginia. George Lawrence, a second cousin to father who lives at Sequim, showed me an old iron spectacle case which he said the first ancestor brought from Germany. If he came as a boy it could not have belonged to him. If he came with his parents or his mother only, one of them may have owned it. Tradition has it that the family was originally from England, migrating during the persecution of the Pilgrims. George Lawrence, mentioned, says the family was descended from Sir Robert Lawrence, who was knighted in the Crusades. I am giving these traditions for what they are worth which is very little if anything. Only the fact that the same traditions come from different branches of the family, separated for generations, leads to the common origin and lends color to their authenticity. George Lawrence has it that it is the same family related to the Washingtons, but I think the wish that it were so is father to the thought. The Frost family history, written by a descendant of John Lawrence, says the first Lawrence settled in Maryland not far from a stream called Connecocheague. This leads me to think of a possible relationship to Capt. James Lawrence of "Don't give up the ship" fame. He was from Maryland. John Lawrence must have moved across into Pennsylvania as he enlisted in the Revolutionary war from Cumberland County, Pa., serving as a sergeant in the company of a Capt. John Jack, Eighth Cumberland county militia, 1779. He was a brother-in-law to Samuel Fenton who served as captain in the Sixth Battalion Cumberland county militia, 1780. All of this is shown by the records on file in the state library at Harrisburg, Penn. On proof of descent from John Lawrence, our ancestor, this record entitles the descendants to join the Sons of American Revolution or Daughters of American Revolution. Some time after the close of the Revolutionary war, probably in 1784, John Lawrence and Samuel Fenton moved to Fayette County in Western Pennsylvania. Here Jeremiah Fenton married his cousin Rosannah Lawrence and founded the Fenton family whose history was written by a descendant, William B. Brown of Des Moines, Iowa. John Lawrence was an influential man in his community. A good many of his old neighbors followed him which is a pretty good testimonial of his character. He died in 1818 and his wife Catherine died in 1819 or 1820. These are our first known ancestors. I have spent a good deal of time and money to trace further back but have not succeeded and will likely get no farther. They have seven children. Rosannah, born Oct. 3, 1768, married Jeremiah Fenton and died in 1845. Catherine, born Sept. 15, 1772, married Ephraim Horner, date of death unknown. William born Oct. 15, 1775, wife named Patience Frost, died in 1854. John (my great grandfather) born Aug. 9, 1778 and died June 1, 1854. He married Elizabeth Wanee, daughter of John and Patience Wanee. His father was probably a soldier of the Revolutionary War. George, born June 18, 1782. Mary, born Sept. 10, 1785, married Amos Frost and founded the Frost family. Samuel, born May 4, 1778, died 1820 unmarried. John Lawrence and his wife Elizabeth Wanee had three children: Charles (my grandfather) born Dec. 1, 1803. Married Eleanor Bailey, died July 13, 1883. Mary Elizabeth, born Jan 28, 1810, married Jesse Fenton, the second marriage into the Fenton family. Margaret, born Feb. 22, 1810, married George Denny, died July 25, 1845. Charles Lawrence, my grandfather and Eleanor his wife had ten children: George, my father, born Dec. 15, 1829, married Lucretia Montgomery who as born May 28, 1831, died June 29, 1870. Rachel Elizabeth, born March 24, 1833, first married a man named Nesbett and after his death a man named King, died in about 1915. James, born Dec. 5, 1835, unmarried, died after enlisting in the Union army in 1861 and is buried at Indianapolis, Ind. John, born July 10, 1838, unmarried, died in the summer of 1864. Father's letter, quoted later on, mentions his last sickness. He died at our home. Harrison, born June 28, 1840, died early in 1921, married Cynthia Smalley, was a captain in the Union army, serving through the entire war. He and father are buried side by side at Pleasant Hill, Illinois. William, born Jan. 30, 1843, died in 1897, married Mina Ferguson. He was a soldier in the Union army and served during the war. Lucinda Jane, born May 31, 1845, married Samuel Eyerly, died May 28, 1905. Arabelle, born Oct. 3, 1848, married a man named Hershner, died August 23, 1924. Louise, born June 22, 1850, married a man named Pollock, died in 1923. Charles A., born May 12, 1852, died in infancy. After the death of Eleanor, my grandmother, in 1852, grandfather married again to Sarah E. McCown, and to this union five children were born: Joseph and Oliver, and three sons who died in infancy. George Lawrence, my father, married Lucretia Montgomery. To them eight children were born; Charles Smith, born Sept. 6, 1852, wife Marcela, died in 1915 leaving no children. William Preston, born Apr 1, 1854, married Anna Bishop, sister to John Bishop. To them three girls were born, Clara, Leona and Morgia. Jane Ellen, born Apr. 28, 1857, died Apr. 28, 1924. Married John Bishop. To them were born Angie L., Lena Leoti, Lucretia, John, Inez, and Lawrence. Martha Elizabeth who married Sam Crumbaker to whom were born: Myrtle, Melvin, Mabel, Marion, Milton (Dyke), Bert, Margaret, William, Paul, Ruth, and Beulah. John Creig, the writer, who married Jessie Rogers. To them were born four children: Zola Lucretia, Bessie Angeline, Hugh Montgomery and Perry William Columbus. Perry Wilson, born Aug. 28, 1863 who married Katie Eslick. They have no children. James Crawford who died in infancy. George Harrison, born Oct. 6, 1868, married Mary Smith to whom Lela was born. After divorcing Mary he married again without issue. This completes the history of the Lawrence family as far as it need be given here. I am preparing a list of the descendants of John and Catherine Lawrence of whom there are several hundred whose names I have secured and if circumstances are favorable I hope to publish a book giving the history of the Lawrence family. My grandfather married Eleanor Bailey in Winchester, Ohio, in about 1828. I was told a few years ago by Crawford Bailey that this was the second intermarriage between the Lawrence and Bailey family. I know nothing of the first intermarriage. The Fentons had moved into Ohio after leaving Pennsylvania. Rossannah Lawrence, daughter of the first John Lawrence, had married Jeremiah Fenton, founding the Fenton family of whom I have the history. In the next generation her niece, known as Polly Lawrence, married another Fenton, (Jesse), so these two families became closer related. Both Rosannah and Polly Fenton are buried in the cemetery at Winchester, where I visited their graves in 1911. My grandfather in visiting his relatives, the Fentons, became acquainted with the Baileys and so married Eleanor Bailey. As the Fentons were proud of their Lawrence relationship, so I am proud of our Bailey relationship. They were splendid people in every way, of original Welsh stock, Samuel Bailey, the first of the family in America having come from Wales. All the Baileys I have known were physically large. I had supposed the fact that my brothers and sisters were larger than the earlier Lawrences as I knew of them, my grandfather particularly, was due to the Bailey blood. All the Baileys I have known, a score or so, were over six feet tall, both men and women. But on a visit to Winchester, Ohio, I met two very old men, a Mr. Smith and Lou Bailey, both past ninety who had known my great grandfather, John Lawrence, when he came to visit his daughter, Polly Fenton. They both said I very much resembled him in size and looks, and particularly in voice. I was then and am now well over two hundred pounds in weight, five feet eight and three-quarters inches in height and of a ruddy complexion, red-faced to be plain about it. I told them I was surprised as I supposed my grandfather's people were rather slender and dark. Grandfather was about five feet nine or ten and weighed about one hundred fifty to sixty pounds. These men said he took after his mother, a Wanee. So, after all, it seems my family came by their size from the Lawrence as well as the Bailey side and mother's side as well. My father was about five feet ten inches and weighed about 160 pounds. Mother about five feet five and weighed about the same as my father. I have always been told I very much resembled her. My oldest brother, Charley, was about five feet ten inches and weighed at the most about 240. Willie, the next is about five feet eleven and one half inches and weighed as much as 260. My sister Janey is about five feet four and I suppose she has weighed closed to 200 pounds. Sister Martha is a little taller and must have weighed 180 to 190 when in her best health. I have given my own size. Perry, next youngest, is about five feet 10 1/2 and has weighed as high as 230. My greatest weight was about 220. Harry, the youngest is about 5 feet 10 and has weighed close to 200 pounds. Another brother, Jimmy, next to Perry, died in infancy. Going back to the place of my birth, my parents sold the farm in the spring of 1863 and moved to Kosciusko County, Indiana, near Warsaw. I remember as before stated the ditch at the place of birth and events before our removal, so that my memory goes back almost to my second year. Thereafter the events stand out more distinctly. In Indiana that spring the mosquitoes were plentiful. I remember going with mother to milk and they bit so much I started to the house. On the way they treed me, or stumped me, as mother found me on top of a stump, crying at the top of my voice for Ohio where there were "no skeeters." I remember this very distinctly. At the same time I know how easy it is to become mixed as to facts of one's own memory and what others told. Even facts become strangely perverted. I know my own girls, Zola and Bessie once made a trip on bicycles. On a steep hill one of the bicycles got beyond control and there was a hard fall. Both girls remember the event distinctly. Zola remembers it was she who fell and Bessie remembers just as distinctly that she fell. I am sure I remember the incident of being stumped by the mosquitoes. I remember about the same time kicking a strange dog which had picked up a bone in the yard. I carry the marks of his teeth on my foot yet as I was barefoot and he sunk his teeth deep in my foot. Another event I remember clearly is the birth of brother Perry, August 28, 1863. The date of course I do not remember. Janey, Martha and I had gone to a neighbors for the night. As we returned home the next morning just as we were climbing through a set of bars we were met by the neighbor who told us there was a little baby at the house. We ran and as we reached mother's room she held up the baby for us to see. In the fall of 1864 father sold out for the purpose of going to Nebraska. His brother John had gone west a few years before, in the late fifties. He was a teamster from Omaha to Denver, taking a homestead or preemption on the Blue River. Owing to sickness he returned to Ohio. His father had married again after his mother's death which was the cause of his leaving home in the first place. The stepmother was not kind to him on his return, so he came to our home. It was consumption and realizing he could not recover he gave father the land to care for him. So after his death and burial at Etna Green father sold out to go to the land, where the town or city of Beatrice, Nebraska now stands. We first went back for a visit to grandfather's going by train. It was my first ride on a train. At one station I saw father on the platform as the train pulled out and was frantic with fear that we were leaving him. When he came into the car as the train moved away smiling I could not understand how he got on the train. I remember he wore a tall silk or beaver hat. It was called a plug hat. When we reached Mansfield it was pouring down rain. Grandfather met us in a spring wagon. A hack we would call it in the west. I can remember the slanting rain drops and the ride to the farm nearly eight miles, and the gate where we turned into the barn yard. Then, during the visit, with my half uncles Joe and Oliver, playing around the barn with a wheel-barrow. Of a yellow jacket's nest, or bees, I am not sure which. Of the taking of a family group at Mansfield, a picture of which I have an enlarged copy. Perry was too young to keep still. They had trouble with me. Finally the photographer told me if I would keep still a mouse would run over the floor and a little bird would fly across the room. I kept still. He must have had a mouse in a trap for one did run across the floor. But no bird flew so I remembered him for long years as a story teller. Father bought a team of white mares, Bet and Doll, and a wagon on which he put a cover and we started for the long drive to Nebraska. Mother's brother, James had gone on to prepare for us. The first night, as I remember, we stayed with John Creig for whom I was named. He was either a close friend or a distant relative. Of course the name John had come down to me from my grandfather's grandfather as well as his father. Father and mother each had a brother John. But it was from John Creig I got my full Christian name. Next morning as we started away he carried me in his arms and put me up in the spring seat in front. He gave me a silver dollar as I sat there which I held in my hand until father came when I gave it to him. I never saw it afterward. We stopped in Indiana to visit John Montgomery, mother's uncle. He lived about two miles from Sugar Grove, which is about 25 miles north of Crawfordville. I remember passing along a canal and seeing the canal boats. I was very much interested in seeing how the canal crossed a river. I do not know what canal or what river, only I remember it distinctly. I suppose it was in October of 1864 we reached Croff Bailey's place near Pleasant Hill, in McClean County, Illinois. Croff was a first cousin to father and we stopped for a visit. Soon after we children took the whooping cough. Winter was at hand and going on to Nebraska seemed unsafe, so father and mother concluded to stay over winter. This decision changed the whole course of our lives. Uncle Jim Montgomery, who had gone onto Nebraska became disgusted and returned to Indiana. We never saw him again. He died some ten years later. Father had about three thousand dollars in cash and Croff advised him to invest it in corn which he did. He paid fifty cents a bushel on the cob and during the winter a good deal of it was spoiled by the weather and by rats. In the spring, the war drawing to a close, corn dropped to twenty-five cents a bushel. The loss was a serious one to us from which father never recovered. We spent the winter in the little town of Pleasant Hill. The post-office was named Selma. Here we formed a number of acquaintances, among them George S. Rogers and family, Tom, Jim, Hugh, Matt, and Jessie who later became my wife. The friendship then formed remained through life. In the spring we moved about three miles east of town to what was later known as the Crumbaker place, where we lived a year, farming. Soon after we moved out I saw a wagon loaded with lumber drive into a field across the road from the house but a short distance away. With childish curiosity (I was then four) I went to inquire what they were going to do. A boy of about ten, Sam W. Crumbaker, who later married my sister Martha, told me they were going to build a school house which they did. Charles Kennedy was the carpenter. I watched the building very carefully. When the house was completed a Miss Fannie Freshcorn was employed as teacher. She offered as a prize in the class of beginners to the one who would first learn the alphabet the privilege of carrying her watch. I won the prize. Martha and Joanna Crumbaker were in the class. I was very proud but she allowed me to carry the watch only a few minutes. The seats were mere benches placed around the walls of the room. It was hard for me to sit still then as it has been all through my life. So I changed about. The teacher put me under her desk and I made faces at her. Then she put me on the floor and put her feet on me. She could not hold that position long so I was finally tied up with a string. Jonas Crumbaker ran around the room making a noise like a frog. I caught a look at his tongue and asked him to stand still so I could see his tongue go. It looked very funny. Worms covered the ground that spring, thousand legged worms, we called them. I suppose they were army worms. You could not walk in the road without stepping on them. It was horrible to a barefoot boy. The worms were destructive to crops. Davey Smalley, an uncle to Cynthia Smalley, who later married Uncle Harry, father's brother, came to our home one day and took me up on his lap. Picking up the first reader and pointing to a picture he asked me if I could spell cow. "Yes," I answered proudly, "o x, cow." But the picture and the name were not quite the same. That was the spring the war ended. I remember one day hearing the sound of a booming cannon. Father was in town and mother was anxious to learn the news. I can yet see the smile on his face as he climbed over the fence from the field he had crossed when he answered mother's questions as to why they were firing the cannon. "The war is over," was his reply. I think I remember the death of Lincoln but am not so sure. While my people were thoroughly union and republicans I can remember hearing them say, "Lincoln was good but not a great man." How time has changed that judgment! Lincoln's greatness in popular esteem has increased with the passing years until in all the world today he is looked upon as one of the greatest men in history. During the summer of 1865 my father and George S. Rogers went on a trip to Missouri and Nebraska. Each put a horse in a team hitched to our wagon. They were looking for a new location in the farther west. While they were gone mother wrote a letter to father's sister Belle in Ohio. More than forty years later, while on a visit to Ohio, Aunt Belle gave me this letter which is one of my prized possessions. In it she said: September 9th, 1865 Dear Sister Bell: After a long delay I at last sit down to answer your kind letter that I received weeks ago. I thought I would wait until George would come home but he has not come yet. But he will be at home in two or three days and then he will write to Harrison. He has been gone almost 9 weeks. We have had a lonesome time of it since George has been gone and Martha, Johny, Perry and myself have all had the chills. I don't want to stay here any longer than we can get ready to go. I don't know where we will move to. George has not wrote anything favorable of the west and I don't believe he has much notion of moving west this fall. He has been gone so long that it will make it late before we can get started. Well, Bell, I hardly known what to write to you that would be interesting. I feel so homesick and bad I cant hardly think of anything pleasant any more. We have never bought a cow since we have been here so we have no milk or butter only as we buy it. We have plenty of good potatoes, tomato, squashes, green corn, cabbage and some melons and a nice patch of cane and will have some molasses made as soon as George gets home but I long so much for good apples and cant get any. There is apples here but you can hardly get any for love or money. I tell you, Bell, I am sick of the west but we will have to make the best of a bad bargain and do the best we can. Tell Cinda when her and her fellow marries she must send us a piece of her wedding cake. Tell Harry that cousin Croff says if he was here in corn cutting time he could make five dollars a day cutting up corn. Well, I will bring this poor letter to a close. You must excuse me this time for not writing more and the next time perhaps I will feel more cheerful and will write you a better letter. You must write and tell Cinda to write and we would like to get a letter from Ida too. If Harrison comes out I would like if he could bring us a few dried apples. Now I will close hoping this may fine you all well. No more. Good by. Lucretia Lawrence to Bell Lawrence I have copied the letter just as it was written except the punctuation. I followed mother's spelling to show just how she wrote. She was a wonderfully well informed woman but had gone to school very little. She kept up with the current events of the times and also kept up with our studies. I think I wrote that she and father grew up in homes within sight of each other and attended the same school at least a part of the time. While we were living in Indiana several months before the date of mother's letter to Aunt Bell father wrote a letter to his father, which was kept by Aunt Bell and given to me at the same time she gave me mother's letter. It was as follows: Butter Nutt Grove June the 26th, 1864. Dear Father: I seat myself once more to inform you of our welfare. John is very poorly. He is not able to be up half of his time for the last ten days. His throat is very sore. Last Sunday a week ago he could not swallow water but he is a little better now. John has faded ever since he has come here. He said he caught cold on the road here and the spring being wet and cold was unfavorable for him. Then two or three weeks he seemed to improve but he has taken down with his throat and he is very weak. He says you must not think hard because he has not rote you. He is not able to rite. I still have some hope that he will improve. His doctor thinks he will. He is not taking any medicine now. If he gets worse so that he is confined to his bed all the time I would like that Lucinda would come out and stay with us awhile if you can spare her. I will rite you again if he gets worse. I got a letter from Lib the other day. She was well. John got one from Hary and Will. They was well. You have no doubt got all the particular of the fight (battle) that Harry was in. Charley is not well. He got a cold some six weeks ago and it has settled on his lungs. He is moping around. He has always bin very hearty til this spring. The wheat looks well and everything else. So no more now but remain you son. G. Lawrence To Charles Lawrence Rite as soon as you get this if you please. Uncle John did not live so very long after the letter was written. He is buried at Etna Green. Aunt Lucinda came and spent several weeks, but I do not remember how long. Mother's letter shows the longing for her old Ohio home toward which her heart turned and away from that seemingly illimitable west toward which she journeyed and in its farthest part lies buried. I never knew her to be discouraged. Never saw her cry but once. Her face always smiling was an index of her heart. Under burdens seldom put upon any mother she bore herself with unflinching courage. In this letter is the only sign of sorrow I ever found or knew in her life. On father's return it was decided to remain over another year, and we remained on the same place. In the later years Mr. Rogers told about seeing General Grant on the return trip. This was almost immediately after the close of the war and three years before Grant's election as president. He was of course the popular war hero and subject to that attention from the public common to all such great men. Mr. Rogers said his impression of Grant at that time was that he felt tired and bored by the attentions showered on him. The following winter Mollie Carson taught the school. Many large boys were in attendance, some of them returned soldier boys, one of them Marion Crumbaker. I remember one result of their home coming was an almost universal epidemic of so-called seven year itch. The winter of 1865 was a very cold one. At least there was one very cold spell in mid-winter. Chickens froze to death on the roost. Some were brought in the house and put upstairs to save their lives. A cow got a rope twisted around her leg shutting off circulation and her leg froze until it came off. My memory is not so very clear as between the two summers we spent on what became the Crumbaker place. I spoke of Fanny Freschcorn teaching school in the spring and summer of 1865. Mollie Carson taught afterward but I am not sure whether the following winter or the next spring. I remember very distinctly spraining my ankle by jumping off the woodshed roof. I was curious to know the sensation of going through the air. Mother told me not to try it. One morning she was in the garden when I climbed on a