Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 4.djvu/401

Rh richly colored costumes of that day, never will the good people of our spray-bedewed old city rest upon the like again." The names are given as history, the last quotation as a sample of Mr. Rees's quiet humor.

Now an end of life by natural law is not a proper subject of mourning. Willard H. Rees did not so regard it, when his generous kindness led him to collect the most praiseworthy incidents of very earliest and most unlettered of the pioneers from those coming with Lewis and Clark and Astor's enterprise to those better informed who came after he himself was here. The contributions of Willard H. Rees, J. W. Nesmith, and M. P. Deady to the Oregon Pioneer Association publication would alone constitute no mean volume of the history of Oregon, beginning with retired Canadian hunters and trappers who by cultivating the soil of Oregon and creating a magazine of supplies to the American homebuilders unawares were cultivating the seeds of civilization aided and foreseen by the Applegates, Burnetts, Waldos, Nesmiths, Rees, and others who managed a bloodless victory over the pro-British occupation of Oregon.