Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/418

 listened. We could hear the bear groaning below and promptly decided that it would be indelicate to intrude upon his last struggles. And great glory was ours, and we were the babes in the wood no longer, for when the other boys came back they found a badly smashed bear and two boys who did not know what fear was. That night Charlie preferred not to shoot off his own gun and we fired it with a string from behind a tree and so proved his wisdom, for it went off like a cannon, and would certainly have kicked him into the next township.

George Andrew Waggoner arrived at The Dalles on his tenth birthday. With his parents and two brothers and two sisters, he had come to Oregon by ox team from Iowa, arriving on October 8, 1852. At Powder River his mother had died of cholera, and by the time they had reached the Grand Ronde Valley and camped on the present site of La Grande, their food gave out. The motherless family consisted of his two sisters, Francis, 18, and Emily, 5; his two brothers, Thomas, 14, and Byrd, 7; his father and himself. Provisions arrived from Portland and were distributed among the destitute families in camp, but their troubles were still not ended. They managed to drive their emaciated oxen, at the rate of a few miles a day, across the Blue Mountains, but on the Umatilla River one of them "gave entirely out and could go no further". Of the rest of the trip, he has told as follows:

We left our wagon on the Umatilla, not far from the present town of Pendleton. We packed our bedding on Old Nig, the last ox left us, and started on afoot. Poor old Nig. He was a wonderful ox. He was coal black. My father sold him at The Dalles for $20 to buy food.

We stopped two weeks at The Dalles. Father found an old stove and rigged up a table out of some old endgates and sideboards of an abandoned wagon and ran a lunch counter for the soldiers and civilians who were building the military post there. My eldest sister made pumpkin pies, which she sold for two bits each as fast as she could cook them. With the pie counter money father bought a couple of