Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 9.djvu/87

 From Youth to Age as an American. 75 well-conducted wheat farms, managed (to my surprise) by stew^ards of English farmers sent over for that purpose. Offers of ''land for sale" were frequent— posted at road crossings, and telling that "His Grace the Duke of had by letters patent from Her Gracious Majesty," etc., become owner of a district named. Terms of sale and price were given, and almost uniformly the statement was added that the value of the black salts and pearl ash yielded by burning the timber would go far towards paying for the land. I found among my relations, who had come to Canada be- fore I was born, some who might pass easily for Americans, but also some who carried an undying hatred and prejudice against the people and government of the United States. As to property rights, the owners seemed to me more English than the English at home. A girl begging for a penny stood by the gangplank of the steamer at Toronto landing — a sight I had not seen since leaving England. It was not till I read in Oregon, Henry Thoreau's remark made in 1832, ''that humanity was the cheapest thing in Canada," that I found others had felt something of what made me glad to get back to the American side and to mining coal at the salt works near the Great Western Iron Works. By this time I had opportunity to observe more closely the timber stand of these broken lands bordering the Alleghany and Red Bank rivers. There were yet rafts run out of the latter stream upon high spring freshets. My father had bargained for the purchase of twenty acres of land on the east bank of the Red Bank and on it I took my first lessons in clearing land— burning brush sometimes till midnight on Saturdays after walking home across Brady's Bend from the salt works seven miles to spend Sundays. It was a rough, broken, hilly country as Jacob Riis describes it in the "Making of an American, ' ' though I can hardly imagine it to have re- mained so twenty-eight years later when he got there, sup- posing he had reached the "West." Mining to him also proved fearfully dangerous from his own ignorance and that