Page:Portland, Oregon, its History and Builders volume 3.djvu/61

Rh gather and drag the dead limbs that fell annually from the great maple, hickory and Walnut trees in the beautiful forest which my grandmother Scott had christened Pleasant Grove, a title it carries to this day.

As the years sped on I grew rapidly into a tall, spindling and awkward child, and was often ill on account of performing tasks for which my rapid growth ought to have excused an undeveloped daughter. It was at this time, and for long afterwards, the general belief among grown-ups, that no child was in danger or injury from overwork, an almost fatal misconception of a fact in my case, as the re-sodding of a blue grass lawn at the age of nine, after a hard winter, gave me a chronic weakness of the spine which will never cease to ache till after I leave the body for good and all.

Having become an overgrown though weakly young girl, I was unable to receive even the meager advantages for schooling that were accorded to the more rugged members of our household; and such learning as I got consisted chiefly of a five months' term in an apology for an academy in Stout's Grove, a rustic village in the heart of Illinois near what is now the town of Danvers.

Early in the spring of 1852, my father, having caught the "Oregon fever," sold his possessions in Illinois and started with his family and a long line of covered wagons, drawn by teams of oxen, to this land of the setting sun. The limits of this narrative preclude further details of that perilous journey, further than to say that of the many who perished by the wayside in that eventful year, lingers longest and tenderest the memory of our faithful, gentle and self-sacrificing mother, whom we laid away, for the eternal sleep of the body, in the solemn fastnesses of the Black Hills, then known as a mighty section of "Mandan District," which is now a part of the great sovereign state of Wyoming. The silent snows of many winters have rested long upon the sacred spot wherein we laid her precious dust, but I cannot write any more about it now; nor can I hardly see, through tears, to read what has been written.

After completing our journey of six tedious months across the almost untracked continent, the still large remnant of my father's family settled for the winter of 1852-3 in the village of La Fayette, Oregon territory, at that time the county seat of Yamhill county, where, after the lapse of several months, through most of which I was employed in teaching a district school in a Polk county village, bearing the ambitious title of Cincinnati, since changed to Eola. Here surrounded by a beautiful, undulating valley, a few miles west of Salem, Oregon's thriving capital city, though still a child in my "teens," I met my matrimonial fate in the person of an honest young rancher and stockman, Mr. Ben C. Duniway, who conveyed me to his donation land claim in the wilds of Clackamas county, a dozen miles from Oregon City, where I spent four years of a difficult struggle with the (to me) uncongenial hardships of a back-woods farm. My husband, who had been a bachelor before taking me to his ranch, was the envied center of a group of about a dozen unmarried fellow ranchmen; and nothing delighted him more than to mobilize them at meal time at our cabin home in the wilderness, where it fell to my lot, whether the babies or I were well or ill, to feed the crowd to repletion, as is the habit of most wives and mothers of the frontier settlements unto this day.

Passing over the four years of farm life spent in Clackamas county and five years in Yamhill county, which had made me a physical wreck while yet in my "twenties," I was, as I now believe, providentially relieved by the results of a security debt, incurred by my husband, but for which I should doubtless, have long ago succumbed, as my dear mother and one sweet sister had done, to hardships unimagined by women of other and more modern modes of home-keeping, which many younger women of today enjoy, who little heed the changes that time and advancing civilization have wrought to their relief, through public efforts like mine, else none could be found who would seek to hinder the service of love for all humanity which alone nerved me to endure