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316 thinking to bring down the giant, an eight-foot-diameter trunk, before night. But, after sinking the undercut about sixteen inches, further progress was arrested by striking a copious flow of pitch, which ran literally barrels of a crude turpentine. This was something new, even to the Yankee, and at night he had little to say. But the next day the liquid was found drained off, and not only did he fell that tree, but brought down five others, to the amazement of Hunt and all the others. His reputation, which his employer was ready to back with a wager, as the best chopper on the Pacific Coast, was then established.

The summer was passed at Hunt's mill, with the exception gf a run down to Clatsop Plains, where some of the first settlers of Oregon made homes, and with whom Bradbury made lifelong friendship. He also began to look upon life in Oregon as a permanency, and with a young man named Day, as partner, bought of a Scotchman, Charlie Wright, the claim at Oak Point, the original "Point ': being on the Oregon side of the Columbia, on the alluvial lands where the oak trees grew. This was the old site of Major Winship's venture in 1809, and sap-decayed logs of oak and stumps, with bark and root fibrils gone, still attested this earliest attempt at occupation of Oregon by Americans.

But late in the summer of 1848 these plans were halted by the exciting news brought from California by the brig Henry that gold had been discovered. The men at the mill immediately decided what they would do—they would build a small vessel and go down to the mines. Fred Ketchum, who had come a few years before as a beardless boy, undertook the task of supervising construction of the craft. He was from Wood-