Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 17.djvu/374



366 FRED LOCKLEY

"I have always saved father's commission as Special Postal Agent of Oregon, and I also have the glasses President Monroe gave him. Mr. Monroe and father had been good friends long before Monroe ever thought of being president. When father told President Monroe he was coming out to Oregon, Mr. Monroe gave him a pair of spectacles and said 'Take these glasses with you, Neal. You don't need them now, but if the time comes when you do need them and you can't get any out there in Oregon they will come in handy.' Father and Presi- dent Polk had worked together in politics and Polk was very friendly toward father.

"Father was killed in the spring of 1848 and we had a pretty hard time to make out for a while, but mother was a hard worker and a good planner and we managed to get along. My oldest brother, Smith Gilliam, thought he could help most by going to the California gold mines, so as pretty near every man in the whole country was either there or on the way, he pulled out for the gold diggings in the spring of '49. My brother Marcus and I had to do the farming. I was going on ten years old so I was plenty old enough to do my share of sup- porting the family. I drove the oxen and Mark held the plow. When the wheat was harvested we put the shocks in the corral and turned the calves and young stock in to tramp it out. We had to keep them moving or they would eat it instead of tramp- ing out the grain. I enjoyed threshing the wheat out. I would go into the corral, catch a young heifer by the tail and while she would bawl and try to get away I would hold on like grim death and as she sailed around the corral trying to escape I would be taking steps ten feet long. This would start all the rest of the stock going full tilt so the grain got well trampled.

"We cut the wheat with a reap hook, tramped it out with the cattle and cleaned it by throwing it up in the air and let- ting the afternoon sea-breeze blow away the chaff. We had a big coffee mill fastened to a tree and it was my job to grind all the wheat for the bread mother baked. It took a lot of grinding to keep us in whole wheat flour.