fence, then up on the roof. Creeping to the high side (it sloped one way) I looked to see where mother was. She was stooping over gathering some vegetables. I can see her form now in memory as I jumped. I knew at once what had happened as she had told me it would. For weeks I hopped along on one foot holding to sister Janie's hand. Some eleven years later in Oregon I again sprained the same ankle by having a pony fall on it. From these two sprains serious consequences followed in the after years. In the fall of 1866 father built a house on Croff Bailey's old place near the Mackinaw which is scarcely more than a creek except during a flood period. We moved into this house and passed the winter. Another family, Joe Bowers and wife with one child, lived in a part of the same house. They had one child, a little girl baby. Mother and Mrs. Bowers talking one day spoke of the possibility of our growing up and marrying. It was just the speculation sometimes indulged in and forgotten in the hour. For me it meant much. I looked at the little girl baby dressed in long clothes as my possible future wife and for many years I remembered it as something likely to happen. In ever saw her after her babyhood. That winter I went to school with the rest of the children at the Henline school. Col and Joe Duling were among the large boys. Sis Williams, who later became Col Duling's wife, with Ether and Babe went to school and came by our place. I remember Sis holding my hand while we walked along, Jane and Martha being the only two beside myself going from our home. I cannot remember Charley or Willie being in school although I think they attended the previous winter. Johnny Moon and the two sisters, Laura and Viola, also went our way. Lou Henline was the teacher. She used to pick me up in her arms and kiss me which plagued me very much. Charley Bailey and Jim, cousins, lived near by. Jim and Perry came to school one day and it was quite an event. They had run away. Perry sat by me and wiped his nose on my coat sleeve which I thought not very nice. Brother Jimmy had been born the previous summer, a bright little baby. There was an epidemic of small pox that winter and we were all vaccinated. Dr. Waters of Lexington did the work. Thirty years later I met in him in Lexington, then a very old man. I told him I carried a scar he had made. He said he remembered it, but I told him I thought that would be impossible. To prove it he recited the details of my sitting on mother's lap while he drew up his chair beside her on Croff's place. I told him that was just the way it happened. It was a remarkable instance of good memory. The next spring we started for Missouri by team, the same team, Bet and Doll, we had driven from Ohio. We stopped at Wash Bailey's over night. Next morning Mrs. Bailey got very angry at a cow kicking her and we drove away with scarcely a word of parting. Mother was not pleased. A night or two later we stopped at Brandenberg's, Tillie being a sister to Croff and Wash. When we crossed the Mississippi into Missouri I at once looked at the ground and found it black, the same color as in Illinois. I was very much surprised at it showed yellow on the map. I told mother and she laughed. There were three wagons in the company. Our own, David Cox, who married a sister to Croff Bailey and their son-in-law whose name I do not now recall, then newly married, and a man who was with them whose name is also forgotten. I remember my first sight of a negro and it frightened me. I remember our dog chasing some sheep one morning, and a man running out with a gun and shooting it. Father called to him not to shoot. I was scared and thought father very brave to speak up as he did. But the dog was killed. As we drove further south we saw the effects of the civil war where it had raged a short time before. I suppose we passed hundreds of chimneys standing by the road side, with a heap of ashes where a house had stood, burned during the war. At Carthage a battle had been fought. The tops of the trees had been shot away and branches torn off with some of them still hanging. Just south of Carthage was a stone fence which had been used as a battle line and it was here the evidence of the conflict was plainest Our destination was the lead mines at Granby which had been an objective during the war. There was a smelter here and a prospect of work both in carpentering and for Charlie and Willie in the mines. We moved into a house on lower Main Street that had been used as a baker's shop. I was six, Perry nearly four, and Jimmie a year old. Soon after we reached there we were all taken sick with typhoid fever. I remember when mother was taken sick we had to have help. The only person was a big fat darkey woman. We were afraid to eat after her, thinking the black would come off her hands. When we saw that the inside of her hands were about as white as our own and perhaps much cleaner we concluded there was not as much danger of dirt as we had feared. One morning while father was making up the bed for mother while she sat in a chair she fainted. I stood watching her and when her head fell over on one side I thought she was dead and cried out. She recovered in a moment. Jimmie sickened and died. I think he had a dysentery. Whether he had the typhoid fever or not I do not know. I had thought so until recent years when doctors said children or babes while nursing would not have typhoid. At the time they called it typhoid fever and I know there was bloody dysentery. I stood for hours at a time, it seemed to me, keeping the flies off his face while he grew steadily worse until death came. Father made a little coffin and took the baby to a graveyard at Newtonia, near where we expected later to live. Soon after this there came an epidemic of cholera. It was very fatal. At all hours of the day and night there would suddenly break out at some home the cries of mourning at the death of a member of the family. So numerous were the deaths that all semblance to funerals ceased. The town dray would be seen going by the house with a pine box for a coffin, unattended, to the burial ground. I remember the case of a young man named Crabtree who boasted that the cholera could not kill him. He was seized with it as suddenly as the rest but sought to fight it with the most wicked oaths he could utter. Cursing and swearing he died a few hours later. Brother Harry was born the second fall we were in Granby. We had moved across town and were living in what was a negro cabin. I do not know that negroes ever lived in this particular cabin but it was the same kind. Built of logs, no floor but the dirt, only a low doorway over which a blanket hung, and a small opening where a short length of a log had been cut out served as a window. The beds were bunk fashion, one above the other with a very low loft in which Charley and Willie slept. Our broom was made of hickory and used to sweep off the dirt floor. Our neighbors were negroes. One family, Uncle Edward and Aunt Sarah, were the nearest and best neighbors. They were as black as coals on the outside but on the inside their hearts were as white as the whitest. They were only recently out of slavery. A large family of children had been born to them in slavery. As they grew up, like young cattle, they were sold as chattels. A profit was made in breeding and selling human beings as slaves. They had watched their children go, one by one, until all were gone. Then came the war and liberty. It was during the very first years of their liberty we knew them. Every Sunday they had chicken for dinner. They said they had raised chickens for their master all their lives but were never allowed to eat any. Now they were free they resolved to have a chicken dinner every Sunday. We soon found out if we went over just after they ate there would be chicken left for us. So we would go. One incident sister Janey wrote me not long ago. We moved out on the prairie near Newtonia the next spring and passed the summer there. Winter came bringing Christmas. Janey and Martha walked into Granby to see the Christmas tree. To their consternation they found there was a charge made to see the tree. They had no money. They went to Aunt Sarah's to stay all night. She asked them if they were going to the Christmas tree, which was an unusual event. They told her of the admission and that they had no money. "Yes, you are going," she said, and gave them the money, insisting on them going. For them there was no present on the tree which they had paid to see, while to the children of the rich or well to do presents were distributed. How changed from today when if children will not come Christmas trees are put up on the streets, literally taken to the children with candy for all. It was not so in Granby that Christmas of 1868. The summer of 1869 was spent on the prairie near Newtonia. Our house was built by father was the only house on the prairie at that time between the ridge just above Newtonia and the timber line toward Granby, a distance of nearly three miles. The timber along Shoal Creek was two miles away to the north. There was no house in sight southerly but the lower lands concealed widow DuVault. She came to visit us once. Mother showed her the family album. In it was Uncle Harry Lawrence's picture in his uniform of Captain in the Union army. Mrs. DuVault had a fit of anger. She threw the book on the floor and stamped out of the house. Mother was glad to have her go while sorry for the scene. Afterward she sent a message saying her husband and all her sons had been killed by Union soldiers and the sight of a Northern uniform maddened her. Mother sent no reply and thereafter we never visited. In Newtonia was a large stone barn belonging to a Captain Ritchie, who had been on the Union side. When Price's army was retreating before Seigle's men in the yearly years of the war the rebels made this barn headquarters. The union forces came up and planted their cannon on the ridge just in front of where we afterward lived, and overlooking the town which they shelled, making the barn a target. I am a witness to the fact they were good marksmen. The holes were still in the barn when we lived there which the cannon balls had made in going through. They say the rebels came pouring out like hornets and retreated to Neosho, nearer the Arkansas line into which state they were driven. This was the battle of Newtonia where about 20000 Union troops were engaged. We lived on the battlefield where we found many relics in shells, bayonets, and trinkets of various kinds. In town near the barn in the summer of 1869 we had a brick yard where we dug out an unexploded shell. Uncle Will came out from Ohio that spring with his bride who had been Mina Ferguson. He was a brickmaker. A yard was put in at Newtonia. Perry and I worked edging the brick and hacking them. Father did the mixing which was bad for him as he was then in the first stages of consumption. Charley dug the clay and Uncle Will did the moulding. Brother Willie off-bore, that is, carried the moulds out to the level yard where by quickly inverting them the brick were dumped on the ground to dry. After a little Perry and I would turn them up on edge. Later on, when they were sufficiently dry, we would put them on long rows of hacks, piled as high as our heads. Later they were trundled in wheel barrows to the kiln and later burnt. That was great fun. It was roasting ear time. The fires were kept going night and day for a week or so. There was no sale for the brick so Uncle Will and Aunt Mina went back to Ohio. Later we sold the brick. Years afterward I found they had been used to build a church. That the church was blown down by a tornado. The brick were gathered up and used in a dwelling on Indian Creek toward Neosho. There was no school on the prairie, and as I said, no houses. There were a number of houses in the edge of the timber. One was that of Mr. Hilliard. His children were Silas and Delilah, nearly grown up. These are the only names I remember except McCanns who lived under the hill on the road to Newtonia. Mr. Hilliard was a union man and while and old man and a non-combatant was compelled to hide out to avoid the bushwhackers. Finally he had to leave the country as did all the union men, to avoid being killed. This was done under cover of darkness. A voice would call, "Hello," and if the man went to the door he would be shot by someone out in the dark. In Granby I heard a woman tell about wearing mens' clothing during the war. One day she crossed a foot log with a union soldier. She tripped him until he fell off into the water where she kept him under until he drowned. She told a neighbor of her own kind with a good deal of pride, overlooking the small boy who listened. Shooting scrapes were common in Granby. Father came home about Christmas time in 1869 where he passed through the experience of seeing men shot down in the street. A tough gang came up from Arkansas to take the town. The marshal, named Bailey, put up a fight. All the men who came were killed except one who was shot a dozen times, captured and taken bleeding to jail. It was a cold day and there was no fire. Father heard him praying for his wife and children. Such a man, shouting at others and killing at least one man after a drunken debauch deliberately planned, badly wounded and at the point of death turns to prayer as a last resort. He may have been praying to human ears. At least his prayers awakened sympathy. The marshal arranged to have him taken to a room with a fire and a bed. A crowed gathered saying, "Let him die in jail." The marshal called for help, father among them. They carried the prisoner out. The marshal cocked his pistol saying he would shoot the first man who interfered and made them clear the way. Father, in telling it, said he could hear the click, click of cocking revolvers all through the crowd, but no one drew. Mother went to father's coat, an army overcoat, and found two bullet holes made by stray shots, showing the danger of being around at such a time. Later the wounded man, while pretending helplessness, suddenly jumped to his feet one night when two men rode up with a horse, dressed and was away to join a waiting crowd near town before any one woke up. He was never recaptured. A horse thief was always punished but no one for killing a man. Such men always got away and went to Texas, then a resort for pursued criminals. Early in the spring of 1870 I went with father to Newtonia and on our return we stopped at the corner of the fence opposite the graveyard where brother Jimmie was buried. Father had stopped to rest for he had grown weaker during the winter with his coughing spells. As he looked across at the graveyard, apparently not thinking of me as he spoke aloud, "I don't so much mind dying, but I hate to be buried here." Of course I told mother as soon as I could after reaching home. That was on a Saturday. The next day mother wrote to Uncle Harry in Illinois that if he expected to see his brother George alive to come soon. She read me the letter before mailing it and I wondered that she could know father would not live long. He seemed quite strong to me and was always up and about. It seems to me now he might have "caught" the dread disease from Uncle John whom he nursed. He was never a very strong man after that time, while he did a good deal of hard work. He had caught cold while sitting up with a sick man in Granby the winter of 1868, and never recovered. Working in the brick yard the next summer in the mud was bad for him. His blood was very much out of order. A sore on his hand would hardly heal at all. Now mother wrote he would not be long alive. Instead of Uncle Harry coming Croff Bailey was the one. What a powerful man he was, over six feet tall and weighing over two hundred pounds. A giant he seemed beside father who was then shrunken. In a day or two it was arranged for father to go back to Illinois with him. Croff brought out a team and buggy from a livery stable. That seemed a great extravagance. We all stood about the buggy while the good byes were spoken. Croff said, "If we meet no more on earth may we meet in heaven." I do not remember individual farewells. Perhaps it was because father was too overcame to speak. We did not cry. At least I do not remember that we did. Croff drove away toward Granby. We stood watching the buggy over the prairie until it disappeared from view, and with it my father. This must have been about April. We were to follow as soon as possible, but how? That was a serious question. Charley and Willie worked out. Charley for a man named Stringfield living near Newtonia. Willie for a man whose name I do not remember. Mother tried to trade off our house. The land belonged to a railroad company and we concluded to abandon it. I went with mother to Newtonia one day when she succeeded in trading it to a man for a team and wagon. The man delayed delivering the team until he found if he could move the house. There was a fear the railroad company might object. Several trials were made before he succeeded. Then the house moved slowly away until it crossed the line into another section. Then the deal was completed and the team delivered to us. Two gray mares much like the two we had driven into Missouri. They were named Tobe and Nell. They were old and miserably poor. We loaded in the few household effects unsold, a dutch oven for baking bread and started on the return journey to Illinois. That was the third day of July. We stopped in Granby that night at Jesse Shortas, a school mate of father's. Next day, the Fourth, we made Carthage where they had celebrated the Fourth of July. Celebrations of the Fourth of July were not common in the south after the Civil War. We drove through Carthage and to the banks of a little stream a mile out of town where we camped. Charley and Willie slept under the wagon. Mother and the rest of us slept in the wagon. The horses were turned out to eat grass. They had no other feed on that 500 mile trip and did not move out of a walk in the whole distance. Harvest was on and grain was standing shocked in the field. Southwest Missouri was at its best at that time. One evening we came into Sedalia just before night. A storm came on of wind and rain and terrible thunder. I looked into the window of a house we passed and saw a family gathering at supper. I cannot describe the feelings which came over me in the contrast. They were at home. Father and mother were there. No fear of the coming storm. Supper was on the table and they were sitting down so comfortably. We were homeless. Father away, perhaps not alive. In fact, as we afterward knew, in his grave. We were practically penniless and the storm was a real danger as shown by the first gusts of wind which threatened to upset the wagon. The horses were unhitched and fastened to the wagon with backs to the storm. Charley and Willie held the wagon. The rest of us stayed inside and held to the cover. I thought the wagon would blow over or the cover come off. But with all hands holding on, it held. After the first hard blow had passed we drove through town. There was a saloon brawl on. Shots were fired as we passed. One man ran with a long knife in his hand, his face bleeding. We did not stop. Just on the further side of town we stopped in a lane and tied up the team. No supper for us or for the poor tired, hungry horses. Next morning we moved slowly on to where there was grass further away from town. There the horses were turned loose. A fire was finally built out of the rain soaked sticks we picked up and we had breakfast. Sedalia was at the nearest railroad point where we saw a train for the first time in over three years. I need not dwell further on the trip. At Louisiana, a town on the Mississippi, where we ferried across, mother sent to the post office where Uncle Harry was to write us. Charley came back with a letter which he handed to mother. As she read we saw the tears come to her eyes. Father was dead. He was buried on the day we started on our trip. What a feeling of desolation came over me. I was an orphan. At the end of 30 days we reached the vicinity of Pleasant Hill. We passed Jacksonville, Springfield and Lincoln's tomb. Through Bloomington and now we were nearing Uncle Harry's. On the banks of Mackinaw, a small stream, we stopped for our last dinner. We bathed and put on clean clothes. I wondered at this for it seemed to me an unnecessary thing to do. Soon afterward we drove up to Uncle Harry's in Pleasant Hill. That is a never-to-be-forgotten day. We saw Aunt Cynthia for the first time. That was August first, 1870. Croff's came in their carriage, a wonderful thing to us. Charley and Jim I had remembered but Lou and Belle had grown into being and Lottie was a long, curly haired baby. I thought her the most beautiful object I had ever seen. They were all kind to us. Shortly afterward we went down to father's grave not far away. We were at Uncle Harry's several days, then moved out to the house on Croff's place which father had built and from which we had started out for Missouri three and a half years (nearly) before. That winter Martha, Perry and I went to school to Reese Johns. We had been out of school nearly three years and were very bashful. When we reached the school grounds the teacher was out in the yard walking on his hands. That was a wonderful thing for a teacher to do and he captured all the children at once. A teacher who could walk on his hands could do anything. Indeed this teacher could. The first thing was to nickname everyone. I was John the Baptist and Perry was Commodore Perry before the day was over. It had been arranged that Janey, then thirteen, was to work at Croff's. That ended her life at home save for an occasional visit. Charley and Willie soon went to cutting corn, followed by shucking. I was again care free, but never forgot that I was an orphan. We were to move out on the prairie the next spring to some land Aunt Cynthia owned and which she stills owns after more than fifty two years. We were in school until April of 1871 when we moved. Charley and Willie had gone back and forth to the farm. That winter Jim Rogers brought his mother with Mat and Jessie for a visit. There had been a sleet and all the trees hung in icicles. I went rabbit hunting with Jim. On the trip he said he had a catarrh. I wondered what kind of an animal it was and asked him. He said it was in his nose and I thought that was stranger yet. After dinner we all went down to the scales and weighed. I weighed 49 pounds and was just about at my tenth birthday. After playing awhile longer Jessie wanted to go and weigh again. I thought that funny as we had just weighed, but she said it might be different next time. Mrs. Rogers smoked a pipe but we had remembered that. There were many of the same scholars in school that winter as the winter of 1866 when I had gone to school there before. The district was the same but a new school house had been built on the road, a short distance east of our house instead of so much further away across the field on the north and south road. Ether Williams, Ethel and Elzena, called Babe, were there. We had gone to school with Ether and Sis before. That fall I had tagged after Ether all over the timber of Mackinaw, hunting squirrels, climbing trees after birds and flying squirrels which only sailed down by spreading their feet which had a connecting web so as to give them a gliding motion through the air. We were inseparable, while he was several years older than I. He was my champion in school. No larger boy could impose on me. All feared Ether, not that he fought but he was quick and strong and could wrestle and run and they knew he would fight, so they let him alone. All of this accounts for our friendship in the later years and when nearly forty years later he met his tragic death it drew from me the unavailing tear. Col. Duling and Joe were again in school as before, coming with Belle and Joey Spahr with whose people they lived. Col. and Sis were always regarded as lovers, as they were and remained for all the after years. Neither kept the company of any other. A few years later they were married and not until nearly fifty years later when she died so suddenly as she prayed in church were they separated. Theirs was an ideal wooing and mating. Three of the Henline boys were in school. Stag was one, Robert, about my age, another, and I think Henry. Three named Smith, children of the widow Smith. Charley, Jim, and Lou Bailey. Three of the Big Dick Williams children and two of Bechtels, Jim and Iona. There were others, Sally Fariss and Josie, the