Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 2.djvu/53

Rh phrases, therefore I must leave out these lingual decorations of the captain's story, and give it in plain ordinary prose.

F. A. Lemont was born in Bath, Maine, that nursery of seamen. The founder of the family in America was John Lemont, who settled in Bath in 1722, and took a tract of land from New Meadows River to the Kennebec, and built a fort on it. The land was subsequently divided into four farms among his children, who enjoyed an unusual longevity, one daughter living to one hundred years, another to ninety-nine, and his sons from seventy-six to ninety-six years. His great-great grandson, Captain F. A. Lemont, at eighty-three was not by any means feeble.

On the wall of the captain's sitting-room hung the family coat-of-arms. It was manifestly French, and indicated high lineage, but its history was lost on a voyage to Oregon, when, in a severe gale, the vessel was swept clean by the overwhelming seas, and the cabin so drenched that the legend of the Lemont coat-of-arms, which was pasted on the back of the frame, became loosened by the moisture and was destroyed by the cabin boy as waste paper. The captain believed that the American family was of Huguenot ancestry, and probably banished from France. They continued to reside in Bath, engaged in ship-building and trading, Frank, as he was called by his associates, at the age of eighteen being a clerk in his father's store. Standing in the doorway one day in the autumn of 1828 the young man watched a party of sailors tramping merrily down the street, singing their sea songs, and a sudden impulse came over him to try a life of adventure.

Learning that the ship Owyhee was to sail from Boston for the Columbia River to trade with the Indians, he went to that place, and in September was articled as an