Page:Portland, Oregon, its History and Builders volume 3.djvu/396

390 for forty-five dollars per barrel. Having some leisure, Dr. Cardwell joined a friend, I. N. Gove, who had had some experience in New England fisheries, in a barrel cannery project. The Doctor bought sixty dollars worth of twine of a local importer, learned the netting stitch of Mr. Gove, and when not occupied with professional duties made seine and gill nets. They rented an old Indian fishery on the Columbia three miles below Vancouver, and in June and July, 1853, put up one hundred barrels, all of which Dr. Cardwell dressed and packed personally. The run then stopped and the business ended. Owing to the stimulus of the high prices of 1852 the Sacramento fisheries put up a great surplus and overstocked the market, so that salmon were unsalable at from eight to twelve dollars per barrel. W. S. Ladd, then a wholesale grocer, took the output of Cardwell & Gove at the ruling price and was several years in disposing of it at small margins, notwithstanding there was never any question of the number one quality of the pack. Thus commenced and ended the barreled salmon enterprise in Oregon for more than a decade. Their books showed cash to balance even and three months' lost time.

At that day there was but one drug store in Portland and Dr. Cardwell, having had some experience at the prescription case in St. Louis, conceived the idea that a practical prescription drug store might pay. He planned with Mr. Gove to enter the business which could be accommodated in his office building where he had an unoccupied front room with shelf, counters and bay window. Dr. Cardwell planning to look after the business when not occupied at the dental chair. They sent to San Francisco for about fifteen hundred dollars worth of drugs and glassware, which early arrived, and from the beginning the business prospered and they engaged a druggist assistant for Dr. Cardwell's dental practice so increased that he could give but little time to the drug department. Later they accepted a tempting offer to sell and the business passed into the hands of Dr. Weatherford, who made enough money to invest in Portland realty and retire on a competence.

No town in Oregon was large enough to support one dentist, and it was the custom of dental practitioners to make periodical visits to other towns. In the winter of 1854 Dr. Cardwell closed his Portland office with the intention of visiting Roseburg, Eugene and Corvallis, his father and mother, four brothers and three sisters then living in Corvallis. He was liberally patronized there and was the first dentist to visit the three towns. He says that in those days "I often improvised a head rest by placing a chair behind the patient and putting my foot on the seat and resting the patient's head on my knee. I have stood many an hour on one leg and operated thus." While at Corvallis Dr. Cardwell bought lots and eighty acres in the suburbs and set out a family orchard on his father's place. He found an old neglected apple orchard, took sprouts and roots and grafted apples between the call of his patients, and started a nursery on his own eighty acres. Ninety-five per cent of the grafts grew and Philip Ritz, for many years a leading nurseryman in Oregon and Washington and a neighbor of Dr. Cardwell, often said that it was the Doctor's success and influence that induced him to go into the nursery business, in which he made a fortune.

Dr. Cardwell made annual spring visits to Corvallis to set out growing plants and trees until 1858, when the family removed to Portland. On one of these visits, in partnership with Dr. Jackson, a resident practitioner, he built an attractive drug store and established the first drug house in the valley beyond Salem. The death of his partner three or four years later and the removal of his family to Portland caused him to dispose of all of his holdings and young nursery stock at Corvallis. As a boy he had taken an interest in taxidermy, and from 1855 until 1860 his pastime and amusement was in mounting and casing the birds and animals of Oregon. He made a full collection of several hundred, including the large animals—cougar, bear and elk. He still has some of these, some are in Golden Gate Park at San Francisco, and others in the Smithsonian Institute at Washington, D. C. About 1859-60 he set out a ten-acre or-