Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 8.djvu/54

 46 WILL J. TRIMBLE. Of these the highest in rank was Capt. 0. H. P. Taylor. His initials stood for Oliver Hazard Perry. He was thus named because of relationship on his mother 's side to the naval hero. Captain Taylor was a Kentuckian by birth and a grad- uate of West Point. He is described by Major Trimble as a small man and very erect. He was exacting in discipline and rather hot-tempered, yet he was much loved and respected. An especially sad feature of his death was that he left at Walla Walla a wife and two children. They had come out the year before and had faced many perils in order to be with the husband and father in the far frontier fort. Lieutenant Gaston, who was killed in the same fight, was an unmarried man, only twenty-four years of age. He had graduated the year before from West Point. He was a "tall, slim, handsome man" so tall, indeed, that on his arrival at the post he had been promptly nicknamed " Shanghai. " Both his name and Taylor's appeared in the roster of West Point graduates who had been killed in Indian wars, which was conspicuous in the government building- at the Lewis and Clark Exposition. In dying on the field of battle, Gaston met the death he desired, for a cancerous growth on his neck had troubled him so much that he feared death from disease. Colonel Steptoe, the Commander, survived the expedition. He, like Taylor and Gaston, was a Southerner, being descended from an old family of Virginia. A Dr. Steptoe is mentioned in the *Fithian Journal as a prominent member of Virginia society in the years just preceding the Revolution. Whether or no the Colonel was related to the doctor I do not know for certain, but, at any rate, Trimble describes the former as an "elegant man and aristocratic in his ways." He was about five feet ten inches [in height, slendefr in build and dark of complexion, with black mustache and hair. At the time of the expedition he was about forty years of age. He, too, had grad- uated from West Point and, in addition, had served in the graduation from Princeton College, was employed as tutor in the winter of 1773-74 at Nomini Hall, a large Virginia country-seat.
 * The Fithian Journal was written by a young man named Fithian, who, on