Shepherd girls, the Grimsley boys, others whose names do not occur at this writing. Hale Johns, a brother to the teacher, and a half brother whose name is gone from my memory. There were about forty in all and Reese Johns was a most excellent teacher. I went into McGuffeys Third reader and Rays Primary arithmetic which I completed that winter. Learned the multiplication table which was easy. Had a little trouble with the 9's and 12's but none with the rest. Johns was partial to me as were nearly all my teachers. I listened to all the other recitations, so gained a smattering in advance. I was very small for my age and he would frequently turn from a class of grown young people who could not answer a question in class and ask me. Strange to say I usually had an answer ready, being a listener, and made some astonishingly correct answers, some by the hazard of a guess. We moved out on the prairie five miles east of Lexington on a half section of land left Aunt Cynthia by her father, Samuel Smalley. We always knew it as Uncle Harry's place. He built a two room box house, a mere shanty, in which we lived for five years. I n 1875 we built on a shed on the south side which we used as a kitchen. About a hundred yards directly south he built a stable for the horses which was covered with straw. The stable was about 10 feet wide and 60 feet long, with an opening just above the manger where two boards were off the side wall. We could look in from the house and see the horses eating. As they afterward stood the horses and mules were named Jack and John, a large team belonging to Uncle Harry which we afterward bought, Jack and Gin, a span of mules, Fan and Dick, a blind mare and a young horse which, as a colt 2 years old, we brought from Missouri, and Little John, a mule colt foaled by one of the mares. Tobe we drove from Missouri. Tobe died that spring when the mule colt was a few weeks old. When it was old enough to work we bought a mate from John McCullough and named it Cully, an abbreviation of the name of its former owner. I worked these mules two years and learned many lesson from them. One was that you have to be smarter than a mule to work it. Sixty acres of this land had been plowed the year before. The rest was in sod, the most of it a blue grass and wild grass mixture. In the lower lands or sloughs it was a very coarse and worthless grass we called slough grass. It answered for a top covering over the straw on the stable and to top out a stack of hay to help shed the rain. Stock would not eat it, while it had luxuriant growth as high as a man's head. The wild prairie grass grew only about a foot high and made excellent hay. Charley and I put the 60 acres of old land, as we called it, in corn that year. It was my first experience in farm work. I was very small for my age. The work was tiresome with the long hours. There were no play days except the Fourth of July and one day for a picnic. Uncle Harry drove the two horse planter, working a team named Brownie and Pet. The mule team, Jack and Gin, we bought the next year. Charley worked Fan, the blind mare we bough of little Dick Williams, and Dick the colt which we broke that spring. I worked Uncle Harry's mares. Willie worked Jack and John the big team and broke sod all spring. In fact, except one slough which was then too wet to farm, Willie in the next two years, broke out all the sod until all the land was under cultivation. I said there was a half section. I should have said 240 acres. After the corn was planted I worked the team harrowing sod. I rode Pet as it was hard walking over the sod. I rode bareback with the harness on, not very comfortable. In turning the horses would sometimes turn too quick and upset the harrow, hinged in the middle. It was too heavy for me to turn back and I had to call for help. Sometimes I was too far away to be heard. Then I would become vexed and cry in anger as much as anything else. When the corn was high enough to plow then we both worked with small double shovel plows with two coupled together by means of two pieces of wood, one above the other fastened loosely to the handles of the plow. The plows were so made that on one, the left shovel was in front of the right, and vice versa on the other, so that when coupled together the front shovels were next to the row of corn. I used this plow for three years, while Charley the second year bought a riding cultivator. He used it, however, without a seat but the plows were held in place by the frame while with the old fashioned double shovels, four handles in all, two of which were held in the hands, one in each hand, they had to be held in balance all the time to keep them from falling over. It was very hard work for a boy like me to use such plows. During the third year I hurried out to the field on day and hitched to Charley's plow. When he came out from dinner I was half way across the field. When he came up and saw what I had done he turned around and went to town and bought a riding cultivator. Not to be outdone I rigged a board on mine with a cushion on one end and rode astride. It beat walking and it seemed to be a fair world after all to allow me such an easy task. We were through cultivating the corn by the Fourth of July. Then we went to haying. The prairie grass where the sod was unbroken was cut with a mower and raked in windrows by a wooden rake pulled by Fan, the blind mare. I rode her while Charley held to the rake handles, dumping it as desired. I remember we ran into a bumble bee's nest. Charley ran but I did not dare leave the poor blind mare, frantic with bee stings, while I was stung in the face until my eyes swelled shut. That did not stop me from work, however, but I was let off one day to go to a picnic at Sulphur Springs on the Mackinaw. I walked. It was a hot day and the dust was so hot it burned my feet. We all went barefoot in summer, men, women, and children. I would hunt for grass to step on as it was cool. But the grass was on rough ground while the dust in the road was smooth. So it was hard choice between the smooth hot dust in the road and the cooler grass on the rough ground. Boy-like, and possibly man-like too, I would walk in the road until my feet were burning, then go on the grass until my feet got hurt, then back into the dusty road again. I suppose it was about five miles to the picnic ground, a ten mile walk in all. I cut corn for fodder but was too small to do much that year. I shucked by taking the row which the wagon straddled which we called the down row while Charley and Willie would each husk two rows by the side of the wagon. While presumably I husked only half as much as either I had to stoop to pick up the corn knocked over by the wagon and no man would take the one row under the wagon in preference to two rows of standing corn by the side of the wagon. I spent five years on the farm in Illinois, going to school about three months in the winter and working as only those who raised corn in Illinois during such years know anything about. They were years of drudgery to me. The only relief was the 4th of July holiday and one picnic day until the beginning of school. That was the beginning of a happy time. The saddest day was the last day of school. This school was in the Crumbaker district and the school house I had watched Charley Kennedy build in the spring of 1865. Mr. Crumbaker afterward bought the place on which we then lived and the school district has since been called by his name. William Stickler, who afterward married Maria Crumbaker, taught here for five winters, the last four of which we were in school, Martha, Perry and I. Charley and Willie had not gone to school since we moved to Missouri, and Janey had gone to Croff Bailey's on our return from Missouri, so was not again at home. She married John Bishop at Croff's place. Mr. Stickler was a remarkably good teacher and very thorough in his work. The school was a small one and there were few changes in the scholars. I think I can name all of them. The Crumbaker family had the largest quota, as all of their children, ten in number, attended this school at the different periods in their growth, but not all of them at any one time. During the five years we were on the farm there, the last of which John Crumbaker taught, those in school were: Sam, Jonas, Joanna, Maggie and Alice Crumbaker, Frank and Ella Hiser and Billie Hiser, a cousin who lived at the William Kennedy home. Jimmy Ogden, Eddie Costello, who died in the summer of 1873. Mike and Biddy Maloney at whose home Eddie Costello lived. Frank, Lucretia and Hannah Foreman, Sam Piper, a cousin to the Crumbakers, Maggie Belyeu. Frank Kennedy and Mandy Lane who lived at Charley Kennedy's. Not all of these went to school all the time as the Foreman's and Charley Kennedy's moved away and Maloney's moved away in the fall of 1874. Eddie Costello suffered from chronic phthisic which developed into tuberculosis, then called consumption from which he died. He was a remarkably fine boy, precocious in his studies, dying at the age of about fifteen. During the winter of 1871 he printed on the blackboard at the rear of the school room, in chalk with shaded letters the motto of the school: OUR RULE, DO RIGHT This motto remained on the board nearly five years, revered by all from the fact Eddie wrote it, and it was as nearly the rule of conduct in right living as scholars of any school I have ever known. Marion Crumbaker was in college and his text books as fast as completed were sent home. They then came into our school and while not in our course of study classes recited in them and I always listened to the recitations of every class in school. In fact my advancement in the various studies of so much use in after years was due to the habit of listening to the recitations while studying my own lessons. In this way, and by special lessons I had a course in ancient history as well as modern history, zoology, or natural history, physics or natural philosophy as we then called it and botany. This was of course in addition to our regular studies, which were not in a graded course. We were allowed a "go as you please" gait, but recited in classes. Especial attention was given to reading and arithmetic. One paragraph and sometimes one sentence constituted a recitation period. I can without fear say that all the advanced scholars became good readers. The McGuffey readers were used and this method of teaching fixed the lessons in the memory so that I can given the substance of nearly all of them today, if the title is given and repeat most of the poems. Jonas Crumbaker, Joanna and I were in the same class in arithmetic. Jonas and I were together in all our studies. I completed Rays Practical Arithmetic the winter of '71 and in the following years reviewed it and took the higher course. There were few if any public schools in Illinois then or since, especially in the county, with such an advanced course of study. Much of whatever success I have had in the educational work in which I engaged in the later years was due to this country school and to the methods and teaching of William Stickler. It may be interesting to a later generation to tell of the games we played in school at recess and noon. Blackman was the general sport for boys and girls played in the school yard. There were two lines, or home bases, on each side of the yard. One player would be selected as the blackman who would take a station on one side while the remainder to a station at the other base, facing. The one selected as blackman would call out, "What will you do when you see the blackman coming?" All would answer, "Run right through." As they ran to the other base the blackman would catch as many as he could and patting them on the back would say, "One, two, three for you." In this way the one caught became a blackman and then each would call out as before. When all the opposing side were caught the game would be ended and the first one caught would become blackman in a new game. The boys would play blackman around the school house, having one home base. Any one caught off the home base was captured. When all were caught a new game would begin. We played "base" in much the same way in the open yard. There could be as many bases as desired, a block of wood or piece of board constituting the base. Each player could have a base. Anyone caught off a base was captured and then belonged to the base of the captor. This game was generally called gool. This was a corruption of the word goal, I think. In playing ball we had a variety of games. Two could play "tip up" which was to knock the ball straight up with a paddle. The one who caught it took the paddle. To play cat, one tossed the ball, one was at bat and another caught. This was "one old cat." Where there were a number to play with three bases to make, it was called "Town ball" and played something like baseball, choosing up for sides. We played "mumble peg" with our pocket knives, also a game called "jacks" with five pebbles. This was done by throwing up all five or more from the palm and catching on the back of the hand. "Tag" is almost universal and was played at close of school. The indoor games were few as we played outside almost regardless of the weather. Sometimes the indoor game took on the form of the Virginia reel which was called a dance and that was a horrible sin. I never went to a dance in my life to take a part and very few times even saw dancing. Card playing was banned at our home, but we liked to play authors and such harmless games as could be played without the regular playing cards. The summer of 1875 was one of the wettest known up to that time in McLean county. The wet season commenced July 16, 1875. Up to that time the crops had grown as usual. The corn was just tasseling out, being about six feet high. We had finished haying and begun reaping the spring grain. In fact all the grain was spring sown. Wheat was grown very little. We had seeded rye that year. A small field south of the house, a quarter of a mile away. We were harvesting there on July 16 of that year. In the early afternoon we saw what we called thunder clouds gathering in the northeast and in the northwest, two separate clouds, piled high and dark. For an hour or so they seemed to be standing still. We watched them closely as we did all such clouds in summer while at work in the field. They would swing overhead surprisingly quick at times. Often when such a cloud seemed approaching we would risk going around the field once more and sometimes after starting realize our mistake. Then to save being drenched with the rain we would unhitch and make for the house on the run, riding one of the horses, of course. On this occasion the clouds hung so motionless it was hard to tell which way they were moving. Finally it became apparent both clouds were moving toward us. All clouds that were accompanied by thunder were called thunder clouds, and nearly all rain clouds in summer were thunder clouds. The exception was a general rain when the sky would be filled with low hung clouds. As soon as we realized these clouds were approaching the span of mules hitched to the reaper, one that we called a self rake, were unhitched and put to the wagon which had been used for riding to the field. Willie was driving the mules. Uncle Harry, Charley, Perry and I were binding. The clouds came on with surprising quickness. The first drops fell as the wagon started, the mules on a run. By the time we had gone a hundred yards the full force of the rain was on which we almost directly faced. The mules slowed to a walk. In the fraction of a minute we were all wet to the skin. Boylike, Perry and I jumped from the wagon and started to run, thinking we could outrun the team. The rainfall was so heavy it seemed like the water came down in sheets. I strangled, and held my hands over my nose as a protection against breathing the water. My pants were so heavy with the water they slipped down. I never wore suspenders at this time of my life. So I was compelled to hold up my pants with one hand and hold the other over my nose to shed off the water. Before I reached the house the water was ankle deep. The "shower" lasted only a few minutes. A tub in the yard, empty before, was half filled when the rain was over. Some half grown chickens were drowned as well as a number of young turkeys. You could have seen a dog anywhere in any of the corn fields. The house stood in the center of 160 acres of corn. The wind, the weight of the water and the softened ground combined and the fields which had been so fine with the tasseling corn looked like a roller had passed over. The corn never straightened up. Rain after rain came for several weeks. The field of rye was under water and the reaper barely in sight. It seemed the beginning of a deluge. We had been discouraged before and this seemed a catastrophe. Little of the rye was saved, although Perry and I waded in and packed the bundles out to higher ground. At intervals harvesting was renewed. The reapers were run in the grain only on e way, so as to pick it up, as the grain lay flat. There was no pretence of binding. In fact the reapers were discarded and a mowing machine used. A neighbor named Phil Johnson came with his mower. The ground was so soft that the traction was not enough to turn the wheel to drive the sickle if the driver rode. The machine often mired down, the wheels dragging like sled runners. The grain would cling to the sickle bar. Phil while walking behind would step on the grain which was dragging so as to break it loose from the bar. Once he lost his balance and stumbled, stepping across the sickle bar. Fortunately the horses stopped at a word but the sickle had cut his ankle half off. "Dick" claimed by me, was ridden to Lexington by Billie Smith in record time for a doctor. Uncle Harry fainted at the sight of the blood. This seemed strange to us for he had gone through four years of a bloody war and was himself wounded. As I said, we were discouraged, and a remark father once made of wishing himself in Washington territory was recalled. By chance, we came across the Oregon Farmer, published in Salem, Oregon. We wrote to a woman who had an article about the country in this paper. Soon we had the Oregon fever. Mother thought with her family of boys there would be better opportunities in the growing west as land owners than in Illinois as renters. She determined to let one of the boys go ahead to spy out the land. At once a dispute came up between Charley and Willie as to which should go. Charley claimed the right as the older and Willie contended that in that wild country the best shot should go and that he was the one. Charley finally agreed to a test of marksmanship with both rifle and shotgun. He lost out of course. We all knew that and felt it was for the best. So on Nov. 16, 1875 Willie started for Oregon. Dell Bishop went along and John McCullough went as far as California. That morning I took Willie to John Bishop's, a mile toward town, in a wagon with his heavy valise and two guns, a rifle and a shotgun. The ground was frozen hard and the wagon rattled until it could be heard a mile. They left from John Bishop's, going to McCullough's. I turned back to shuck corn as John took them on to town. We had a hard task gathering the corn which was so nearly flat on the ground and the ground so soft. It was an open rainy winter. While only fifteen I was practically the head of the family. Charley was very fleshy. He weighed nearly 240 pounds at this time. Willie wrote back encouragingly and it was only a question of how soon we could follow. We gathered and sold the corn and on February 16, 1876 had a public sale of everything we owned except our clothing. The day of the sale was cold and stormy. People kept by the fire in the house while bargain sales were going on. In desperation I climbed up and put a board over the chimney. It soon smoked them out. On March 22 we were all ready and took the train at Lexington for Bloomington where we were to get our tickets to San Francisco. Dave McCullough and John Cohagen went with us, our own family and John Bishop who had married my sister Janey. We did not think of spending money at a hotel, so sat up all night at the depot. Next morning we took a train to Peoria where we changed to the Burlington. One coach on this train was filled with soldiers going to the Black Hills to fight Indians. I spent a good deal of time in their coach, listening to their talk. They were regular soldiers and wanted to do anything but fight Indians. Wished the train would run off the track, anything to save them from the Black Hills. Of course this was mere jesting on their part, but it was real to me. Only three months later came the Custer massacre. I have often wondered what became of these soldiers who were going to join that movement, and if they formed a part of Custer's command at that fatal battle of the Little Big Horn. I thought of them when I once stood on this battle ground. The first night on the train we passed through Iowa. It was wonderfully strange to us. The motion of the car, the clack, clack, clack of the wheels on the rail joints, the swaying bell cord and smoking lamps. The stopping and starting of the train, it was all a new experience. Sometime in the night as the train stopped at a station I was awakened by my brother Perry jumping up out of the seat. I saw him run down the aisle and while scarcely awake myself knew he had no business to leave the car. I ran after him as fast as I could. He slammed the door behind him. I ran on to the next car but he was not in sight. I knew he had no time to have gone through the car. So I looked out on the station platform. He was not there. In desperation as I expected the train to start any instant I crossed the car platform to the other side. I saw an object moving under the car steps. It was Perry. I grabbed him and pulled him out. As I put my foot on the step with one hand on the railing and the other dragging Perry the train started. I yelled. Either the conductor or a brakeman stood on the platform and pulled the bell cord. I held on while the train was in motion but knew I did not have the strength to get him on with the train running. When we went back into the car we discovered he had lost his hat. He was sound asleep and knew nothing of what happened. Mother was frightened and securing a strong cord tied one end to his wrist and the other to the seat. After that until we were in Oregon Perry was tied up every night. Mother would take no chances. I will attempt no detailed description of our journey by train across the plains. Robert Louis Stevenson describes a journey he made over the same road about the same time. I do not know the exact date of his trip but from the similarity of incidents it might have been on the same train. Every man on the train had a fire arm of some kind. If a wild animal was seen, and many antelope and jack rabbits were in sight, the windows were filled with guns of every description regardless of the distance to the game. I saw nothing killed. We had some bedding along and in Omaha bought boards so arranged as to fit between the seats. On these bedding was spread and in this way answered for bunks in which the passengers slept. The tourists' sleeping cars came many years later. The emigrant coaches of that day were crude affairs and coupled into mixed trains, box cars, stock cars filled with live stock, and on the freight schedule. We would be side tracked for hours for a passenger train to pass. We had been herded onto the cars at Omaha like cattle and as far as the railroad company was concerned were treated like cattle. We were two weeks on the trip from Illinois to California. One morning the train glided down the Sierras into the Sacramento Valley. We had been snow bound just a little while before. Now we were in a garden of flowers, a bower of beauty, paradise it seemed to us. At Sacramento, the terminal at that time of the Union Pacific, we transferred to a river steamer. It was an exciting ride. The boat was crowded with passengers, and these were importuned, hounded I might say, by hotel drummers. There was almost a riot. Some of the passengers became partisans of the hotels to which they agreed to go. Crowds gathered about disputing drummers, or runners as we called them. When on the side of the dock the boat would careen and an angry mate would charge down swearing and ordering the crowd to get amidships. We agreed to go to the Manhattan Hotel. I remember one of the passengers claimed to be Wild Bill. He looked the part. I never knew whether William Hicock, the real Wild