By the time that he reached the Cascades, the early autumn rains were falling gently, and at Vancouver they were continuing; but they seemed so light and warm as to cause little discomfort; and the Indians were noticed going around in it unconcernedly barefooted.
At one time Mr. Cosgrove was eagerly advised by Daniel Lownsdale to locate a claim immediately back of his own, on what is now included in a part of the Portland townsite. But the timber here was so dense, and the hills so abrupt that he saw no possible chance to make a living there, and decided to look further.
Valuable advice was given by Peter Speen Ogden, then governor of the fort. Mr. Cosgrove was quite for going down the river to Clatsop, so as to be by the ocean. Mr. Ogden said, however, “It depends on what you are able to do. If you want to go into the timber, go to Puget Sound; if you want to farm, go up the Willamette Valley.”
Mr. Cosgrove decided that as he knew nothing of lumbering, but did know something of farming, that he had better proceed to the farming country.
Coming on up the Willamette Valley, he was met everywhere in the most friendly fashion; especially so by Mr. Hudson, the newspaper man of the Joliet _Courier_, who constrained him, “right or wrong,” to turn his cattle into a fine field of young wheat to pasture over night. Hudson was living a few miles above Oregon City, opposite Rock Island, and was a flourishing farmer. He went to the California mines, and was very fortunate, discovering a pocket in the American River bed, in a crease in the rocks, so rich that he dared not leave it, but worked without cessation a number of days, ordering his meals brought to him, at an ounce of gold dust each, and took over $22,000 from his claim.
Meeting Baptiste Dorio, of Saint Louis, on French Prairie, he proceeded with him to look up farm lands. At Dorio’s a somewhat laughable incident occurred. It was, at that early day, the custom for all to carry knife and fork with them, and these were the only individual articles of table furniture. The meal, usually beef and potatoes, was placed on an immense trencher, hewed out of an oak log, and around this all sat, and each helped himself at his side of the trencher.