Page:Portland, Oregon, its History and Builders volume 1.djvu/295

Rh hundred million dollars in gold, and which revolutionized the currents and conditions of trade, commerce and living expense in every civilized land.

The rush to the gold discoveries nearly depopulated the town. And while it carried off many good workers, there were compensations for their absence. Lumber, wheat, potatoes and everything fit to eat, ran up to enormous prices and the Oregon farmer was soon digging as much gold out of his land as the miners were getting in California. The gold discoveries helped in another way. Very soon gold dust and states money was rolling back into Oregon for the produce sent down and surplus dust sent back to families and friends; so that wheat was no longer the circulating legal tender medium, but gold dust, and finally "beaver money" made from dust by the Oregon City mint, became the circulating medium and greatly stimulated trade in all its branches.

About this time Hiram Smith and his brother, Isaac, reached Portland, the plains across, but sending a stock of merchandise around Cape Horn, with which they started the next store after Pettygrove. Hiram Smith had made a lot of money in Ohio manufacturing fanning mills—wind mills to clean grain from the chaff and dirt—and brought it to Oregon to push things. He was an active pushing man, well informed in business, and also a very generous, kind hearted man. He started out the next year with a pack train load of groceries, flour and meat to sell to the incoming emigrants. But on meeting the train east of the Blue mountains found them all so poor and famishing that instead of selling anything, gave it all away to the starving people, trusting them to pay him sometime in the future if they could. Some of them did pay afterwards, and many did not; but Hiram Smith never lost' any sleep over the matter. He accumulated a large fortune by honest fair means, and left it all to his wife, Hannah, who in turn gave most of it to deserving charities at her death.

About the same time with Smith, Thomas Carter and wife came in from Georgia, and located the land claim south of the King claim, and which covered what is now known as Portland Heights. Carter built the first old style Southern states mansion house out in the region, for a long time demeaned by the name of "Goose Hollow", but subsequently changed into "Paradise Valley"; the region bounded by Jefferson street on the north, Chapman street on the west, Lownsdale street on the east, and Market street on the south. Carter lived on the claim for many years, but finally sold out to his two sons, Charles M. Carter, and Thomas Jefferson Carter, both forceful and public spirited men.

"Goose Hollow" was for a long time a sort of "no man's land" being too far out to be saleable for city lots, and, not worth grubbing out to put in potatoes. In consequence of which, a miscellaneous lot of people got in there who did not really go in the "upper ten" class of 1862. And while the good husbands were busy digging stumps or catering to the thirst of the sturdy yeomen on Front street, their good wives were adding to family comforts by raising geese and plucking their feathers as far out as the Carter mansion in 1862. In consequence of this goose industry it soon got to be that every woman in the little valley had a flock of geese. And in consequence of the numbers of them they all mixed up together, and every good woman in the whole neighborhood claimed all the geese. And from pulling feathers they got to pulling other things, and some twenty more or less goose owners were cited to appear before Police Judge, J. F. McCoy, to receive justice at the August forum of Portland's first police court. McCoy had a worse job of it than the judge who decided the case between the two women who claimed the same baby, two thousand years ago. But he was equal to the occasion, and his decision was, that Marshall Lappeus and his two deputies should repair to the seat of war and round up every flock of geese they could find, count them, and then divide them equally among the contending owners; and that thereafter the first woman who complained about geese should be incarcerated in the city bastile. For that trip, Lappeus named it "goose hollow," and the name stuck.