Bill, ever made this trip or not. About 8 o'clock in the evening we came down San Francisco Bay and into sight of the city. We had never before seen a city by lamp-light. I had not dreamed of San Francisco being built on hills. We were from the level prairies of Illinois. It was a wonderful sight. We just missed a steamer to Portland, Oregon, so had to lay over a week, nearly, the boats being on a weekly schedule. Perry and I made the most of our time. For boys of 12 and 15 and from the country we were pretty well posted on city life and especially San Francisco about which we had read many stories. We visited Woodwards Gardens, then a popular resort, and the Sand Lots were Dennis Kearney became famous. We listened to speakers haranguing crowds. Whether we heard Dennis himself I never knew. The Palace Hotel had just been completed. We looked in awe on a hotel where it was said it cost $5.00 just for a room. I thought maybe some day I would be rich enough to stay there one night. I did that a third of a century later, to gratify the wish, I must confess. We saw the first cable car line in the world, in operation then about a year. It answered the Chinaman's description, "No pushee, no pullee, go like hellee." To stay at a hotel a week was of course an entirely new experience for all. We had never before been at a hotel. It was a third rate one at that. I remember the waitress with a pimpled face who called the same bill of fare every meal we were there. "Beefsteak, ham and eggs, sea bass and codfish." We usually took fish and generally sea bass. We finally took the steamer, the John L. Stephens for Portland. It was a side wheeler and a tub of a boat. We took steerage passage. As we steamed out through the Golden Gate the ocean was calm and the voyage a promise of pleasure. I ate a hearty dinner as did all the rest. It was my only meal on the ocean. An hour or two later we were at sea, out of sight of land. While the water was not rough, the waves were a little choppy and the vessel rolled from side to side. The wheel which was raised out of the water would run slowly, while the one in the water seemed to speed up. I never knew how this was regulated, whether automatically or by a man. One at a time we became seasick. Harry, scarcely out of babyhood, was the only one to escape. Most of the passengers were seasick. I envied a Chinaman who seemed to enjoy the trip. We were scarcely on deck until we reached the mouth of the Columbia River. The bar was rough and the tide apparently low. So we beat about a few hours. During this time I was on deck But when we started across the bar we were driven below and the hatches closed. The bar seemed rough and once the vessel struck bottom. Our first stop was at Astoria, Oregon. Then we touched at a number of places on both sides of the river, usually at canneries were large quantities of tin were unloaded. We reached Portland and went to the St. Charles Hotel. Then we took a ferry across the Willamette River to the depot of the Oregon & California railroad. It is the same depot now used by the Union Pacific on the East side. The train moved up the Willamette Valley. This was April 10, 1876, nearly three weeks from the time we left Illinois. It was about the close of the rainy season, but when we were above Albany we saw a sea of mud. I hoped we would be through it before we reached Harrisburg, our destination. Looking out of an open window, and at that time of life I could not ride without having the window open to see and to breathe, I watched the water splash from the end of the ties as the wheels passed over. When we were in the very worst of it the conductor called, "Harrisburg." We had no choice but to get off. We went to a hotel for the night. Next morning Charlie and I started on foot for Amos Dunham's where brother Willie was at work. We walked through the fields, as they were no muddier than the road, taking a direct course as pointed out to us. On this trip we were directed to go toward Rocky Butte. We then found out what a butte was and how it was pronounced. Climbing a rail fence Charlie sat on the top rail to rest. It was what was called a stake and ridered fence. At each corner of a five rail fence, laid worm fashion, two stakes were put up so as to cross and in the crotch a rail, the rider, was laid. Charley sat on a rider. It broke under his weight. The distance to the top rail was a foot or so. His weight and momentum was such as to break this rail, and the next. The rails were quite rotten from age and the rains. It seemed a poor fence to be smashed by the weight of a man. I laughed at him. It was comical sight. We reached Dunham's and found Willie and Dell Bishop. At once a team and wagon was sent for the folks. Dunham was very hospitable. Here we spent a week. Then we rented a house in a field, or at the edge of a field of a section of land fenced in. There was a corral near the house. We soon scattered to work for various farmers. Sister Martha at Dunham's. I went to work for a man named Abe Hunter. As this is the story of my life I will not give the doing of the others except as connected directly with my own experience. I drove a team hitched to a harrow sowing spring wheat. The ground was very wet. Many of the dead furrows were filled with water. I wore boots, the ground being cold and the people here were not going barefoot. So I had to jump the water in the dead furrows while harrowing. That was a strange experience to me. In fact all our experiences were strange. We were in a strange country and among strange people. We were strangers. They called us emigrants. Really we were immigrants. We were what they also called "tenderfeet." I late found that this meant more than merely a new comer. Looking back after nearly half a century I realize just what the word "tenderfoot" meant to the Oregonians and what we really were. I thought that, being from "back East" where or whence all knowledge came, that we knew more than the people of the West, so in reality were here to teach them some of the things we knew. But like all tenderfeet we overlooked some things: The people of the West we now met were with few exceptions, our predecessors from the so-called East by only a few years. Few of them had been born in Oregon and the East had not changed much. In fact our East which we knew was West to the people of the Atlantic coast. Illinois was East to Nebraska and Iowa. Ohio was East to Illinois and so on. It is hard to reach the place where East is East, as Kipling says: "East is East, and West is West and never the twain shall meet." But the people of Oregon, or all the West for that matter, knew the East quite well as they were all watching the East. The people of the East, wherever the East may be, never know as much of the West as the people of the West know of the East. A person just from the East is always a tenderfoot to the people of the West and his feet never toughen until he is convinced he does not know it all and that the people of the West know as much or a little more than he does. But I have not found bashfulness at fault in the West. The very circumstances of Western life and experience are calculated to overcome bashfulness. So the Western people are not abashed by people just from the East nor do they lack in self conceit. This was true in 1876 and it is true in 1924 when this is written. I know from my own experience. I was once a tenderfoot and am now of the West with all its self confidence or conceit. But I am away from the muddy field where I first worked. Into this field the hounds chased a deer down from the mountains one day. It was another experience for me. The dogs bayed it near me. I went in with a club. While it turned to meet me as a new foe one of the dogs caught it by the hind legs and threw it. I ran in and killed it with a club, my first deer. The hunters came a few minutes later. They gave us a quarter which we ate and enjoyed. It commenced raining one forenoon but we kept on at work. I was surprised when we went in to dinner that Abe did not unharness. I thought he was in a hurry and would do that after dinner. But when we went back to the barn he led the horses out, I thought to water them again. Instead he started to the field with me following him. It was my introduction to the custom of working in the rain, the "Oregon mist" as it was called. In fact it was a very gentle rain. When it rained harder they did not work out in the fields. After the seeding was done I had a few weeks idle time. Perry had started to a country school near where we lived. He had a little trouble with the teacher. I started to school, not really for the purpose of going more than a day or two. It was to protect Perry. That was soon corrected on an explanation to the teacher, a Mr. Williams. Thereafter we became good friends, a friendship which lasted many years. So I spent a few weeks instead of a few days in school, an experience of more value to me than what I really learned as I will tell later. It may be worth noting that one of the girls of this school grew up to become the wife of Senator Bourne of Oregon. The teacher, who was them studying medicine, became Dr. Williams who practiced medicine long years at Palouse, Washington, near my future home. Tom Harris, one of the boys in school, became my companion for two winters in school, one at Harrisburg and one at Brownsville. As was true in most country schools there was speaking on Friday afternoon. In Illinois it was the custom to divide the school into two classes, so as to alternate in the exercises Friday afternoon, usually after the mid-afternoon recess. I always belonged to both classes, as I enjoyed the speaking and always had a new selection. All through life I enjoyed recalling mentally, if not aloud, scores of these pieces. Perry was not so much inclined to speak pieces and being younger he had not accumulated a memory store of them. So when called on to speak a piece he had none ready. He was given to the following Friday afternoon. When he went home the question was what piece to speak. He had once learned Harry and the Guide Post but had forgotten it. All our books had been left behind. Mother recalled one verse that evening. Next morning she recited it all. We never knew she had committed it to memory, nor had she ever recited it before. In the night she lay awake and recalled it from having heard him recite it two years before. This always impressed me as a wonderful feat of memory. Had she ever committed it to memory it would have been different. To recall it word for word under such circumstances is almost beyond comprehension. I learned it through that effort and have never forgotten it. Perhaps I might say here without intent to appear egotistical, even to my children and their children, that I can now repeat selections by the score which would require many hours to do, selections learned in childhood, very largely for the purpose of reciting on some Friday afternoon, going back more than fifty years. I cannot say as much for selection memorized in recent years. I can memorize as quickly but cannot retain as I do the pieces learned when the tablet of memory was more plastic. When harvest came around I went to work for Amos Dunham for whom Willie and Dell Bishop worked. He had a reaper with a platform for carrying the men who bound the grain. It was that much of an improvement over the self raking harvester, which was in turn an improvement over the cradle. I have known and used them all, including, in the later years, the twin binder, the header and a combined harvester. While two could keep the grain bound, Mr. Dunham thought by taking three he could crowd the work a little faster. When the binding season was past the heading came on. At that time the upper Willamette Valley, particularly Linn and Land counties, were vast grain fields. All our family had scattered to various places to work, including sister Janey. Perry, while not yet thirteen, his birthday comes August 28th and this was about the middle of August, had gone out to work. By chance it seemed I was the only one who remained at home Sunday night, August 15. The next day I was to go to William Vaughan's some four miles away to begin work. I was to drive a team belonging to John Bishop which was running out in the field in the edge of which the house stood in which we lived. The house was a quarter of a mile back from the road. The next morning I started on foot to drive in the team. They were the only horses in the field. There was a small corral near the house. I drove them across the field a mile, as it was an entire section of land. As they came up to the bars they kicked up their heels and ran back, clear across the field. I hurried after them. The second time mother was watching and came out to help me. A second time they broke back on a run. I ran after them. By this time I was warmed up, and instead of allowing them to walk leisurely back I ran them. Again I drove them up and with mother always watching and coming out to help, tried to corral them. Again and again, all forenoon, sometimes walking when out of breath but running the greater part of the distance I chased them back and forth around the field. It was noon when, tired out, they went into the corral very easily and willingly. I caught them and hurriedly put on the harness as I was late, having agreed to go in the morning. I was very angry and when placing them to the wagon to hitch up kicked one of them into place. Mother, who stood by helping said quietly, "A good man is kind to his beasts." Needless to say I can never forget the words. There may have been good byes spoke and probably were. I do not remember them and thinking back afterward I recalled her speaking of having a headache, and unusual thing with her. She seldom spoke of herself, especially to complain in any way. As I drove away, still hot and angry at the horses, I had chased them probably five hours, I looked back. Mother was standing where I left her, watching me. Harry was standing near by. I can never forget her form as I saw it last. It seems to me now she had a longing look as though in regret at my driving away. It was probably anxiety over my temper, and my being heated from running so long. I reached Vaughan's and went to work. I do not remember clearly what I did that afternoon, except rigging up a header bed and getting ready for work the next day. Night came on. After supper we went to the barn to sleep and made our bed down in the mow. Johnnie Cohagen and I were together. We had known him some years before coming west. It was my first experience sleeping in a barn. I was long in going to sleep from the newness of the experience. I awakened in the night to listen to the horses munching their feed. I learned then how little horses slept. They ate nearly the whole night through. I could hear mice scampering in the hay, with an occasional squeal. The barn seemed a thing of life with its noises going on all the night through. We were up early and ready for breakfast. We used a header bed for hauling in hay to the barn. In fact the hay was made from cutting grain before it was quite matured. As I came into the barn lot with the second load Mr. Vaughan, an old man past seventy, came out to meet me, saying in a cold matter of fact voice, "Your mother is dead." There was no sympathy in his tone, no gently breaking the news. I cannot describe my feelings. It was one of anger and resentment, then of doubt. It could not be true. I think I said nothing, but jumped down and unhitched the team. Cohagen was there and helped me hitch to a wagon standing in the barn lot. We stood up, I remember, and I drove out to the road and whipped the team into a run. I drove through the Dunham place and into the field in which I had chased the team the day before, all the time thinking it was a lie and mother was not dead. She could not be dead. I had left her strong and robust the day before. To me it was impossible and yet I had dreamed for years of her death. I had awakened in the night, scores of times, crying out to mother until she would answer me. Then I would smile and think of it only as a horrible dream. Could this be a dream from which I would awake. When I came in sight of the house I saw a throng of people and my heart sank. It must be true, else why would the people come. I left the team and ran to the house and into the bed room. The dream had come true. Mother was dead. There could no longer be doubt. Little Harry said he had awakened and thought mother was asleep so he went back to sleep. Then when he awakened again he got up and looked at her and knew she was dead. He had never seen death before as far as I know. He seemed younger than he really was, seven years of age. He ran to the nearest neighbor, a quarter of a mile away and told them. Word was then sent to each member of the family. A doctor came but he had no definite opinion. She had done up the evening work and made ready for morning. Everything was in order showing that she went to bed in her usual good health. Death came in her sleep. She was lying as she always slept with the smile on her face which was there during life. I had often heard her express the wish she might die in that way. To me it seems terrible. I would rather face death, knowing it was coming. I suppose this is due in part to the horror of mother's death. For months life held nothing for me except the purpose to so live that I would meet her in heaven which I pray God daily I may do. We buried her in a country graveyard under the overhanging branches of an oak tree. The place is where the long shadow of the mountains fall in the early morning, as the shadows fell across her pathway when fate turned her toward the West when her heart turned back to the childhood home in Ohio as she had written Aunt Belle. It is the only note of her life that voiced a complaint as far as I ever knew. Her philosophy of life was to meet every condition bravely and with a smile. The following winter I went to school in Harrisburg, in what was then the new school building, a three room affair. A Mr. Brown was principal until the spring term when he was succeeded by a Mr. Bean. Arvilla Davis was the primary teacher and a Mr. Rumsey the intermediate. Tom Harris and I bached in a little building across the street from Mr. Humphrey's. They had two daughters, the younger, Florence, about my age. The older sister was married. Florence went to school. In the later years at Olympia she was a devoted friend of our family. She never married. The first week in April I went to Junction City, about four miles away to attend a teachers' institute and take an examination for a certificate to teach. William Estes, a schoolmate, went with me. We walked over on the railroad track in attending the institute and examination. The latter lasted one day. Bill consoled me going over on my probable failure to pass the examination, although he felt sure of success for himself. Three grades of certificates were granted. I secured a second grading pretty well up toward a first. Bill did not get even a third. However, Mr. Williams, my teacher of the year before, was one of the examiners which may have accounted for my success. Bill was a better scholar but did not have the faculty of telling all he knew in an examination. Fortunately for me I have always been at my best when stimulated by such a test. I secured a school and taught that summer. I was barely sixteen and unfit to govern the school, made up of some forty boys and girls, some older than myself. A girl, Melissa Bargor, was my undoing. I finally whipped her, a fact I have seldom mentioned. I was not exactly discharged, but by mutual agreement I quit before the term had quite closed. This was in a district in which Joaquin Miller's father had taught school. It was called the Vaughan district from a numerous family by that name. I knew the Millers well, having harvested for them and eaten in their home. Mrs. Miller thought her son inherited his poetic talent from her and to prove it she tried to write poetry. I never saw Joaquin, as he was then in London making his first great reputation. But from his pictures I knew he resembled his father. His brother George and I worked together in the harvest field in the summer of 1876. During harvest of 1877 I bound grain for Amos Dunham. At the close of harvest Sam Crumbaker, who had married sister Martha, concluded to go to Eastern Washington, where the Palouse country had just come into notice. Charley made up his mind to go to Eastern Oregon, where Willie had gone the previous fall. I gave him my summer's wages, some $200.00 and assumed a debt of $300.00 he owed the Smith & Brasfield store in Harrisburg. That handicapped me $500.00 at a very critical time in my life. I watched them drive away, Perry lying in the feed box behind the wagon. A little later John Bishop's went to Colorado. Angie, the first child, was then a baby. Ann Bishop went with them. Ether Williams who had come out from Illinois went back, taking his wife and child. I was left alone of all the family who had come out from Illinois. Soon after I took the mumps from which I suffered severely. When the heavy rains of winter came on I was put to a test. I saw two roads. One was through the winter on a farm with the hope of an education gone. The other was in trying to borrow money and go to school. I saw Dell Bishop, the only acquaintance left behind. He agreed to loan me $50.00. So one Sunday morning just before Christmas, 1877, I started on foot for Brownsville near where Tom Harris then lived. I had heard of an excellent school there, an academy kept by W.R. Bishop. It was a walk of fifteen miles. On starting out I considered what I would think about on the trip. A few days before I had read of an Ohio man who could recall the events of every day for a period of years. So I tried to go over the days since I left school the spring before. I succeeded, and went back over them day by day. I excluded from this the three months I taught, as there was too much sameness in the days in school. All the other days came before memory clearly. I arranged with Tom to batch and go to school. We secured a small house, vacant because a former occupant had died there and people were superstitious or disliked to move in. We had no such fear. We secured a cook stove, one I had traded for from John Bishop, together with a cow and calf. I had never studied grammar, although I had always listened to the recitations of the classes in grammar and had passed the examination for a teacher's certificate from this information. I now took up the study in earnest using Clark's grammar. At the end of the term of three months I think I could have almost reproduced the book from memory. I studied physical geography for the first time. In Illinois I had completed Rays Practical Arithmetic. I now took Robinsons Progressive Higher Arithmetic and completed it. Not only that but I was used as an instructor by almost every student in arithmetic in school that winter. I studied history and spelling. During the latter half of the term I took Bryant & Strattons High School course in bookeeping which I completed in the six weeks, passing a perfect examination and receiving a diploma. Mr. Bishop was a very excellent but eccentric teacher. He was a minister in the Cumberland Presbyterian Church and preached in the hall where school was kept. This was known as Bishop's Hall. During the winter it rained continually at one time for six weeks, the longest rain I ever knew. That winter Doc Fields, a young town bully, was killed by a Mr. Williams, a druggist's clerk. The killing was done with a shotgun I owned which I had loaned to Newton Stone, a school mate whose brother was a part owner in the drug store. Fields was intoxicated and abusive and tried to force Williams to sell him some whiskey and followed him into a back room where Williams shot him. When school closed I was very much down hearted. It had been a very lonesome winter for me with my folks scattered and far away. I was out of money and did not know which way to turn. I dreaded the last day in school but it came. I concluded to go to Abe Hunter's who had been a good friend. With a small bundle of clothing I started out. As I left Brownsville I passed a man named Jones, a teacher in the public school. He stopped to chat with me and when I told him I was leaving town he commended me for being a good boy. Said he had been watching me and that I had not gone in bad company, had not fooled away any time down town and he saw I was studious and he knew I would succeed in life. How much