Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 25.djvu/71

 ing seven stores and he advised me to accept a position with them. H. F. Bloch was the head of the firm. He put me to work making out bills. Their store in San Francisco was known as A. Cohn & Company. They also operated one in Portland under the same name on the corner of Pine and Front streets. Their store in The Dalles was Known as Bloch,Miller & Company. They operated one in Walla Walla under the name of Schwabacher Brothers and the name of their Boise store was Schwabacher Brothers & Frank. They also had a store in Placerville and one in Colville. Mr. Bloch, after trying me out for a short time, told me to report to Bloch, Miller & Company at The Dalles. At that time there were two steamers a month plying between San Francisco and Portland. I came on the Panama, of which Captain Connor was the master. It took us seven days to make the trip. At that time there was only 15 feet of water on the Columbia Bar and as the Panama was fairly heavily loaded, it bumped on the bar three times in crossing. I landed at Portland on Sunday, April 9, 1864, getting off at the Allen & Lewis wharf at C street. I stopped that night at the New York Hotel. Their rooms were 25 cents a day. In those days it was well known up and down the coast as the 'two-bit' house. Next morning at 5:00 A. M. I took the boat for The Dalles, of which Captain John R. Wolf was master. In 1864, when I started to work for Bloch, Miller & Company, they had the only stone building in Oregon and also the largest store in the state. We handled general merchandise and miners' supplies and we also operated a warehouse for transferring goods by pack train to the mines. The Dalles had a population at that time of not less than 2,700, and it was always thronged with transients on their way to and from the mines. There was more life in The Dalles in a day than there was in Portland in a month. I was put in charge of buying the gold dust. This doesn't sound as if it would be a very responsible job, but it was, for it wasn't merely a