Page:Portland, Oregon, its History and Builders volume 1.djvu/947

Rh "T'Vault of Kentucky," answered the quick-eyed official. Engaging Curry as secretary, all night the two sat in an upper room of the T' Vault house, where the court house now stands, preparing a proclamation. In the morning Curry himself in his shirt sleeves set the type, George Boone turned the hand press printing them off and the governor's proclamation was distributed announcing the extension of federal jurisdiction over Oregon territory. Thus on the very last day, March 3, 1849, Joseph Lane, "Marion of the Mexican War "kept his promise to bring in Oregon during President Polk's administration A barbecue in honor of the new governor was held at the Holmes' claim a mile square in the woods, just out of the settlement, at which a hundred and fifty invited guests sat down to a baronial board groaning with half an ox, chickens, turkeys, venison and salmon galore.

At once Governor Lane ordered a census, and took up his duties as superintendent of Indian affairs. One of his first acts was in behalf of Wanaxka, whose Indian fishing village on the west bank of the Willamette, near the falls, had been maliciously burned by a party of white fishermen who coveted the spot. A similar Indian rancherie at the mouth of the Clackamas, mossgrown and drooping with age, disappeared as one of the sequels of the Cayuse war.

The pressing need of money that could be handled, led to the organization of a private company to coin dust into five and ten-dollar gold pieces. A Salem blacksmith forged the dies out of wagon tires and scraps of old iron; W. H. Rector did the lathe work, and John G. Campbell the engraving, and in a small wooden building on Main street, gold dust to the amount of $60,000 was coined into money stamped with the Oregon emblem—the beaver. Then the dies were ordered destroyed. From a high rock that stands below the falls they were said to have been thrown into the river, but some years after D. P. Thompson, in cleaning out the rubbish in a room on Main street, found those dies and sent them to Salem where they are now in the vault of the secretary of state. It has even been suggested that there may have been two sets of dies, as one authority claimed he saw Campbell throw those dies into the chasm below the falls. The set now in the office of the secretary of state is said to be of slightly different workmanship. But as this coin was made of pure gold without alloy, it was gladly bought up by the San Francisco mint at a premium and recoined.

In July, of 1849, the legislature held a brief session at Oregon City, and in the fall the first mounted rifles, recruited at Fort Leavenworth, arrived tattered and worn, having lost their goods in a wreck on the Columbia, and two-thirds of their horses in crossing the Barlow road over the foothills of Mt. Hood. The girls of Mrs. Thornton's school, where Mrs. Lena Charman's house now stands, flocked to the windows to see the soldiers march up Main street. Over the hill at the Methodist church they came, an elevation long since leveled, down into the corduroy-bridged mud hollow at Eighth street, tramp, tramp, with flag flying and drums beating, the finest martial music ever heard in Oregon.

No quarters were ready for the soldiers at Oregon City, and they were housed for the winter in tenements rented at exhorbitant rates. Dan O'Neil, a boy of twenty-one, of the mounted riflemen, took command of a fleet of four or five Hudson's Bay batteaux, bringing stores from Vancouver to Oregon City. Of this event, he himself wrote, "With a crew of six Indians to each boat, and a load of about five tons, we would leave in the afternoon, making our first landing and camp somewhere near where St. Johns now stands. On the second night we would reach Milwaukie and on the next afternoon make our arrival at Oregon City. Getting over the rapids below Oregon City was a tedious but exciting part of our journey, the Indians wading and towing through the swift current, patient and enduring, good-natured and willing, as long as they received their dollar a day and plenty of fresh beef. Occasionally one would lose his hold and go whirling down the rapids for some distance before he would recover himself, and several times while poling on the head boat, I lost my balance and took a spin in the rapid waters."