brighter the world seemed after that. I walked to Hunter's that day, about 20 miles. He needed help to put in the crop. So I went to work at $1.00 a day with a two horse team, harrowing. He worked three horses on a larger harrow. Abe was a very tall, bony and muscular man. Taking a sack with nearly two bushels of wheat he would sow by throwing both ways as he walked, the widest strip I ever knew any man to sow by hand. He would leave his team while sowing around the field, then harrow until we would catch up. The second morning after making a round I drove alongside his team and taking the lines drove the two teams together. I can yet see the broad smile on his face as he came back sowing and meeting me. I could just about keep up with him driving both teams. In this way we finished the spring work. I worked for George and Edgar Mason after finishing seeding, and up to the threshing season, binding grain for them. I excelled in binding and knew only one man who could beat me and that was Bill Twitchell, a powerful man. I engaged to take care of all the grain the machine owned by Hunter, Willoughby & Co., threshed. Monroe Philpott was the company. This had never before been done. Abe Hunter thought I could do it. Bert Willoughby was sure I could not and Philpott said I could if any man could. I was ambitious and it meant double wages. I had received extra wages during the early harvest and double wages would help me pay the debt at Smith, Brasfield & Co. I rigged up a grain spout on the machine so I could hang two bags. This had never been done before to my knowledge. The spout was low, intended for a half bushel measure. So I had to dig a hole deep enough to allow the sacks to stand upright. While a sack was filling I would sew and carry another sack away. I had never known fewer than two men to do this work. Usually it took three and I have seen four men at work taking care of the grain. We were threshing direct from a header. In the afternoon when the grain was close it kept me on the jump. Running to the top of a pile of sacks with one just sewed, I would turn and leap to the ground and with another jump get to the sack just as it was full. Shaking it down would give me time to hang on another sack. Then I would sew the full sack and run with it, and keep this up all day. I would be as wet with sweat as if I had just come out of a river and my heart would be palpitating, but I kept on. The previous winter while in school I had taken lessons on a pole and rings and had developed a good deal of athletic ability. In addition I was very strong. I stood in a half bushel measure, picked up a sack of wheat weighing 130 pounds by putting a hand at each end of the sack and then without allowing the sack to touch my body put it at arms length above my head. I did this many times as an exhibition of strength, but never saw anyone else do it. After harvest I hauled wheat to town until that work was done. Then the Masons and Twitchells having concluded to go east of the mountains I arranged to go along and drive a team. Helen Twitchell, a girl of about my age (I was seventeen) was to ride in the wagon with me. For the purpose of starting we all assembled at Twitchell's near Lebanon, Oregon. Just as we were ready to start late in October, there came a heavy fall of snow and blocked the pass, the Santiam route. So they gave up the trip until spring. However, having made up my mind to go I took the stage at Lebanon for Albany, the train to Portland, the boat to The Dalles, passing around the Cascades on a narrow gauge railroad. At The Dalles, after waiting a week for a delayed valise I found I lacked money to pay fare on to Colfax. So I arranged to ride with an emigrant named Matt Charlton who was going to Centerville near Walla Walla. I paid him $2.00 for board and drove a team most of the way. After buying a stage ticket at Walla Walla to Colfax I had fifty cents left. I bought forty cents worth of cheese and crackers on which I lived until we reached Colfax. There I invested the ten cents in crackers. I did not have enough to include cheese. At that time ten cents was the smallest change and no item was sold for less than that amount. Things were priced by bits. A bit was 12 1/2 cents, but there was no such coin. Two bits was a quarter, or twenty five cents. Four bits, fifty cents. If an article was priced at a bit and you gave twenty five cents or a quarter, ten cents would be returned in change. Or you would give ten cents. So a bit would be designated as a long bit, fifteen cents, or a short bit, ten cents. This practice continued many years until the five cent piece or nickel came into use. Before leaving Oregon I paid Smith, Brasfield & Co. in full and I traded Dell Bishop the shotgun for $25.00 to apply on the $50.00 I had borrowed and paid the remainder in cash. So I was square with the world in starting life in the Palouse country November 11, 1878. There was no employment in the Palouse country in the fall of 1878. Probably one half of the population there at that time had come into the country that year. In the previous year as many had come as in all the years before. Nearly all were without money, except barely enough to buy groceries during the winter and some lacked even that much after buying enough rough lumber to build the shack which made the first home. The Kelly family on upper Dry Creek was one which lacked the money to buy lumber and so lived in a dug out that first winter. Another family near Garfield, years before a town was started, lived in a dug out. Thirty years later I met one of the Kelly boys in Seattle who told me his sister, then the widow of a wealthy man, was touring Southern California in a limousine with a chauffeur. There was no work in sight for me. I was only 17 and could not take land, although a large portion of the Palouse country and practically all of the Big Bend country was vacant, unappropriated public land. Dell Bishop and Jonas Crumbaker had taken claims and needed rails and posts for fencing. The first fences were made by digging a narrow, deep ditch and piling the sod on one side backed by the dirt. Such a fence made an obstacle and answered at first for a fence. Later stakes driven in to the dirt to which rails were fastened made a very good fence. But posts and rails were better. The rails were fastened to the posts with wire which was in turn held up by two nails. Having nothing else to do I went into partnership with Jonas and Dell. We bought an ax apiece, two steel wedges and a steel sledge. Our cooking outfit consisted of a dutch oven, like a low, flat pot with legs and a cover with a rim turned up to hold coals. It answered very well for cooking or baking. The procedure was to rake out a bed of hot coals on which the oven was placed with its contents and the lid covered with coals. John Bishop and Sam Crumbaker took us to the mountains as we called it, above the old rail yard on Deep Creek. On the way we expected to buy some potatoes but could find none. We did buy a sack of rutabagas which none of us liked. So we had only flour, bacon, coffee and sugar. This made a rather slender variety, but we had plenty, such as it was and, as the saying was, good enough what there was of it. We each took our blankets, then as much a part of our wardrobe as a coat. John and Sam stayed overnight. We were nearly 25 miles from John's and 30 miles from Sam's. The location of the old railyard is now scarcely known. Then it was the most important center of that country. Here the rails were yarded and from the surrounding timber were made and a fairly good road led from the railyard to the Palouse country. We camped about two miles above the yard. The first thing was a log house. We reached the location in the early evening and while John and Sam were gathering their load of cedar logs to be split up at home, Dell, Jonas and I went to work building our house for the winter. We used fir logs about a foot in diameter, cut about 16 feet long and roughly notched log house fashion. We were in too big of a hurry to build high enough, so that when completed with the roof sloping one way we could not quite stand erect. This proved a great hindrance to our comfort and convenience if such terms can be used as descriptive of such as life as we led. I had never done much chopping and no splitting. We had not gone back far enough for the large, easily split cedar trees and cut what had been culled over. So it was rather hard splitting. Dell was good with an axe, so he did the cutting and Jonas and I did the splitting. We made about 300 rails a day. There was a few inches of snow on the ground when we reached there Nov. 22, 1878. Fortunately no more fell until after the first of the year and there was no rain, else our roof made of boughs would have answered to poor purpose. We had forgotten comb or towels. Even soap was neglected and no one thought of a mirror. However, we could see each other and as the weeks passed our hair grew long and tangled. One Sunday I whetted my knife blade until it would cut a hair. This suggested something to me and I asked Dell to use it to cut my hair. He did it. When cutting over one part of my head by catching the hair with one hand and using the knife to cut, the pull was very painful and I thought it would not hurt as much on any other part of my head, but it did as he came to it. Jonas thought my grimaces put on so did not hesitate to have his hair cut. He soon found it was no laughing matter. But we did get rid of our tangled hair. We were not old enough to in much need of shaving, yet accumulated a little growth of beard. One of the never to be forgotten experiences of that time was in the acoustic qualities of the mountains and timber. Our voices really reverberated, and a kind of roaring noise we practiced sounded really ferocious and we thought we developed voices like the roar of lions, fairly shaking the earth. It was not until some weeks later when again out in the Palouse country at John Bishop's that we were disillusioned. One morning we were outside washing our faces when we thought to attract attention by our roaring. Very much to our surprise our voices were flat and instead of the ground shaking from the roar the noise was very feeble. We looked at each other with silly grins and that ended our roarings. After we had been there several weeks Dell came up from the creek late one evening with a pail of water which we carried for house use. He told of a family which had just come in and the man said they needed a teacher for a new school district formed that year and unless school started soon they would lose the organization. Dell told him to come up as there was a teacher in our camp. Next day he came and introduced himself as George Harlan. He had the blackest eyes and beard and hair I ever saw. He told afterward that I never missed a lick while he talked to me. I am sure this was an oversight on my part. I hired out to him to teach the school at $20.00 per month and board around. This led to my teaching the first school in what afterward became the town of Garfield with which I was identified for a period of forty years. Thus ended my experience in making rails. Having landed a job I sold my interest in the rails which would be my share for the cost of the grub stake, $3.75. Dell bought them and as there were nearly four thousand he certainly got a bargain, about a dollar a thousand, or about ten rails for a cent. But I had no use for them and there was no one else to buy them. I really went with Jonas and Dell for lack of something else to do and felt that anything was better than idleness. This is a rule I have followed pretty closely during life. Dell had grub staked me and I thought he was entitled to the bargain. January 6, 1879 was the first day of school. I had gone up from Sam Crumbaker's with Hugh Rogers, who was then working for the old man Price at Farmington. He had been sent to Colfax with a load of farm produce, oats or potatoes. He came out to Sam's to stay all night and I rode with him on his way back to Farmington. I got off the wagon in the flat about where the Crabtree station stands or a little further west and walked to Syron's carrying a heavy valise. Hugh in the later years has often spoken of the time he took me to Garfield when I commenced teaching there saying how well he remembered the flat. But he is mistaken as I have said. He followed the Indian trails and his nearest point to Garfield was at Seven Mile spring near Tommy Dobbin's house. There was no school house and I was to begin teaching at Syron's home and continue until a house could be built. There were three of the Syron children to attend, William, Mina and Charles. In the later years we called them Billie and Charley. Mina married Harvey Irwin who as so long postmaster at Garfield and later in business there. Silas was too old. While school was held around the fireplace Silas worked outside. The old man sat silent while the old lady busied herself in the kitchen. It commenced snowing that day. I had gone early in the forenoon and called school at once. It snowed all day and was snowing when we went to bed. I slept in a loft which was reached by climbing a ladder. The boys all slept in the same loft. It was quite cold as the wind was blowing and I could feel it sift in through the crevices in the shake roof. So I covered up my head and slept soundly. When I awakened it seemed "smothery" and I threw back the covers. Imagine my surprise to find several inches of snow on top of the bed and all over the room. It was rather disagreeable dressing that morning. As soon as a fire was started in the fireplace the snow commenced to melt and the water came down all over the room. There was no school that day. We were too busy chinking the cracks in the roof with rags. All day it snowed steadily. The next morning I resumed teaching. It snowed steadily for two weeks. There was scarcely the break of an hour during that time. It blowed at times and the snow drifted as I have never seen it do since. I suppose there was over two feet of snow on the level. By this time Mr. Syron doubted the advisability of continuing the school in his home where he would have to board the teacher all the time. A hint was all I needed and I at once adjourned school. I went to Harlan's and we arranged to build a house on Milton's place where he had some lumber. Mr. Tant had moved back from Palouse where he had gone for the winter. Before beginning the house I made a trip to John's and Sam's on a pair of skis I made out of wide strips I split from a cedar rail at Harlan's. A slight rain had fallen which melted the snow down a little. A freeze formed a thin crust. Walking was slavish but the skis made traveling easy. That trip was my first and only experience skiing. When I came to the hill just south of Syron's the drift was very high and I came down carefully as it was difficult to see in the glaring whiteness of the snow. I was on the brink of the drift before I saw it, and just then broke my pole, a light one of cedar. I threw myself on my side with my skis hanging over. I kicked them off and they dropped fifty feet. The noise of the skis on the crust of the snow brought out the whole Syron family to see what was happening. I climbed down over the drift and after a rest at Syron's home was on my way without further accident. I returned from the trip to John's and Sam's to help build the house used for the first school in Garfield. It was on Milt Harlan's claim and stood back of the present N.P. depot about a quarter of a mile. A house now stands on what was our playground, back of which is a woodshed very nearly where the school house was built. Milton Harlan and I went over one morning and shoveled the snow off the pile of lumber and the site for the building. There we started the foundation. On a hillside without any instrument it is hard to place a foundation level. We had built a fire to warm our hands. Picking out a long cedar shake which was perfectly straight I piled on some snow and held over the fire close enough to melt the snow without burning the board. I then had water as a liquid to answer for a level. It was easy to plumb the walls with a square, so as to be at right angles with the floor. Mr. Tant came and furnished most of the tools used. George Harlan, Miton, Frank, Mr. Tant and I built the house. We ran short of lumber for sheeting so Milton and I took a cross cut saw and ripped boards into strips to be used for nailing on the long cedar shakes. Here I opened the real school, with fourteen pupils from six families. Milton, Frank, Ida and Charles Harlan, Alice and Julia Tant, William, Mina and Charles Syron, Lou and Edward Hill, their cousin Lou and two smaller children, a girl and a boy whose names I have forgotten. There are two incidents of the school. One the exchange of text books and the other a drove of deer running over the flat where Garfield stands. These come vividly to memory. Of course there are many more happening of that school I remember not worth recording here. By an act of the legislature and of the Territorial Board of Education a new series of textbooks were adopted on the condition that the publisher exchange new books for the old without charge. I asked the pupils to bring in all their old school books one Friday which they did. Saturday morning I put them in a sack and carried them horse back to Colfax, 18 miles away. Baxter Renshaw, a well known pioneer, was the exchange agent. I had a queer assortment of the books gathered up, match them as best I could. In some cases I would have a second reader with an advanced arithmetic. Baxter asked me about this, but I only laughed without attempting to explain. On the way home, riding a mare belonging to Mr. Tant and coming up Silver Creek about opposite Rocky Gulch, the mare threw up her head in fright. Standing within 50 feet, her long ears dropped forward toward me, stood a deer. After watching it a few minutes I rode on as the doe lightly leaped away. However, this was only one deer. One afternoon at the school house we saw a drove of deer run down the hill from near Mr. Harlan's home and across the flat at Garfield. Later Hughes East, living on the Palouse River, killed all of them near the old Chase mill pond. The next spring I taught the first term of school on Dry Creek. Rose Long, daughter of one of the directors, was to have taught but she failed to get a certificate. On the closing of the Garfield school I went to work for Johnny Lipscomb building the canyon road out of Colfax leading north. Exposure to wind and sun made my natural ruddy complexion redder still. I knew when I went to the teachers' examination in the old school house that I was not handsome. Father Eells, the noted missionary, was superintendent and Miss West was his assistant. In the afternoon of the first day she came into the room at the close of her own school, the Colfax Academy, which was in reality the first high school in the Territory. It was the first time I had seen her, the old maid school ma'am about whom I had read in the harvest field and who afterward had a very strong influence on my life. I will tell her first impression of me as she told it later with much good humor over the outcome. Looking over the thirty or more applicants in the room busily at work on the examination she singled me out and asked Father Eells who was that green looking boy. Father Eells had numbered the applicants and then instructed us to sign our papers by number only. As Miss West was to assist in marking the papers he did not want the identity of any known to her. So in his quiet way he said he would tell her when the examination was over. Later, in marking the papers she was anxious to identify those of the green boy who thought he could teach school and was trying for a certificate. I was then 18 and had taught two terms which she of course did not know. When she came to a paper which was particularly poor she guessed it was that of the green boy. There were three of the numbers running high and one particularly high. Her curiosity was aroused as to which one it could be. Father Eells would only smile and say he would tell her when all the papers were graded. When at last the work was done Miss West said, "Now tell me who is number so and so?" Father Eells smiled again as he replied, "That green country boy." Which was the one with the best grade. Of course Miss West told this to my credit many times. This was the first public examination of teachers held in the county. Only three first grade certificates were issued and mine led these. Father Eells selected me as one of the county examiners. It was due to the publicity given at this time and to the kindly words of Miss West and Father Eells whose protégé I became that I was selected as county superintendent of schools without my solicitation and in fact without my knowledge in January 1883, before I entered my twenty-second year. The first school house on upper Dry Creek stood on the north side of the road a hundred rods or so above where the present Elberton road turns off at the bridge over Dry Creek. School opened the latter part of April and was a three month term. I boarded around as during the previous winter. Anna Bishop who married brother Willie later, attended. Callie Gragg, a daughter of Hiram, Ira Long, with Ella, Cora and Martha. There must have been others but I do not now recall them. The most interesting event was the annual journey of all the Indians in Eastern Washington and a part of Oregon to the Coeur d'Alene reservation in the latter part of June. The school house was on the old Indian trails which the road followed. These trails were several paths in number running parallel and a few feet apart, worn in some places knee deep to the ponies. The thousands of hoofs at this time of the year would cut a bed of dust at the bottom of the trails. Where the direction was such as in Dry Creek where the wind would sweep along the trails the dust would blow out in clouds. In this way the tracks were deepened at such points. For several days the Indians were passing constantly with their families and all their ponies, all headed for the reservation. They met for a religious festival in part, and to run horse races and gamble, a strange combination of motives. A short time later they returned toward their homes. There were Umatillas, Snakes, Palouses, Yakimas, and what others I do not know. That some lost their possessions gambling could be seen from the fact that often two would be seen riding one pony. The authorities at the reservation finally put a stop to the gatherings as the thousands of ponies gathered on the reservation ate out so much grass the Coeur d'Alene Indians lacked a pasture for their own stock. During the summer many Coeur d'Alene Indians passed. I learned to talk the Chinook jargon so I could carry on a conversation fairly well. Only about a score of years had passed since the Steptoe battle. I always led the conversation to that event and talked with scores of Indians who had taken part. While they were voluble in describing the fight with Steptoe, an Indian victory, they became instantly silent when asked about Wright. It was only a little while after the Steptoe battle that Col. Wright came. He rounded up all the Indian ponies a few miles above Spokane and shot them, leaving the Indians afoot. He then called in a number of Chiefs who had taken part in the Steptoe battle and hanged them on a creek afterward known as Hangman Creek. During the summer a camp-meeting was held on the Palouse River below Chase's mill. First it was one denomination and then another, the Christian or Cambellite church and the United Brethren. I attended, walking over after supper and back after meeting, a dozen miles or so. That distance meant nothing to me then. I joined the United Brethren at this camp-meeting and was baptized by immersion in the Palouse River near the old ford. I worked during the harvest season following the close of school. My first day was for Billy Morrill one Monday. I went the evening before. He had ten acres in wheat, cut with a self raking harvest and about half of it bound. As it had laid over Sunday and was dry Billy said we would start to bind early while the dew was on. We went out before breakfast when we could scarcely see from one bundle to the other and the grain was heavy. In the latter part of July it is daylight at 3 when clear as it was then. At about 6 we went to breakfast and finished binding the field before noon. Then we shocked it and stacked it finishing when so dark I could scarcely see to pick up a