Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 11.djvu/205

Rh Doctor at the pinery opposite what is now New Era. They had been floated down without rafting, and many of them had been rolled by the current across the shelving rocks of Abernethy Island, west of the Abernethy mills,—some of them very near the brink of the falls. Mr. James Welch, later of Astoria, had taken a contract to roll these logs over the falls so that they could be boomed below the sawmill. I learned that Mr. Welch wanted help and applied. Without mentioning terms he thrust a pikepole into my hands and said: "Go onto the boom below there and boom the logs we roll over; you will get your meals at my house and perhaps a bed." So I put in the first day catching Dr. McLoughlin's logs and booming them below his sawmill. After supper I decided to ask Mr. Welch about my wages as my work had been light and his own, with but one man to assist him, was both disagreeable and dangerous; the one man starting the log being often breast-deep in the water and requiring all his strength to stem the inflow after the log was started. Mr. Welch replied that he had offered $1.25 for help in booming; I told him that I had understood that he had offered $2.00 for help. "Yes," he said, "I would be glad to pay that for help above the falls". "Then count me with you," said I, "I am here to earn some clothing and I understand that your contract is with Dr. McLoughlin." He replied that it was; that he was glad to have my help, and that I might bed with Nate Buzard at his (Welch's) house, as the river was falling and time was very precious. While we three men were thus engaged in rolling logs over the brink of the falls, the Doctor was generally to be seen moving about from point to point of the race, or talking to Mr. Hedges, who seemed to have the supervision of widening and deepening the raceway over rocks and earth, while Judge Nesmith with his assistants was constructing the flumes to the respective mills. We had thrown some light logs toward the race and they had jammed in the frame of a gateway to the yet unfinished flume. One noon the Doctor and his grandson by marriage, William C. McKay, tackled this