Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/114

 $1.00, and another entry "to books 50 cts" is included in the purchases of David Leslie. It is true that in the case of Ewing Young and many others the trappers and the pioneers were the same persons. But between the hunters and the settlers as generalized groups there was a great difference that can be summed up very quickly. It was the difference between Fort Vancouver and Oregon City in the early days of those two places.

John Ball was only a temporary Oregon pioneer but was one of the very earliest. He came out with Captain Nathaniel J. Wyeth in 1832. He was a Dartmouth College graduate and at the request of Dr. John McLoughlin taught the first school at Fort Vancouver and the first in the Oregon territory, from November, 1832, to March, 1833. He then tried farming in the Willamette Valley for a few months until he left the country for good in the fall. The Autobiography of John Ball was not published until 1925. The manuscript was written in his eightieth year, from scanty diaries kept at various periods of his career, and from old letters sent home, as well as from memory. He left Oregon in October, 1833, quitting his "home on the Willamette with something of regret after all." He spent most of his life as a resident of Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Caught from the prairie a span of horses only used to the saddle, made for them a harness and put them to work. Stuffed some deer skin sewed in due form for collars, fitted to them for harness crooked oak limbs, tied top and bottom with elk skin strings, then to these, straps of hide for tugs, which tied to the end of a stick for a whiffletree, and the center of this I tied to the drag, made from a crotch of a tree. And on this I drew out logs for a cabin, which when I had laid up and put on rafters to make the roof, I covered with bark peeled from cedar trees. And this bark covering was