bundle. It must have been ten o'clock, or an 18 hour day as we took little time for eating. I got $1.50 for the day's work. Following this first day in the harvest field I helped brother Charley who had agreed to harvest the crop on the Throop place for one half. I did all the stacking for him but go no pay as he lost money on the job. This was the ground where the town of Steptoe now stands. The 4th of July Dell Bishop and I went to Colfax, taking Dell's team and wagon. I took Ann Bishop and Dell took Mary Throop, driving around by the Throop place. Miss West read the Declaration of Independence. It was a cold day, too cold to be comfortable without an overcoat, an article of clothing I had never then worn. During camp-meeting I engaged to teach the school at Eden Valley. I taught the first term at Garfield for $20.00 per month. For the first term on Dry Creek I was paid $40.00 per month and at Eden Valley $50.00 per month. School closed about the middle of December. I then arranged to go to school in Colfax, to Miss West as planned before I left Oregon. Jonas Crumbaker, Milt Harlan and I arranged to go together. I took Brother Harry paying half the expenses of all. Sam Crumbaker hauled the lumber from Talbot's mill, a mile or so above Elberton on Silver Creek. The snow was about a foot deep and it was a hard day's work to get the load as far as Sam's. Next day we went on in to Colfax. I arranged for the privilege of building a shack on a lot owned by Hez Hollingsworth who owned that portion of the townsite. The location was across the street from the present Methodist church. The lumber cost ten dollars and we did the carpenter work, using lumber for the roof. It answered and it was cheaper than renting. Jonas and Milton quit at the end of a three month term. I kept on a few months longer, then secured a position on a newspaper founded by L.E. Kellogg who with C.B. Hopkins had started the Palouse Gazette two years before. George J. Buys was foreman and here I was a so-called printer's devil. In the early fall Mr. Kellogg was induced to move the paper to Depot Springs, a new town on the N.P. Railroad, then under construction. The name was soon changed to Cheney. I concluded to remain in the Palouse country so declined an offer to go with the paper. I accepted an offer to teach a second term at Eden Valley and taught six months. Among the patrons of the school were Jack Chase, Callison, Uncle John Fisher, W.H.H. McClure and Mr. Hunt, Mr. Earnest and Mr. Williams. This was a very interesting term of school. Adelia, James, Zoula, Lottie, Elma and Bertha Chase, Harlan, Etta and Katie Callison, with Fred, Sheridan, Edward, Mary and Mandy McClure, Warren Pedigo who was with his uncle John Fisher, Mellie, Ulysses, Frank, Ella and Nettie Earnest, John Williams, the Hunt boy whose name I do not now recall, one of Stearns Chase's boys, two children named Costin and Carrie Brinkerhoff were the pupils. There were some other Pedigo children and a boy named Cooper. Seeral boys rode from the west end of Kamiac Butte but their names have slipped from my memory. One was Perry Mood. It seems I should recall them but that was forty-three years ago. During the early summer of 1880 George S. Rogers came from Illinois with Mrs. Rogers, Mattie and Jessie. I had known them since I was three years of age when we moved to Illinois. It seemed perfectly natural for me to go to their temporary home in Colfax while he was on a trip to the Big Bend country to look for land. Hugh went with him and they were gone two weeks. While he filed on a homestead near what is now Davenport he had a soldier's right so was not compelled to go immediately on the land. On his return he bought a quarter section of railroad land on Dry Creek about 8 miles from Colfax, now a part of the Roberts place and owned by my niece Angie who married Charley Roberts. While teaching in Eden Valley that winter I spent Sundays at the Rogers home. We had a good many parties that winter. The Cunningham home was a welcome one where many of the parties were held. Hugh Rogers was then courting Hattie. I introduced Bryan Westacott, a young Englishman who had just joined his brother William, to the company of Cunningham and Rogers girls. He at once fell in love with Jennie whom he afterward married. At the close of school in the spring of 1881 I returned to Colfax for a time and worked on the Whitman County Democrat, a paper started by George J. Buys who had been foreman on the Northwest Tribune on which I had worked in the summer of 1880. When it was removed to Cheney Mr. Buys who was an old newspaper man started a paper of his own. Our acquaintance on the Tribune of the year before gave me a place for the asking. However, I had engaged to teach a summer tern on Turnbow flat. The school house at that time was a house owned by Riley Turnbow. There was an epidemic of measles. I had a rash while at Buys that spring and thought it was measles, but Mrs. Buys told me when I had real measles I would know it. I did. I boarded with Mr. and Mrs. Lewis and sure enough, after John Turnbow's death from measles, I had them and knew it. I was compelled to dismiss school two weeks. The Turnbow families made up most of the school. I cannot name all of them now. Laura and two sisters of the Isaac Turnbow family, Maggie, Tom, John and Isaac of the Riley Turnbows, two children of John Turnbow, Nancy Hodgen, Steve, Amanda and another brother of the Choat family. Arthur and John Hughes and a sister, Emma, Florence and Beulah Lewis, where I boarded, made up all the boys and girls of the school I now remember beside Della Showmaker and Emma who rode across from home. At the close of school I returned to Colfax to work for Mr. Buys. During a brief period in the fall Jonas and I worked in a railroad construction camp building into Colfax. The work was suspended that winter and the railroad not completed to Colfax until in 1884. I again went to school to Miss West that winter. In the early part of the winter I batched with two other boys in a room off Miss West's woodshed. Later I took my meals at Mrs. Buy's and worked on the paper evening and Saturdays. At one time Mr. Buys made a trip to Spokane and was gone two weeks. In addition to carrying on my studies in school I got up the news matter for the paper, wrote the editorials, did a good portion of the typographical work and all the press work. During this time Mrs. Buys was very kind to me and thus began the friendship of a lifetime. In the later years we called her Auntie and no other except my mother had been so dear to me, aside from wife and children. In the spring of 1882 I accepted a position with Mr. Beach as clerk at the Baldwin House, then the principal hotel in Colfax. During the next few months many of the men afterward so prominently identified with the country registered at the Baldwin House where our acquaintance began. Among these was John L. Wilson and Chas. S. Vorhees, both from Indiana. Voorhees was soon elected prosecuring attorney of the county and later to congress. Wilson went to congress at the beginning of statehood and later to the senate. Colfax at that time was a rough town, filled with saloons and a disorderly house right on Main Street. Stages ran in all directions. Each morning there was a rush of passengers for the stages. One from and to Texas Ferry to connect with the boats from Portland, Oregon. Another to Spokane, then a rival to Cheney. One to Farmington, one to Palouse and one to Lewiston, all carrying mail as well as passengers. This was a very valuable experience to me. I visited Spokane for the first time, then a town of a few thousand people. As this is not intended to be a history of the country in which so much of my life has been spent, or of its towns, except incidentally, I will not attempt any further description of Spokane, at that time known as Spokane Falls. We judged the country then by the quality of the soil. By this standard Spokane was too gravelly, else my life story might be different and written as a pioneer of Spokane instead of Garfield. In the early summer I accepted an offer from Uncle Steve Shoemaker to teach the school in that district, a summer term. In addition to Della and Emma, Steve was in school. Sam was a baby and Grace a little girl too young for school. All of the Phelps children were in school and the McGuires, Easts, Hale, Grove and John Hoskins with Ellsworth Bishop. I made the desks for the school house as I had previously done for Eden Valley. At the close of school I went to Palouse to help Ed Orcutt start a newspaper. In the spring a number of Palouse citizens came to me in Colfax and offered to buy the plant of the Whitman County Democrat, move it to Palouse and set it up in a building and give it to me if I would start a paper there. I refused saying I would cast my lot with Garfield which would have a railroad while Palouse would not. In this refusal and the reasons given I made enmities which lasted forty years. C.H. Farnsworth, the leader, laughed with me over the incident only a year or so ago. Orcutt knew nothing of the newspaper business so I had the full responsibility for composition, press work, job work, and in the beginning, editorial work as Orcutt was too much taken up for a time with some wet goods he was trying to carry. I went beyond any previous expectation as a printer, as I had never done job work or set advertisements. However, I had seen enough of it. I remained a few months until I got the paper well on its way and Orcutt sobered up. He called the paper the Boomerang, accenting the last syllable as he spoke it. The paper was afterward sold to Psychyngue Hughes called Shang for short and re-named the Palouse Republic and under various managements exists today, the second oldest paper in the county. Following a previously determined plan I went into a partnership in the early winter with Dell Bishop in the firm of Lawrence, Bishop & Co. We put up a small business 16 x 32 in Garfield and started in the hardware business. At the same time I engaged to teach the Garfield school. Dell ran the store during five days while I taught and I kept the books, keeping the store Saturday. This was the beginning of a varied life for the next seven years. I was engaged to Jessie M. Rogers who felt that she must go with her father, mother, and Matt to the homestead near the present town of Davenport. We were to be married in the spring. I bought a small house on a lot on Main Street, where Dr. Bentley's home was later built, in which I batched that winter. Early in January 1883, M.T. Crawford, county superintendent of schools, refused to qualify for a second term. He wrote me a letter consisting of two words, "Come down." I replied in two words, "What for?" His answer was specific. I went to Colfax to find I had been appointed to the vacancy by the board of county commissioners, which gave me a full tern. So I taught school, kept books and ran the hardware store, was superintendent of the Sunday School and county superintendent of schools, enough for a young man of 21. I had a school of about forty that winter. The Harlans, Tants and Syrons as at the first school. George, Hattie and Willie Giles, James and Bert Lemon, William, Lee and Price Black, and others made up the school. Dennis Throop, Ray Clarey, and others whose names do not come to me at the moment. Yes, Ude Eslick and Art and Frank were more, and the Larkins family, Henry, Frank and Ed, and the Manrings, Hi, Ben, Ora and Sant, with Charlie, the oldest. In the last days of March I drove with Will Black for a companion to Cheney, then the county seat of Spokane county, where I obtained a license to marry Jessie M. Rogers. This as I found a few years ago, was one of the early licenses issued, #169 as I remember, and in the score or so of volumes of marriage licenses, this is recorded in the first volume near the beginning.. Father Eells was then in charge of the Congregational church in Cheney. I saw him and arranged to have him perform the marriage ceremony, as I felt I would be proud to say he married us. But very naturally the folks wanted us to be married at her home and we were married just after breakfast Monday morning, April 2, 1883, starting at once on the return to Garfield. There were few bridges at that time. The mud was deep and the traveling slow. At noon we stopped at the Courtright House near the present town of Mondovi, then the stage station where meals were served. There were a number of passengers from the stage who ate dinner with us at the same table that day, among them a very large and fine looking Indian. We thought little of seeing an Indian or eating at the same table. I did not know the white men and it was not until many years later I learned it was Hal Cole, then Indian agent at Fort Spokane with his chief clerk on their way to Washington D.C., taking with them the noted Indian Chief Joseph. It was long my regret that I had never seen this celebrated chieftain who put up a most gallant fight in his attempt to escape with his people from the Nez Perce reservation to Canada. Encumbered by his women and children he fought General Miles to near the Canadian border where he was captured. History does not record a greater military feat which ranks him as the greatest among all the fighting chiefs of the American Indians. Yet we sat at the same table and ate with him at noon April 2, 1883, my wife and I, but did not learn who he was until years later. We reached Hugh Rogers' home on Dry Creek next day, and the next day Garfield became our home. Here we lived through the prime of our lives, for nearly forty years. Of course there were absences, some of them for many years. But Garfield was held to be our home and we were identified with its interests actively for a period of more than thirty-five years. Even after that time, when we disposed of every piece of property in Garfield or vicinity, its memories seemed hallowed to us. We commenced housekeeping in the little shack where I had batched. Every article of furniture was home made and of my own make, chairs, table, bedstead and all. When a year later we secured chairs from a furniture store it seemed we were a little extravagant. The next year we built our first real home on the hill near the west end of California street. Mr. Tant had told me he would give my wife her choice of two lots if I would marry Jessie Rogers. I told him I would broach the subject to her and the two lots might turn the scale in my favor. (We were then engaged.) So this was our choice of a homesite and the house was then the best in the town. Perhaps I might as well here give some of the facts as to our courtship in view of the events of later years. When word came to the Palouse country that George S. Rogers and family were coming, I told Dell Bishop I would marry Jessie. "Better wait and see if she will have you," was his answer. I told him there was no doubt as to that for I knew she was to become my wife. During my term as county superintendent of schools I was appointed a member of the Territorial Board of Education. This was in the beginning of 1884, about the time of the birth of Zola in the little house which was our first home. When she was a baby of about six months of age we drove out to Mr. Rogers where I left them while I made a trip to Olympia to attend to the work of that office. This was in the main to adopt a new series of text books for the entire Territory, a uniform series. Miss West who had been my predecessor on the board had made a trip to San Francisco shortly before my trip to Olympia. A representative of a school book publishing company there asked her about what kind of man I was. Her answer was: "Honest but very headstrong." This was told to me in Olympia and afterward confirmed by her. After the meeting and adoption of text books and a trip to Seattle and Tacoma, I went to the Willamette Valley and visited mother's grave where I put up a monument which we had bought with our inheritance from grandfather Lawrence, who died the previous summer in Ohio. When I was county superintendent, Whitman County included Adams and Franklin which were formed during my term of office. I visited no schools in the territory embraced in the new counties but visited all the schools in what is now Whitman county, some of them more than once. Many of the school districts were formed during my term of office. Among these I recall the Rosalia district which I established in unorganized territory. I think nearly fifty districts were created during my term. I held the first normal institute ever held in the state at Colfax during the summer of 1884. In fact, going back to the records of the office of county superintendents of Whitman County, there is little to be found prior to my term of office for the simple reason that there were such scant records when I came into the office. While I was away from home visiting schools of the county and attending to my duties as a member of the territorial board of education brother Perry ran the hardware store. During the winter I spent most of the time in the tin shop in connection with the store. I hired a tinsmith each winter. I soon found they could make nothing without a pattern so I secured Blinn's Manual,, a book on pattern cutting and learned to cut patterns for everything we handled made out of tin or sheet iron. In this way I learned the tinsmith trade as well as pattern cutting, and spent all my idle time at this work. I cannot say that I really enjoyed it except for the pleasure of mastering the trade and at the same time supplying the store with needed merchandise. That was about the time pressed ware or stamped ware was coming into use. But we kept only pieced ware. Every article of tinware we carried was made in our own shop and I have made every article in domestic use formed of tin or sheet iron. In 1884 we drove back from the Big Bend country when Zola was a baby. I used a buckboard in visiting schools and we were driving along between Davenport and Spokane when Jessie said, "Look at that big dog." I looked. It was a bear about a hundred feet away running parallel with the road paying no attention to us. It seemed perfectly natural to see the bear running along while we were jogging along the dusty road. Suddenly pandemonium broke loose. A threshing crew came over the hill after the bear, horseback, with harness on the horses, tugs flying and ins some cases with lines dragging. They were all armed with pitchforks, except one man had a gun. They were all yelling like mad as they passed us. At the stage station at Courtright a mile away where we stopped for dinner we saw the carcass of the bear brought in by the victorious threshing crew. The year 1885 was devoted pretty closely to the hardware and implement business, the latter having been added the previous year. It was during that summer that C.B. Hopkins extended a telephone line to Garfield from Palouse. The first telephone line in the state was from Almota to Colfax. Hopkins was owner of the Palouse Gazette and he had the idea of gathering news and building up a newspaper, charging incidentally for telephone conversations. Later the news became incidental. He then extended the line to Pullman. Later to Palouse and Garfield. The instrument was put in my office in the hardware store, the fifth telephone in use in the Territory of Washington. Later the line was extended to Farmington and on to Spokane which did not have a single telephone in use in 1885, nor did any other city in the Territory. In the beginning of 1886 I was appointed Superintendent of Public Instruction for the Territory of Washington. My first appointment to the board of education was made by Governor William A. Newalll. I now became ex-officio chairman of the board. This appointment was made by Governor Watson C. Squire. In each case confirmation was made by the Territorial Council, corresponding to the state senate of later days. So I became the head o the educational system of the Territory of Washington when barely twenty-five years of age, the youngest for that position in any state or territory. Bessie, our second daughter, was born on February 19, 1886 in the house we built on the lots Mr. Tant gave Jessie. In 1886 the O.R. & N extended its line from Colfax to Farmington. I assisted A. S. Watts, the right of way agent, to obtain the right of way from Colfax to Farmington. This occupied several weeks of my time. At the conclusion of the work he told me he had never before known such social conditions. At almost every house we visited it was "Hello, Johnnie, how is Jessie?" I did not notice this as in such a pioneer country we were all called by our first names and I never outgrew my boyish name of Johnnie and am now too old of course to ever outgrow it and I am glad of it. The name has helped me to keep a certain boyishness, as though I were not yet quite grown. During the summer I held a number of teachers institutes in various cities of the state. One in Spokane when there was no public school building worth the name where the institute could be held. So I arranged for the use of the Spokane College building, a Methodist institution. The building, a small two story brick, is still standing near the north end of the Monroe Street bridge. It was at this time I first met Frank M. Dallam, founder and editor of the Spokane Review. Neither of us dreamed then of the lifetime friendship which was then begun. In 1887 I spent the summer in the work of superintending the schools. I visited many of the counties and county superintendents, holding several institutes. Among these places were Tacoma, Seattle, and North Yakima. In arranging for the latter institute as well as one in Tacoma I crossed the Territory on the Yakima branch of the Northern Pacific, riding on the first transcontinental train to cross over the switch back before the completion of the tunnel. This was July 3, 1887. That year closed my work as superintendent and my biennial report to the governor I still have in a leather bound volume, one of two copies preserved in the office of the superintendent in later years and presented to me by Professor Dewey, then superintendent. The state printer bound it in leather for me. While my name is far back in the list of superintendents there were a number preceding me. Yet all the records I received from my predecessor I could have carried in my arms. My term marks practically the beginning of the records in the office of superintendent of public instruction of the State of Washington. The year 1888 was devoted largely to the real estate business. I formed a partnership with Greenville Holbrook, the Lawrence-Holbrook real estate company. I sold the hardware business to G. W. Nye but retained a quarter interest in the firm of G. W. Nye & Co. While still retaining the implement business, and the grain warehouse business started in 1886 when I put up a warehouse on the completion of the O.R.