[Illustration: Looking for work on the good ship _Mary Melville_.]
ON the first day of October, 1852, at about nine o'clock at night, with a bright moon shining, we reached Portland. Oliver met us; he had come ahead by the trail and had found a place for us to lodge.
I carried my wife, who had fallen ill, in my arms up the steep bank of the Willamette River and three blocks away to the lodging house, which was kept by a colored man.
"Why, suh, I didn't think yuse could do that, yuse don't look it," said my colored friend, as I placed my wife on the clean bed in a cozy little room.
This was the first house we had been in for five months. From April until October we had been on the move. Never a roof had been over our heads other than the wagon cover or tent, and no softer bed had we known than the ground or the bottom of the wagon.
We had found a little steamer to carry us from the Cascades to Portland, along with most of the company that had floated in the scow down the river from The Dalles. The great Oregon Country, then including the Puget Sound region, was large enough to swallow up a thousand such migrations.
Portland was no paradise at that time. It would be difficult to imagine a sorrier-looking place than the one that confronted us upon arrival. Some rain had fallen, and more soon followed. With the stumps and logs and mud and the uneven stretches of ground, it was no easy matter to find a resting place.
The tented city was continually enlarging. People seemed to be dazed; it was hard to find paying work; there was insufficient shelter to house all. The country looked a great field of forests and mountains.
Oliver and I had between us a cash capital of about three dollars. It was clear that we must find work at once, so at earliest dawn next day Oliver took the trail leading down the river, to search for something to do. I had a possible opportunity for work and wages already in mind.
As we were passing up the Willamette, a few miles below Portland, on the evening of our arrival, a bark lay seemingly right in our path as we steamed by. This vessel looked to our inexperienced eyes like a veritable monster, with hull towering high above our heads and masts reaching to the sky. Probably not one of that whole party of frontiersmen had ever before seen a deep-sea vessel.