Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 9.djvu/151

 From Youth to Age as an American. 133 gave me the opportunity to inform him that his daughter and I had agreed to marry and make our home on a spot where I had already made a beginning. He may have expected that; he only made the objection that his daughter was yet very young and needed to be in school, which was true, but we were neither of us at a reasonable age, I near twenty-five, she six- teen. It was Mrs. B. C. Kindred, a grand-daughter of Daniel Boone, who denounced my proposal as an outrage, "When the girl had a choice from all kinds of men near home." It was a year after the event that I learned that the noble mother settled the confab by quietly remarking, ''Well, if day's wages will support a home, John Minto's wife will have one, for I know^ there is not a lazy bone in him. ' ' The fact was, I never worked a day on wages from the time the girl consented, except for Oregon and the United States. We had, indeed, within the first fifteen months of our life together, to be happy on what would now seem impossible conditions, but we were happy, because hope was always with us. The Cayuse war called to soldier's duty and sacrifice; fol- lowed shortly by the gold rush to California, which, though delaying our plans nearly a year, gave means to carry them out more swiftly and completely than would have been the case had not the "yellow dirt" made possible the finest of rare fruits and flowers, of which I availed myself with a zest and enjoyment which was only half expressed by my reply to an able Methodist minister, when, three years later, he came upon me unaware while I was loosening the graft-bands of a crab-apple tree onto which I had worked six varieties of popular apples and was singing at my work, and remarked, "You seem happy. Brother John." "Yes, Brother Roberts," I answ^ered, "Just now I would not swap with Adam before his fall," and the preacher made no reply. Perhaps he thought me irreverent, but I had no such thought, and that has been the experience of my life when working to enrich and beautify the earth. Of course our natural enemies were plentiful; the large wolves prowling in bands; the black bear, the panther, the