& N, real estate was the principal thing to engross my attention. We laid out the Lawrence-Holbrook Addition to Pullman, which lies across what was known as Missouri Flat in the early days, now on the north side of Pullman and extending to the college campus. In the winter of 1888 or rather the spring of 1889 we laid out the town of Kendrick, Idaho. While we were the real founders of the town we took in a number of friends to share in the profits. We made a deal with the N.P. Railway company to build down the Little Bear Creek instead of the Middle Potlatch which comes into the main Potlatch at Juliaetta, a few miles below the town of Kendrick. The summer of 1889 the Territory was preparing to become a state by an act of Congress generally referred to as the enabling act. Delegates were elected to a constitutional convention which framed a constitution and submitted it to a vote which ratified it. Then came a general election for state officers, including a legislative assembly. I was elected to the state senate from Whitman county and was second youngest member of the senate, being twenty-eight years of age. The Territory was admitted to statehood November 11, 1889 just eleven years to a day from my coming into it. I was made chairman of the committee on education and had the drafting of the first school law. Had I followed the usual rule I would have introduced the bill and had the law named after me, but I introduced it as a committee bill. This constituted my principal legislative work for the session. The bill passed just as I drew it without amendment except of my own suggestion of minor changes. On amendment offered by me the fees paid for appointment as Notaries Public went into a state library fund. In a few years this fund provided one of the finest libraries of any state in the union. In after years, in looking over the proceedings of the state senate I was surprised to find how many times I voted alone in the negative. In the election of new senators for a new state I had an important part. Watson C. Squire, who selected me for Superintendent of Public Instruction was a candidate and I had an opportunity to return the compliment to him. John B. Allen was an old friend who had been U.S. District Attorney when I was Superintendent. I was one of two selected by him to place him in nomination. They were both good men, although neither was re-elected. After the adjournment Jessie and I, with Bessie, whom she had brought over in January, made a trip to mother's grave. This was early in April, 1890. Zola had gone to Pendleton to visit with Hugh and Hattie. Shortly after our return to Garfield I was appointed Register of the U.S. Land Office at Waterville, Washington by President Harrison. This was a newly created district. We moved out in August, having a delay in the confirmation of my appointment by the United States Senate. Frank M. Dallam, founder of the Spokane Review was my colleague as Receiver. We organized the new district but owing to vexatious delays were not able to open the office until November 11, 1890. I fixed this date as the anniversary of my reaching Washington, also the anniversary of statehood of the year before. At Waterville the next spring, April 13, 1891 Hugh was born. When a few weeks old Jessie was taken with a low fever which necessitated weaning him. While we hired a nurse Hugh's care fell to me. A few weeks later on Jessie's recovery Hugh was weaned in a double sense. He had, even at that age, only a few weeks old, learned to distinguish between us. While of course his mama cared for him in larger part, he slept with me and I cared for him when at home. We raised him on a bottle. I fed him at night, dressed him and undressed him. When at home and he was a little older I gave him every attention a mother usually gives a child. She never knew what it was to hold him on her arm at night, as she did the other children. If he waked, when older, and I was not in bed he would climb out to hunt me. This continued until he was five or six years old. Perry was born at Waterville a year and a half later, October 21, 1892, the anniversary of the discovery of America. On this account and to distinguish him from his Uncle Perry in the after years we put the Columbus in his name. Zola was named after Zoula Chase and my mother, Zoula Lucretia. In later years we dropped the u. Bessie was named by Jessie, and the name selected because she liked it, after no one in particular. The Angeline was after the second of her grandmother Rogers' name. Hugh was named by both of us, after his two uncles, his mother's brother, Hugh Montgomery Rogers, and mother's brothers who were named Montgomery. Perry was named in the same way after two of my brothers, with Columbus added for good measure, for the reasons stated. I was in poor health during the entire time I was in Waterville, losing 40 pounds in weight. A good many of my friends thought I would die, and I was suspicious of myself. I did not recover until the year after our return to Garfield. This was due to treatments from Dr. Montgomery of Portland, Oregon. I then gained over fifty pounds in six months which I have not as yet lost, having maintained a weight of from 200 to 220 pounds for the past 28 years. I weigh 220 pounds at the present writing. The most important feature of my work in the land office was holding for cancellation all the lieu land selections by the N.P. Railway Company. I will not go into details here. On appeal I was sustain by the Commissioner of the General Land Office and later by the Secretary of the Interior. In religious life I taught the bible class in Sunday school during our residence of nearly four years. I was chairman of the committee which built the Presbyterian church which we joined in the absence of the U.B. church. I was elected school director, a position I held during my residence, and during this time we built what was then the new school house. I had charge of building a telephone line from Wenatchee to Waterville, our first communication with the outside world, except by stage coach. Politically, I was boss of the county, being county chairman of the Republican party and a member of the state committee. At the state convention in 1892 I was offered the nomination of Lieutenant Governor, having been selected by John H. McGraw as his running mate. I declined. I was removed from office by Grover Cleveland who succeeded President Harrison. We left Waterville April 10, 1894 and went to Lincoln county, near Davenport, where we spent the summer on Mrs. Rogers' farm where I put in a crop. It was an entire failure, averaging only five bushels per acre. However, I did not stay to harvest it, hiring that work done. The entire yield did not pay harvest expenses. I accepted the position as manager of the Farmers' Warehouse Company at Garfield. Bryan Westacott, R.C. McCroskey and Michael Byrne were the board of directors. So in the fall of 1894 I again took up life in Garfield after a practical absence of five years. Here we spent the next eleven years. Busy years, I worked hard. While generally successful, these were not the happiest years of my life. This was due largely to competitive business conditions and some personal enmities which developed politically and otherwise. When I took the management of the Farmers' Warehouse Company it was in debt in excess of the amount of its capital stock. The first year its earnings paid its indebtedness and a large dividend. I do not now remember the amounts paid in dividends under my management but far in excess of the amount of its stocks. The year 1893 had been the year of the wet harvest. The heaviest yield of record was almost entirely spoiled by the rains which commenced early in harvest. Those who lost the grain in the field uncut were the lightest losers. When cut and stacked it spoiled. When threshed it spoiled. When hauled to the warehouse it spoiled in greater part. In the fall of 1894 there were hundreds of tons of wheat in the warehouse in various stages of decay. Some I sold for horse and cattle feed. Some for hog feed, some I gave away, and some I paid to have hauled away. At the legislative session of 1894-5 I went to Olympia and prepared a bill to govern the grading of grain, called a grain inspection law. I was accused of trying to provide myself a job. Upon this report I went to the governor and asked him to appoint my brother Perry chief state grain inspector, which he did. When I returned to the Palouse country, which was in what was called the N.P. Railway Co. indemnity belt which had been in controversy many years, settlers came to me for aid. By reason of my experience in the land office I was better informed than the attorneys who had been handling the cases. In this way, while not giving the matter much of my time, I drifted into the practice of land law, confined almost entirely to cases of lieu land claimants against the railroad company. While not an attorney I made, in the course of the next ten years, several thousand dollars in the practice of law, a record few laymen have. I was appointed United State Court Commissioner by Judge Hanford, a position I held for several years. The work was entirely in connection with land matters, taking homestead applications and testimony in final proof. I did a good deal of trading of all kinds, especially in real estate. In this way I accumulated property. I traded a small tract of land, a town lot, as I remember, for 80 acres of raw land near Oakesdale without seeing it. This I kept for a few years and traded it for the home known then as the Rounds house in which we lived for several years. I never saw the land. I traded a small tract of land to Jonas Crumbaker for a house and lot. One morning Jim Faught called me out from the breakfast table and before going back I traded this house for his farm. I had left 160 acres south of Waterville on Badger Mountain, clear of all encumbrances. This I traded to Jim Dutton for his home of 160 acres with $1,000 mortgage. I traded the Faught land, with its mortgage, to John Hale for his home. I sold the Dutton place for enough to clear me of all indebtedness. For a brief period in the close of 1897 I owed no man, the only time since starting in life I have been free from debt. In the course of years I traded for a good many horses. Selecting a number of mares and colts I advertised them to trade for Spokane property. I traded for a furnished home in Spokane. This I traded for a farm in Spokane County. This I traded for a house and six lots in Falls City, near Seattle, taking a mortgage to balance of $4,500.00. This mortgage I traded for a section of land near Mansfield, Washington. This land I traded for a stock of hardware and implements at Wilbur valued at some $16,000. The house at Falls City I traded for a new Winston Six auto which I sold for $2,600 cash. This is an account of only a small portion of the trades I made. I have often said I would admit having traded horses a few hundred times. Possibly only a hundred times or so. But in all my trades I had no blush of shame to meet the other fellow afterward. Sometime I lost but generally made money in disposing of the property. I traded square and without misrepresentation. In 1895 I developed the pooling of wheat by different farmers so as to make up a big block to offer an exporter. By keeping in touch with the markets and especially the ship charters in Portland where I generally sold knowing when the ships were on demurrage, I could secure an advance of a few cents on the regular market by selling to an exporter who was short of wheat to finish loading. I introduced the method of collective selling, but did not perfect the system for various reasons. During 1895 I was kept very busy with the grain business, having a house on each railroad in Garfield. During this year the receipts were heavy. It was a competitive point. Grain came from other places because of the advance in price I paid by reason of pooling. In the spring of 1896 Jonas Crumbaker and I made a trip to the old home in Illinois. This was after an absence of 20 years. That then seemed a very long time, but 27 years have passed since then. I was surprised at how well the people there remembered me. Mr. Crumbaker knew me at once, but did not know his own son. I had supposed few outside of our immediate neighbors and Uncle Harry's would even remember me, a boy of a large family of poor people. The two incidents in this respect which most surprised me were with Roy Fariss and Dr. Waters. The former I had not seen or he had not seen me as far as I knew since I was ten years old. When he remembered me I thought he confused me with Charley or Willie. "Oh, no," he said. "I remember you. Why I often went to Reese John's school Friday afternoon to hear you speak." I have before mentioned the fact that Dr. Waters remembered vaccinating me when a child. It had seemed an age since I left Illinois as a boy. A much longer period has passed since that time, so that the 20 years I counted then seem short. On my return I stopped in Nebraska to visit Croff Bailey's. They were not at home when I reached there except the young boys who of course did not know me. It seemed so unreal to be at Croff Bailey's and a stranger. Margie came first. We were at supper when Croff came, with his usual bluster. They called out to him to see who was there. As he came into the dining room I met him and can hardly explain the disappointment when he hesitated to call my name. Turning me around and looking a long time he finally said, "It is George Lawrence's boy and I think Johnnie." So he knew me. The year 1896 was a very important year in many respects. Times had been very hard since 1895 with the price of all farm products very low. In 1894 I bought wheat at Garfield for 21 cents a bushel, sacked. This was equal to 18 cents a bushel bulk. Later in the year the price advanced to 35 cents. From 1895 to 1896 the price to the farmer varied from 35 to 45 cents. It was the period of what we called the "Free Silver Craze." Silver was low compared to gold and a popular political demand came up for the free coinage of silver at a ratio of 16 to 1. Silver was then bought by the government at the market price which varied in its relationship to gold. The demand, which was quite popular, especially about Garfield, was for the free coinage at the ratio of 16 to 1. A very popular book on this subject was published in Chicago by a man named Harvey, "Coin Harvey." It was the means of converting many to the doctrine of free silver. I was at first inclined to that belief, but the reading of the book had just the opposite effect, so I stood against a tide of popular opinion locally. In fact my brother Perry and I with Charlie Gwinn, were about the only Republicans left in the town of Garfield after the campaign was on. W.J. Bryan made his celebrated speech on the "Crown of Thorns and Cross of Gold," which gave him the Democratic nomination for President. I of course supported McKinley and succeeded during the campaign in converting many to my political belief. For a number of years thereafter I was rated as a conservative of "stand-patter." Gradually, after 1905, under the teaching of Roosevelt, I became a progressive. In the fall of 1897, we took a trip to Portland with Bryan and Jennie Westacott, taking Bessie and Perry. While in Portland we found there was a rate war on between the steamship line and the railroad on the fares to San Francisco. This lead us to take a trip to San Francisco by train at a round trip fare of $5.00 each, the children half fare, which included the standard sleeper, a rate which made it cheaper to take the trip than stay at a hotel in Portland. It was a very delightful trip. On our return to Portland, Bryan and I each bought a surrey or carriage as we called it, having a cut-under body. These we got a very low price, $150.00 each, at the closing-out sale of a large implement house. Our children will remember the carriage which we all so much enjoyed for several years thereafter. No auto of the later years brought greater pleasure. It was on this trip that I took Jessie to a doctor to secure treatment for a cough. In fact it was the cough which led me to propose the trip. Dr. Dix at Garfield had examined her and pronounced it consumption. Her sister, Mattie had been taken with a similar cold and cough in the spring of 1894 when we were spending the summer on the farm near Davenport. After we moved to Garfield in August following she came with the children hoping to secure treatment to cure her. She went to Dr. Dix who after examining her told me she could not live many months. She died the following winter. I can never forget how she longed to travel in the hopes of recovery. Dr. Dix now said he never saw two cases more alike. This was in the early winter after our return from the Portland and San Francisco trip. We immediately started planning for another trip and getting ready for it for it for I was determined to leave nothing undone that could be done to save her life instead of allowing her to die like Mat. Just as we were about ready to start there was a sharp advance in the price of wheat which went to 75 cents a bushel, an unprecedented price at that time. I could not get away but fearing the delay on Jessie's account bought tickets to Illinois and return via Denver, good for six months for her and Zola. They were to stop at Denver, Colorado, until we would come, meantime she would take treatment from a Dr. Holmes who was experimenting with an anti-toxin treatment for tuberculosis. After the lapse of a few weeks I received a telegram from him saying to come at once. Taking Bessie, Hugh and Perry we started. This was when McKinley was rushing preparation for war with Spain, after the sinking of the Maine. We had trouble getting through as we had to give up our coach to soldiers. [Page 58 missing] Jessie soon tired of the noise. We could not talk to each other on lower Broadway without stopping to yell in each other's ears. So we determined to take a train for Washington, D.C. We went into a railroad ticket office on Broadway and bought return tickets to Garfield via the G.N. from St. Paul. After leaving the ticket office in a basement we stopped on a street corner a few blocks away to determine just how to go to a ferry across the Hudson. A man came up and asked me if I had not just bought two railroad tickets at a certain ticket office. I had always prided myself on the fact that a man used to the Great West was not afraid of any stranger. But how often are people from the country warned of all strangers in New York City. Looking him squarely in the face I told him I had and asked him why he asked. "You left the tickets on the counter," was his reply, saying he was in the office at the time and was on the lookout for me down the street. Searching my pockets I could not find the tickets. We hurried back to the office where we found them. I had actually walked away after paying for them leaving them on the counter. The agent had asked a stranger who was in the office to keep a lookout for us and tell us if we were seen. I doubt if we would have returned to the ticket office when we discovered the loss as I was so sure I had put them in my pocket. I will say here that I have been very fortunate in losing so little in all the years I have traveled, covering probably a quarter of a million miles, or as far as ten times around the earth. I remember losing only about $25.00 when I once had my pocket picked in a crowd near Los Angeles. Next morning we were in Washington, D.C. We came into the city in a different direction from what I expected and as a result I have always been turned around in the nation's capital however many times I have been there, a dozen times or so, once remaining a month or more. It was Sunday morning and we spent the day quietly at a small hotel, taking a ride with a man who drove one horse in a canopy top surrey. We made the practice all through life when in a strange city even a few hours to spend a few dollars riding about to see the principle objects of interest. In the score of years following we visited every principal city in the United States and by taking a ride in some special conveyance, an auto in the later years, we really saw much of all the cities. Our first trip the next morning was to the capitol and around the first corner came face to face with M.E. Hay and wife, with whose life my own was in later years so closely linked. Congress was not in session and after a few hours at the capitol we went about the city. Next day we attended the President's reception at the White House, a public reception in the East Room. We shook hands with President McKinley who used the phrases alternately, "Pleased to meet," "Glad to see you," to the long line of visitors from over the United States. Mrs. McKinley sat back at a little distance, surrounded by several ladies and her delicate face was an object of much interest to all. That evening we took a train for Mansfield, Ohio. We got off at the B&O depot, the identical depot at which we landed when we went back from Indiana in 1864, 34 years before when grandfather met us. No one expected us this time. We hunted up Uncle Sam Eyerly who lived not far away. He was the young man who was courting Aunt Lucinda of whom mother in her letter to Aunt Belle from Illinois in 1866 asked for a piece of her wedding cake. We made their home our headquarters for the next few days while visiting the relatives there, their children, Aunt Belle, the half uncles Joe and Oliver out at the old home place and Hugh Piper who had been mother's foster brother. From Mansfield we went to Climax to visit mother's nephew, Nelson Montgomery, Uncle Jim's only son. It was from there we visited the place of my birth mentioned before. Leaving Climax we passed through Marion where we spent a half hour with cousin Ella, Aunt Lucinda's oldest daughter who married a man named Plank. We might have called on Warren G. Harding had we known at that time he was to become President of the United States. He was then an unknown editor of a country newspaper at Marion. We went to Bloomington, Ill., where we changed cars for Lexington, our old home town. We went out to Uncle Harry's at Pleasant Hill, Jessie's old home. This was the realization of a dream to her. Uncle Harry's home was just across the street from her father's old home. Aunt Cynthia was one of her closest women friends. Much older, of course. Jessie often related a silent rebuke given her by Aunt Cynthia once when she took the largest piece of pie. She said she could never forget the look in Aunt Cynthia's eyes and could never thereafter take the best of anything. If she was ever really selfish, which I cannot believe except for her own statement, certainly never was a cure more complete. In the course of nearly forty years we lived together I never knew her to be guilty of one selfish act. We spent nearly two weeks visiting old friends. I had seen some of them only two years before, but many for the first time since leaving Illinois 22 years before. We went out to Mr. Crumbaker's, who seemed like our own folks to each of us. I had missed seeing Maggie two years before when she was on her way back from Nebraska at the time I left. She and Marion's wife, who was visiting there, were over to visit Joanna. We drove down the road to meet them. When they saw each other for the first time after a separation of 18 years Jessie and Maggie jumped from the buggies and ran together for the fond embrace. They were girl chums and Maggie was my schoolmate. Jessie laughed when Maggie asked her if she could kiss her husband. It was a wonderful two weeks for Jessie, as she renewed the childhood acquaintances. She had often complained of a poor memory and especially of her childhood days. But I never saw her fail to recognize an old acquaintance or to call them by name. Nor did she ever fail to remember the incidents told by others. We spent the Fourth of July at a celebration in Lexington and a few days later we had our pictures taken with Maggie at Merrill's old gallery in Lexington. I remembered the gallery so well as we had all gone there to have our pictures taken before leaving for Oregon over twenty two years before. Twenty-two years then seemed a long time but it has lengthened to forty-eight years at this writing. We went to Chicago where we bought the furnishings for our new home, the Rounds house, where we lived for the next seven years. We had taken the measurement of each room for carpets and linoleum, the latter being still on the floor of the dining room at Ralph Wilson's to whom we later sold the house. We moved into the new home in the fall. We had owned it nearly two years but waited for the time when we could add to it the modern conveniences and furnish it as we now did. Our children will remember this as the strongest home tie of any house in which we ever lived. The year 1899 passed away with a busy season in the warehouse and banking, added to the farm life. I had traded for the John Hale place and bought the Charley McCown place adjoining which gave a half section south of the Tom McCown place, which I afterward bought. I hired Joe Rogers by the year and equipped the place with stock and implements for farming. I suppose this was a period of as ideal life as one could have. We gained a little each year in property value. I bought a new driving team after selling Prince and Dandy, two white horses which seemed almost a part of the family. I bought a barn with two lots across the street where we kept the team and a cow, Roxie, which I bought as a small calf from Tom Amos. She was a registered Jersey. Later I bought Tony and Nell, a splendid driving team. We kept mares at the farm, one a registered Percheron and her colt, a registered Percheron stallion I afterward sold for $1,200.00. The year 1901 was the beginning of a homeseekers movement promoted by the railroads, especially the N.P.R.R. The Spokane Chamber of Commerce invited representatives from the surrounding towns of all the country to come to a big meeting at Spokane to plan how to handle the homeseekers. I attended from Garfield and when called on after a long session gave my plan. It ended all discussion and was adopted in detail but without credit to