Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 25.djvu/401

 THE MCNEMEES AND TETHEROWS 359 ley Welch. Joel Palmer and Sam A. Barlow were his assistants. Another, of about 40 wagons, was in charge of Samuel Hancock. Three good-sized wagon trains left St. Joe. One of them had A. Hackleman as captain. An- other, of something over 60 wagons, chose W. G. T'Vault as captain, with John Waymire and James Allen as as- sistants. My father had charge of the other wagon train that left St. Joe. Nearly 200 families of the emigration of 1845 left the main road at Hot Springs, near Fort Boise, and took what was said to be a cut-off for Oregon. Stephen Meek acted as their guide. They followed an old trail of a Hudson's Bay trapper, but they got off the trail in the Malheur country and had all sorts of grief. It was the members of this party, near the head of the Malheur river, who found gold known as the Blue Bucket diggings. - "Three of the 15 children in our family were born after we reached Oregon. We reached what is now Dallas on November 16, 1845. My father bought Sol Shelton's squatter's right to a section of land. He traded him a brindle oxen named Bright for a square mile of land. The city of Dallas is located on that claim, but it's worth a lot more than a brindle ox today. In 1847 father found a claim that he liked better than the Shelton claim. It was located where the two forks of the Luckiamute come together; so he took up 640 acres there as his donation claim. "I enlisted in Captain A. N. Armstrong's company. There were 104 men in our company and we were enrolled on October 15,1855. Two weeks later Captain Armstrong was elected Major and Ben Hayden became our Captain. Our lieutenants were Ira S. Townsend, Francis M. Goff and David Cosper. "While I was at The Dalles word came that two com- panies of volunteers were surrounded by Indians and were nearly out of ammunition. A detail of eleven men was selected to go from The Dalles to Walla Walla