Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 9.djvu/154

136 sheep-breeding was my special vocation if I had one. I was surrounded by scenes of delight and varied interests, all pleasant, but the sheep were a delightful care. I learned to be very expert in killing their worst enemy, the coyote, and my success with their breeding gave me character; as, before means of improvement by breeds of prominent excellence were imported into Oregon, I had by selection kept my little flock up in quality so that buyers sought them at twice the common price. I can give no other reason for this, than that their care was a pleasure, and I have often taken my blanket and slept in the fence corner of the pasture to guard them.

By this time the remarkable energies of the people were supplying themselves with fruit and grain and beginning to export wheat and wool. Californians had done both the latter since about 1858, and their most intelligent land-owners had begun to import the world-famed Merino sheep from Vermont and Australia. The same H. Luelling who blessed Oregon by hauling to the State a very full collection of grafted fruit trees, in 1847, was selling trees as well as fruit in California in 1856, and had a ten-acre nursery lot at Oakland. We in Oregon were beginning to import cattle and sheep of English breeds. Some fine-wooled sheep had been brought across the plains in 1847 and 1848. Martin Jesse, of Yamhill County, returning from the California mines, heard a call of sale of Merino sheep on the wharf at San Francisco. He bought twenty head from Macather Brothers, of Camden Park, New South Wales, certified to be of pure blood, drawn by the father of the sellers from the Kew flock of George III, King of England, who owed to the courtesy of the Marchioness del Campo de Alange the privilege of drawing his first pure Merinos from her flock, for which he thanked her with a present of eight English Coach horses; making these the best pedigreed sheep in the United States when they arrived in Oregon.

I did not know of the presence in Oregon of those Australian Merinos until two years later, but was using half-blood Merinos from Ohio and a like grade of Southdown imported by the