me by the local paper. Under this plan each town was to send a representative to St. Paul to ride out on the homeseekers' train. I made one trip, going on back to Illinois with Brother Willie who continued his visit to Ohio. This was the year of an attempted division of Whitman county in which I took a leading part in opposition which ended at the legislative session which resulted in its defeat. Uncle Harry again came out on a visit in the fall and took a hunt down on the Pend Oreille, an experience he repeated a number of times. The next year Aunt Cynthia and Nellie came out and spent a large part of the summer and fall with us. He was seeking health as well as enjoying the trip and a deer hunt in the late fall. These were the years that now seem the fruition of our lives although we were still looking forward to the time to come for what would be the full measure of success. But here was the period where our children were growing up so as to share with us in a larger measure the happiness of life. Zola was finishing high school, and coming all too soon to the time when she married Bert Fisher. No one who has not gone through the experience can know the feeling of parents when the first born ceases to be a part of the home by making her home with another. This was the first seeming break and however natural in human life is like taking away a part of one's self. Bessie, whose eyes had troubled her through childhood so as to interfere with her studies in school secured a treatment to help her after passing a crisis which almost caused the loss of sight. Hugh and Perry gained a practical experience with farm life such as could come in no other way. They were both growing into sturdy boys. Jessie's health while not fully restored was such that she entertained a great deal of company. Our dining room contained a large table which was usually well spread and surrounded by many at each meal. We seldom ate alone. Neighbors from the country, the Shoemaker's and Westacott's, were frequent visitors. Brother Willie often came and Leona spent a good deal of time at our home. Brother Charley was on a small farm at LaDow Butte. Perry's moved to Pullman and Harry lived in Colfax. John Bishop and Janey were on the farm near Steptoe and Sam Crumbaker and Martha had moved out on the main traveled road to Colfax. When Uncle Harry came we had a reunion at our home and a picture taken of my brothers and sisters, the first group taken since in Ohio in 1864, all the children together but for the last time on earth. But happy prosperous years will end. Not that joy passes out of life but there is a lessening of the things that brings the completion of earthly happiness. In the winter of 1902 I took my final deer hunt on the Pend Oreille. Each year for a score of years I enjoyed an annual fishing trip and for many years an annual hunting trip in the mountains. Jessie and I planned a celebration of the twentieth anniversary of our wedding for April 2, 1903. Cards were out for a large gathering. I went out to the ranch to help Bert break two colts, driving out in the carriage. Bert had the colts ready and we soon had them at work. In the afternoon they seemed so quiet I hitched them to the carriage and drove down to the Palouse river where I filled the carriage with evergreen boughs for decorating the house, then drove on home. The next afternoon I hitched the colts to an old buggy I had bought at a sale. This was one of the mistakes of my life. Driving through a mud hole on Main Street in front of the bank a single tree broke and the tongue came down. In the mix-up I jumped out and losing my balance I broke my left ankle, or the bones of the legs at the ankle. I will not dwell on the injury. It broke up the proposed party. I spent more than a year either in a hospital or in Spokane under the care of Dr. Thomas. He saved an amputation but my suffering was intense. Not for ten years could I step on that foot without severe pain. To save amputation the doctor removed the end of the tibia, lapping the fibula. This gave a very imperfect joint and the shortening of my left leg gave me a permanent lameness. The accident changed the whole course of my life. I sold the stock and implements and rented the farm. I was compelled to retire from the active management of the bank and warehouse. It was certainly a very trying period in my life. The great change which gave the opportunity of my life came in June 1905 when I was selected by Governor Mead as a member of the newly created Railroad Commission. The creation of such a commission to regulate the railroads has been a political issue for some years. My appointment was a surprise to everyone including myself. In fact I did not then know what influences led to my selection. In later years I learned that an old time Palouse friend, then of Seattle and connected with the G.N. Railway was the actual factor in my selection. I immediately went to Olympia to assume the office with Harry A. Fairchild of Bellingham as chairman of the commission and John H. McMillan of Roche Harbor as an associate. Space will not allow me to detail my life and work on the commission where I spent seven years. It seemed that every prior experience in life was a course of preparation for this work. I gave up every other pursuit to throw my entire time and my whole souled interest into the work. In looking back over it I realize, to myself, the successful work accomplished. This was conceded by friend and foe. In fact our work was of such a nature, along new lines, foundation laying in the attempt at public regulation of rates, that our commission achieved a national renown. It accomplished the extraordinary result of pleasing both the public and the railroads. So striking was this success that the editor of the Railway Age Gazette, published in Chicago, made a trip to Olympia especially to see me and find out from actual contact with the people of the state to see if they were really as well satisfied with the result as the railroad officials with whom he came in contact. He found they were and then asked me to write an article which was printed first in the Railway Age Gazette and afterward published in pamphlet form and went through two editions. The pamphlet was placed in every public library in the United States, including every college and university. I wish each of the children to keep a copy of this pamphlet with the copy of this story of my life. I feel that my life work as it materialized on this railroad commission is reflected in the solution of the problems of determining the reasonableness of a railroad rate as shown in this pamphlet. It is of course technical. It was written more especially for those who were versed in the language of railroad rates and fares. Judge Reid, leading counsel for the railroads, told me afterward he spent two weeks almost night and day studying one table, that of the division of the value of a railroad according to the value of its use for state and interstate purpose, saying to himself if I was capable of writing it he was capable of understanding it. It seemed like entering a new world for us to move to Olympia, but we enjoyed it. Before doing so Jessie and Zola's moved to Coeur d'Alene where we had a house bought at the sale of Fort Sherman, the house of the commanding officer, where Bert and Zola expected to remain while we went to Olympia. Before we did so, however, I traded Ralph Wilson out of the Tom McCown place, adjoining our farm on the north, next to Garfield, and Zola and Bert moved back to this farm. In July I started on a tour of the railroad commissions of the eastern states prior to organizing our own commission. I visited the commission in Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Ohio, Wisconsin and the interstate commerce commission at Washington D.C. The next year, starting in February with Jessie, we made a tour of the United States, visiting all the principal cities. We spent over three months on this trip, saying it seemed like a wedding trip after being nearly twenty-five years married. We went through California, then took the Southern Pacific route through Texas to New Orleans, stopping off at El Paso and from which we took a side trip to Austin. After spending a few days in New Orleans we went to Montgomery, Alabama, then to Atlanta, Georgia, to Richmond, Virginia, then on to Washington, D.C. Later we went to New York, back to Ohio, Illinois, Nebraska, and then on home via the Burlington and Great Northern. We took many trips after that, principally to California and return, but no trip in our lives was as complete in its happiness as the trip we made at that time. We were in San Francisco just before the earthquake. We attended an actors' benefit in Chicago later, given in relief of those earthquake sufferers. At this benefit we saw and heard all the celebrates of the stage in the United States and some from Europe including Sarah Bernhardt. Thereafter I made annual trips to Washington, D.C. during the years 1907, 1908, 1909 and 1910. Mr. Fairchild agreed to go in 1911 but the illness which led to his death had seized him so that he turned back from Seattle. During my services on the commission I became acquainted with many prominent men over the United States, usually men in public life as well as practically all the leading railroad men of the west. Samuel Hill of Seattle, the Good Roads advocates, was a close personal friend. His father-in-law, James J. Hill, because of Sam Hill, became a personal friend whom I met many times. I was once invited to home of Sam Hill to a dinner party in honor of James J. Hill who had come to Seattle on one of his periodical trips over the Great Northern. On this trip he had brought several leading bankers from New York. The dinner was given in Mr. Hill's apartments on the top floor of the Hotel Parry. I had been invited over the phone and as Jessie was away from home overlooked all preparations. I rushed from the office to catch the train. I was a little taken aback when I entered his apartment just as dinner was ready to serve to find them all in evening clothes, including Sam and James J. However, I kept my courage up, feeling myself as good as they. As a matter of fact I did not own a suit of evening clothes. At Washington, D.C. I met many U.S. Senators and members of the President's Cabinet. I have told how we attended one of McKinley's receptions. Later we attended one of Roosevelt's. We had to wait an hour and Jessie was very tired, but glad afterward she waited. Later I attended a Taft reception. President Wilson did not give public receptions but through senatorial influence I attended a private reception in the White House and with a few others shook hands with him. The death of Fairchild which came suddenly was a turning point in my life. It was on the appointment of his successor that Governor Hay, after consulting me, antagonized me by appointing a man I did not want, George A. Lee. I quickly found I could not work with him and becoming provoked, resigned from the commission. Shortly thereafter I announced my candidacy for Governor. I feared at the time there would be a split in the Republican Party and told Jessie if it came I would lose. I went in as a progressive Republican and when the split came followed Roosevelt into the Bull Moose Party. I failed to get the nomination at the Bull Moose primaries. In fact, they were so conducted that I never had a chance. After election we moved to Spokane where I went into the real estate business, mainly to handle my own property. At that time I owned nearly two thousand acres of land, mostly cheap logged off land near Spokane bought of the state with only a small payment down. After a few months I traded a section of land in Douglas county for a stock of hardware and implements at Wilbur. A little later I traded the logged off land for the building in which the business was located, known as the Hay building, a brick 100 by 200 in the center of town. Later I traded 80 acres of land near Garfield to Jonas Crumbaker for a stock of hardware and implements at Garfield. I organized two corporations. The Lawrence-Camp Hardware Company at Wilbur, Bessie's husband taking the management and the Lawrence-Fisher Hardware Company at Garfield, Zola's husband taking the management there. I planned to have Hugh in the Wilbur store and Perry at Garfield, making it a family affair. The business never ran smoothly or profitably. In the later years I blamed myself. But regrets are vain. After a little time John Camp became dissatisfied and returned to the coast. He sold out to C.V. Howell of Wilbur. When the war came on I feared the future. Hugh was bound to enlist. Taking it altogether I concluded the safe way was to get out of business and into farming. All my life, since our marriage, I had been an accumulator of property. I was a careful, successful trader. But now I made the one big mistake of my life. I traded all the property including the mercantile concerns, buildings and land into farm land in Western Adams county, nearly 7000 acres in all and equipped it for farming on a large scale. It made the biggest farming venture of that part of the state. We put in a 75 horse power Holt caterpillar which pulled 12 plows, 16 inches each, or about a rod strip plowed at the rate of 20 acres a day or 40 acres on a 24 hour run. We had five drills of 22 hoes or 11 feet, seeding a strip 55 feet wide with 60 feet of harrow pulled behind. In harvest we had a 24 foot combine and trailed a wagon with a bulk grain bed into which the threshed grain was spouted from the combine. The Holt people sent a photographer from California who made a moving picture of our harvesting outfit which was exhibited all over the United States. We had everything but a yield of grain. I stuck to it as it was my nature to stick, for three years. In that time I lost everything except my good name and all the children who took stock in the concerns with me lost proportionately, between fifty and sixty thousand dollars in all. In my sixtieth year I was stranded. While I had done many things I was at a loss which way to turn. By chance, W.H. Palhamus offered me the position of manager of the feed department of the Puyallup-Sumner Fruit Growers Canning Company. In the meantime, before taking over the place I was selected by the Good Roads Association of Eastern Washington to organize the state against the Carlyon Road Bonding Bill. This I did and was credited with defeating the measure. November 1, 1920 I went to work for Paulhamus and Jessie and I took an apartment in Puyallup. Later, her health not being good we rented a furnished home. Still later we shipped over our own furniture from Spokane and furnished another house. A year later, Paulhamus failed and I was again out of employment. I had devised a machine for mixing poultry feed, particularly egg mash. I put one in the mill at Puyallup of which I had charge and by its use built up a large feed trade. It was the success of the feed department which led to its sale November 1, 1921. I immediately set to work to manufacture and sell the mixer. I made application for patent and my claims were allowed, but later circumstances led me to drop it. I made a mixer and sold to Mr. Hawley at Bellingham and another for the Grange at Puyallup. Later I sold one at Wenatchee. Just before the New Year I was offered the position of manager of the Washington Co-operative Egg & Poultry Association at Winlock which I accepted and came down at took the new position January 2, 1922. This was admittedly the hardest place in the entire association to fill and I found a path made up of everything but roses. However, starting then with a floor space of 2400 square feet and 125 active members we have now in July 1924 some 18000 square feet of floor space and 325 members, doing several times the amount of business done at my beginning. The first thing I did at Winlock was to buy a little bungalow home for Jessie in which she spent several happy months. Soon after coming she had a severe cold or an attack of the grippe which took her to the hospital at Centralia. She never recovered full strength, although her health had been gradually failing for some years. Hugh came home after proving up on his homestead late in June. Perry was in the employ of the state highway commission and was living at Elma where Blanche expected to be confined. Zola came over on a visit and as Bessie lived near we were all together many times except Perry who could not leave Blanche. Sunday morning following the 4th of July when Zola, Bessie and Hugh were with us we were all at home and had just finished eating breakfast when the telephone rang. Jessie answered but a moment later asked me to talk. It was Perry at Elma telling that the baby had been born dead. I told him we would come down. It was against my best judgment for Jessie to go but motherlike and unselfish she would not consider her own weakness. Shortly after we started with Zola and John, all three riding in the runabout. We had tire trouble and did not reach Elma until after two o'clock. A little later we drove out to the cemetery where the little waif was buried, named on Jessie's suggestion after Blanche's father. After an early supper Jessie and I started back alone as Zola remained to nurse Blanche. We had more tire trouble coming home and she sympathized with me in that trouble. But we were both thankful it was the new born babe that died, not one of the living grandchildren or one of us. We were happy in this thankfulness, but both unusually silent. We had ridden much together during our lives, with the same mutual tender regard, but never in such silence. Mile after mile was passed without a word. When we came into Napavine it was a question whether we would turn to Bessie's or drive to Winlock. She left it to me and almost unconsciously I turned to Bessie's. After a little rest Hugh concluded to go home with us, but we had scarcely started when a tire went flat. We returned and Jessie went into the house while Hugh and I repaired the tire, only to find that our lights were very low. That settled it and we went in the house to stay all night. It was then after eleven o'clock and I went to bed and was almost asleep when Jessie came. A few hours later she awakened with a scream of pain and after a few minutes went into a convulsion. Afterward she lay an hour or two apparently asleep. The only words she spoke consciously were on the suggestion of removing a vessel. She spoke very quietly and in a natural voice, saying, "Don't take it far." A few minutes later she was seized with another convulsion and a short time later passed away. She had seen all the children the last day of her life but not together. This was the second great shock of my own life and the first one to come to the children. Death in any form is sad, but when it comes suddenly the intensity of grief is deepened. No woman of purer mind ever lived and none more unselfish. No wife more true or mother more devoted and loving. We buried her at the old home town of Garfield in the cemetery I had helped to locate soon after we were married and on a plot of ground we had together selected where some day I will be placed beside her until that great day when I trust we will be in the Kingdom together, our family unbroken in that happy reunion which is not to be again on earth. Two years have passed away since then. After the first burst of grief had passed I made up my mind to live my life on out to the end. This means that I am not to retire from active business while capable of doing it. Not to quit the activities of life as long as life lasts. Not to regard the chapter of life closed until the end. Not to look back with any vain regrets at whatever of failure there may have been, but to press forward in the work given me to do, whatever that may be. I remarried, a school mate and Jessie's girl chum, Maggie Crumbaker, who had married Henry Wilson and was left a widow. How long it may be given me to live is no matter. I will live each day as though the future called me to new deeds and greater heights to be gained, both here and hereafter. Since childhood I have indulged in the fantasy that no reasonable thing was impossible of attainment if there was an intelligent concentration to a given purpose. Concentration, continuity and energy, backed with intelligence, are almost limitless in the possibility of their accomplishment. To illustrate this, I once stopped to think what would be the most difficult thing for me to do, the seemingly impossible. I concluded it would be writing poetry. To carry out the experiment I tried verse making. I am not an egotist, however self confident, and do not therefore flatter myself I became a poet. Yet I wrote a good many verses, some of which approach closely to poetry. I will ask Hugh to type some of them as an appendix to this story. The belief that all things reasonable were possible was taught me by my mother and I suppose this led me to try many things for which I had no natural adaptation. I said in the beginning of this story it was to be intimate and personal and that what I had to say of myself must not be regarded as egotistical. With this statement repeated I will tell some of the things I have accomplished in life without any natural ability in some cases. I grew up with the reputation in the family of not being able to sing a tune. I loved songs and singing, especially the old pathetic songs and was determined to learn to sing. It was a hard task but in the course of years I succeeded fairly well and think now if I had had a teacher in early life who understood voice culture I would have made a fairly good singer. As it is I have sung bass only. As a young man I was not mechanical, but I kept at it until I learned several trades, among them the printer's trade and the tinner's trade at each of which I worked some years. I learned to hang paper by papering our own house many times and then by watching good paper hangers did a good deal of work of that kind. I have done a good deal of carpenter work and have a number of inventions to my credit, some of them really worth while. Among them a portable grain bin, a pneumatic system of conveying grain and the mixing machine mentioned. I am recording my mechanical work with no pride but rather as a matter of personal history. I have been what is denominated as a "Jack of all trades" but have been a master of some. Recently, when I took over the management of the Egg & Poultry Association at the age of sixty, it was new to me and of a technical nature requiring years of training. I have handled it successfully and learned to handle the various departments. One is never too old to learn whose determination is backed by the physical and mental ability to do and I feel sure we retain youth and defeat old age by thinking in terms of our ability to do things. That determination keeps us young. At least it has kept me feeling young. I many ways I still feel like I was a boy. That may be because all my life I have been called Johnnie by every one, even by strangers who have always heard me called by that boyish name. I think this is enough to constitute the story of my life. It is far from what I would like to have done in life. God may yet give me greater opportunity. One of my inspirations came from mother saying to me, "Aim high. You are not likely to shoot higher than you aim." This was another way of saying, "Hitch your chariot to a star." Perhaps the greatest incentive to ambition was mother's wish that I might accomplish something in life by which she would know that her own life by not been in vain. I will pass this on to my children and my children's children. Whatever any of them may accomplish will make it seem more worth while for me to have lived. Lovingly, John C. Lawrence. Addendum: Transcription of an editorial/article from The Palouse Republic, dated Friday, September 13, 1912. (Subscription is $1.00 year in advance, in 1912 dollars, in case you're tempted.) "While the vote of the progressive party at the primaries held last Saturday eliminate J.C. Lawrence of this county from gubernatorial race, The Republic still contends that Mr. Lawrence is, in point of fitness for the high position he sought, the best man who was before the people under any banner. A naturally brilliant mind, together with years of experience in public affairs, have equipped Mr. Lawrence admirably for the governorship, and had he succeeded in attaining to that high position, his chief aim would have been to give the state of Washington the best administration in its history."