Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 16.djvu/45



REMINISCENCES 37

"In those days we did not know that it was necessary to have football and other athletic sports, to educate a student. Not having them and not knowing any better we got along all right. We played marbles and we played a game of ball in which there were four corners, four batters and four catch- ers, "four old cat/' as it was then called.

I had to stop school and help my father, who had taken a subcontract to carry United States mail from Salem to Nash- ville, a distance of about 35 miles. The mail had to be taken three times a week. I made the route on horse back and the mail was carried in saddle bags thrown across my sad- dle. There were only two stopping places between Nashville and Salem, both of them being postoffices. Practically the entire distance was through an unbroken prairie covered with grass almost as high as a man's head.

"At Nashville they always gave me bob white quail to eat. They caught them in nets by the hundreds. At Salem I saw something once that greatly astonished me as well as the other residents of the town. A doctor took several tomatoes, sliced them, put salt and pepper on them and ate them. We all watched him with fascinated horror. We expected to see him drop dead. We felt sure he would be poisoned by eating the tomatoes. He said he had dyspepsia and was willing to take a chance on being killed or cured. At R. G. Shannon's home in Sparta some tomatoes were grown in his garden just as flowers were. They were grown for ornamental purposes and no one ever thought of taking chances of being killed by eating them. The first tomatoes I ever tasted I ate at Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River in 1850.

"My mother died in 1844 when I was 12 years old and I was set adrift. I was thrown on my own resources and it was a case of sinking or swimming, so I swam. I peddled bread from a basket on the streets of St. Louis. While peddling my bread I met a farmer named Ed Drew from Illinois. He told me he had two brothers who were working on his farm with him and he wanted me to go with him and learn to be a farmer. Farming seemed to promise three square meals a day