Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 13.djvu/285

 REMINISCENCES OF SEVENTY YEARS 277 wagons to the Willamette Valley without taking them to pieces in order to load them on the bateaus going down the Columbia River." "Well, if that is the case, I might as well lighten up my load right here." So I dumped on the ground close up to Inde- pendence Rock, at least $50,000.00. For, as it turned out, the box with all its contents could have set right in the wagon until it reached Oregon City. Of course we never dreamed of crossing the Cascade Mountains then. As it was, the watch- man left with the wagons could and would have attended to them with perfect safety. But this opportunity was all gone now, so I turned my attention to preparing my apple seed for planting out in the spring. Good luck attended me, as almost every seed came up, and I had at least 15,000 young seedling apple trees that sold readily in the fall at fifteen cents apiece. When I say I lost $50,000.00, I mean just what I say. There were no grafted apple trees in the territory and I could have made a full monopoly of all the grafted apples and pears on the coast, as California had nothing but seedlings. Of course, you will once in a thousand times get a fine apple from the seed. In fact, that is the way all our fine apples and pears originate. But you might plant a bushel of seed all from the same tree and you would not get one apple of the same kind. But you can graft all the fine fruit into the seedling root and you will get just the kind of fruit that the graft is. Or even a bud put into seedling stock will have the same effect, but you must cut off the seedling stalk above the bud. To sub- stantiate what I have said about the value of the fruit scions or grafts that I dumped on the ground at Sweetwater close to the summit of the Rocky Mountains in 1845, I will just refer to Mr. Henderson Luelling, who crossed the plains in 1847, two years later than I did, with substantially the same kind of fruit trees that I had, and he supplied the country as fast as he could grow the trees at one dollar apiece for one-year-old trees. I paid him in 1853 $100.00 for one hundred grafted trees. I was talking with his son a few days ago about the profits to themselves and the benefits of their importation to the country, NOTE. On the above page, 7th line from the bottom, Mr. Barlow alludes to Henderson Luelling, and in the second line from the foot of the page speaks of "talking with his son." On the next page, second line from the top, Mr. Barlow refers to "Seth," in a way that indicates to the general reader that "Seth" was a son of Henderson Luelling. This is wrong. Seth Luelling, or "Lewelling," as he spelled his name late in life, was a brother of Henderson, and an uncle by marriage of William Meek and Henry W. Eddy, who were sons-in-law of Hender- son Luelling. George H. Himes, Assistant Secretary, Oregon Historical Society.