Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 26.djvu/178

142 no panic. School was held, court convened. Men and women looked calmly into the eyes of the Indians who came and went and watched. The women smiled and tended their little flower gardens of hollyhocks and love apples, of French pinks and fever-few and turned with grave and anxious eyes to the medicinal beds of peppermint and catnip, of sage and tansy and hoarhound. They smiled but listened always day and night for the sound of a horse's hoof-beats that might herald the arrival of a messenger from the fighting volunteers.

Amid these conditions Harriet Jane Lyle was born, in September, 1847, in the cabin near Jefferson Institute. When she was a few weeks old, Ellen Lyle mounted a horse, took her infant daughter on her knee and rode to her father's home at Amity. On the return journey. she bore a little chair on her foot.

During the first winter in Oregon Felix Scott, Senior, had whiled away the dark days by fashioning a little chair out of an oxbow and yoke that he had used in crossing the plains. The rawhide seat he made of the hide of a cow that had died on the plains. He designed the chair for his tiny daughter, Linn, but it failed to please her capricious fancy, so he presented it to his infant granddaughter, Harriet Lyle. The little chair has had almost constant use from that day to this and is still one of the treasures of Lyle Farm.

Gold was discovered in California in 1847. The rush to the gold fields was at its height in '48. It seems incredible that the women of the valley who had lived in daily dread since the Whitman massacre should consent to have the men leave, for any amount of gold. But they did. Many claims were held by women and young boys and little children. John Lyle was gone a few months and brought back $1000 in gold. Soon after his return a second daughter, Joan, was born. He taught in the Applegate settlement and then at La Fayette with young Matthew P. Deady as assistant.