Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/419

 canoes and we started for Portland. At Portland the citizens gave us food and shelter without charge and treated us kindly.

Leaving the two girls in Portland with Colonel Chapman, who kindly provided a home for them in his household, the three boys of 7, 10 and 14, with their father, made their way on foot through the Willamette Valley to a donation claim which they located "on the foothills above Brownsville." The next spring their older sister Frances joined them, but little Emily had died at Colonel Chapman's house.

In the spring of 1861, at the age of 19, he left for the Idaho Mines, stopping by the country schoolhouse near Brownsville to say goodby to the teacher who was beginning to creep into his "plans for the future in the queerest way".

"She was seated on a low railing of a little bridge near the school house, for I had promised to say good-bye. We walked on together on my road for half a mile, when she declared she must return. I took her hand and promised to come back to her in the fall, and she promised—well, no matter.

I mounted my horse and rode on. Looking back, I saw her still standing in the road, and playfully told her to run back to school. "No," she said, "I am going to stand here until I can see you no more, for when you go out of sight over the next hill, I shall never see you again."

. . . Ten years from that time I again rode over the top of that hill. A mist hid the spot where she had stood to watch me go, but I knew where to seek her, and as I stood where for eight years the grass had grown and the flowers had blossomed upon her grave, I thought of her last words to me, and of her short journey and my long wandering."

For fourteen years after he left behind that prophetic girl, he freighted to Florence, Elk City, Oro Fino, Bannock and other towns and camps in the Idaho gold region. And when he rode back and stopped in tender retrospection at her grave, he had been married for several years to Ellen Scott of Walla Walla. It was during his residence at Walla Walla that T. T. Geer's story of the "Pieplant Pie" occurred, as given a few pages farther along in this book and in which Waggoner figured as one of the "Walla Walla hog buyers" with the voracious appetites.