Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 17.djvu/90



82 H. R. KINCAID

A. Logan, of Illinois, delivered the oration. I picked up a shell on the battlefield that had not been exploded. I sent it to Oregon by way of Panama before the railroad across the continent was completed, and have since placed it in the Oregon Historical Society's collections at Portland.

During that year I was sent to western New York to meet a committee of Congress that had gone there to investigate. I did not find the committee, but made the trip, going and returning by way of New York City.

In 1867 I went to Boston and visited the Museum, Harvard College, Bunker Hill Monument, and other places of interest. I arranged with the librarian of Harvard College to have the volumes of the Oregon- State Journal bound by the library and kept in the library. As long as the paper was continued after that date, for more than 40 years, I had every copy of the paper sent to that library. I made the same arrangement with Mr. SpofTord, Librarian of Congress, at Washington, one of the largest libraries in the world, and always furnished the paper, and missing papers when called for, and suppose complete sets may be found in these libraries. To meet these and other demands I had twelve papers each week, after the first two or three years, put in boxes in Eugene, and have had three sets bound, and nine sets not bound. I also sent the paper always free to libraries in Portland, San Francisco, New York and other cities, but in most places they were not bound, but kept on a stick file awhile and then destroyed to make room for newer dates.

From Boston I went to Montreal; then on a steamboat up the St. Lawrence River to Niagara Falls, passing the Thousand Islands on the way. From Niagara Falls I went by rail to the Hudson River and took passage on the steamboat Dean Richmond, at Athens. Some distance below Athens we met the steamboat Vanderbilt, of an opposition line, coming up the river. It was about 11 o'clock at night, and many of the passengers, including myself, had gone to bed in staterooms.