Page:Portland, Oregon, its History and Builders volume 1.djvu/370

262 That night there arose a terrific storm, which lasted thirty-six hours, during which Captain Gale, who was the only experienced seaman on board, never left the helm; the little Star behaved beautifully in the storm, and after a voyage of five days, anchored in the foreign port of Yerba Buena, as San Francisco was then called.

The Star was forty-eight feet, eight inches on the keel, fifty-three feet, eight inches over all with ten feet, nine inches in the widest part, and drew in good ballast, trimmed four feet and six inches of water. Her frame was of swamp white oak, her knees of seasoned red fir roots; her beam and castings of red fir. She was klinker built, and of the Baltimore Clipper model. She was planked with clear cedar, dressed to one and a fourth inches, which was spiked to every rib with a wrought iron spike half an inch square, and clinched on the inside. The deck was double, and she was what is known as a fore and aft schooner, having no top sails, but simply fore and main sails, jib and flying jib. She was painted black, with a small white ribbon running from stem to stern, and was one of the handsomest little crafts that ever sat upon the water. Captain Gale and the crew, who were the owners of the Star, sold her at the bay of San Francisco in the fall of 1842 to a French captain named Josa Lamonton, who had recently wrecked his vessel. The price was 350 cows.

Shortly after Captain Gale arrived in San Francisco, the captains of several vessels then in the harbor came on board his schooner, and when passing around the stern read "Star of Oregon," he heard them swear that there was no such port in the world.

Gale and his crew remained in California all winter, and in the spring of 1843 started to Oregon with a party of forty-two men, who brought with them an aggregate of twelve hundred and fifty head of cattle, six hundred head of mares, colts, horses and mules, and three thousand sheep. They were seventy-five days in reaching the Willamette valley. On their arrival with their herds the monopoly in stock cattle came to an end in Oregon.

Captain Joseph Gale, the master spirit of the enterprise, was born, I believe. in the District of Columbia, and in his younger days, followed the sea, where he obtained a good knowledge of navigation and seamanship. Captain Wilkes, before he would give him his papers, examined him satisfactorily upon these subjects. Abandoning the sea he found his way to the Rocky mountains and was for several years a trapper. I knew him well and lived with him in the winter of 1843 and 18z14, and often listened to his thrilling adventures of the sea and land. He then had the American flag that Wilkes gave him, and made a sort of canopy of it, under which he slept. No saint was ever more devoted to his shrine than was Gale to that dear old flag.

In the summer of 1844, Aaron Cook, a bluff old Englishman, strongly imbued with American sentiments, conceived the idea of building a schooner to supercede the Indian canoes then doing the carrying trade on the Columbia and Willamette rivers. Cook employed Edwin W. and M. B. Otie and myself as the carpenters to construct the craft. We built her in a cove or recess of the rocks just in front of Frank Ermotinger's house near the upper end of Oregon City. None of us had any knowledge of ship building, but by dint of perseverance, we constructed a schooner of about thirty-five tons burden. She was called the Calipooiah. Jack Warner did the caulking, paying and rigging. Warner was a young Scotchman with a good education, which he never turned to any practical account. He ran away from school in the "Land o' Cakes" and took to the sea, where he picked up a good deal of knowledge pertaining to the sailorscraft. I recollect one day when Jack, with a kettle of hot pitch and a long-handled swab, was pitching the hull of the Calipooiah, he was accosted by an "uncouth Missourian" who had evidently never seen anything of the kind before, with an inquiry as to his occupation. Jack responded in broad Scotch: "I am a landscape painter by profession, and am doing a wee bit of adornment for Captain Cook's schooner."