Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 9.djvu/148

 130 John Minto. had no trouble agreeing with him for my board at the rate of two days' labor per week, and thus I secured a home until my own marriage. I was also lucky in finding a beautiful bod}' of land to take for myself, only two miles distant from the claim Mr. Carter had promised and paid $1,100.00 for, and to which I helped him to move. Before surrendering the Mission farm, I took up carefully and planted at the Carter place, some goooseberry and currant bushes, a bed of rhubarb plants, and a rose bush to which I gave the name of "Mission Rose,'' and scattered by slips far and wide over Oregon. I divided these plants with the Carter family. In the spring of 1846 I, by permission, spaded up some fence corners and sowed carrot and parsnip seed, and also planted a half -acre of potatoes in Mr. Carter's field. My labor paid to Mr. Carter was mostly splitting rails, which I learned to do fairly well, and I dug his wells for him and others, which was more like mining; also, I made some rails for myself, walking or riding over the two miles morning and evening. It is not possible for me to describe the ecstacies of joy and hope I often felt as I passed to and fro over my chosen home-site. It was a very garden spot of edible roots and wild fruits and growing plants, though the surface was hills and narrow vales. I was assisting Joseph Holman in his wheat harvest in 1846 when we noticed a grass-fire start, apparently on the foothills about a mile south of the Institute— now the Uni- versity—at Salem. It crept slowly south and east from day to day, a distance of four or five miles over slopes facing north and east, without injury to the evenly distributed oak timber, well described as "Orchard Oak." Most of this was not fully grown, and I may say, never did nor will attain full growth. No one thought at the time that that slow grass-fire was Nature's process of preparing a seed-bed for the red and yellow fir that would grow up so thick as to arrest and in many cases utterly kill the deep-rooting oak; but it did, and I can take any Doubting Thomas to half a dozen places I have recently visited, where dead oaks stand as witnesses.