I settled near the mouth of the Willamette River, near Oregon City, and not far from where the city of Portland later was begun; and builded for myself a little cabin of two rooms, with a connecting roof. This I furnished, as did my neighbors their similar abodes, with a table made of hewed puncheons, chairs sawed from blocks, a bed framed from poles, on which lay a rude mattress of husks and straw. My window-panes were made of oiled deer hide. Thinking that perhaps I might need to plow in the coming season, I made me a plow like those around me, which might have come from Mexico or Egypt--a forked limb bound with rawhide. Wood and hide, were, indeed, our only materials. If a wagon wheel showed signs of disintegration, we lashed it together with rawhide. When the settlers of the last year sought to carry wheat to market on the Willamette barges, they did so in sacks made of the hides of deer. Our clothing was of skins and furs. From the Eastern States I scarcely could now hear in less than a year, for another wagon train could not start west from the Missouri until the following spring. We could only guess how events were going forward in our diplomacy. We did not know, and would not know for a year, the result of the Democratic convention at Baltimore, of the preceding spring! We could only wonder who might be the party nominees for the presidency. We had a national government, but did not know what it was, or who administered it. War might be declared, but we in Oregon would not be aware of it. Again, war might break out in Oregon, and the government at Washington could not know that fact. The mild winter wore away, and I learned little. Spring came, and still no word of any land expedition out of Canada. We and the Hudson Bay folk still dwelt in peace. The flowers began to bloom in the wild meads, and the horses fattened on their native pastures. Wider and wider lay the areas of black overturned soil, as our busy farmers kept on at their work. Wider grew the clearings in the forest lands. Our fruit trees, which we had brought two thousand miles in the nursery wagon, began to put out tender leafage. There were eastern flowers--marigolds, hollyhocks, mignonette--planted in the front yards of our little cabins. Vines were trained over trellises here and there. Each flower was a rivet, each vine a cord, which bound Oregon to our Republic. Summer came on. The fields began to whiten with the ripening grain. I grew uneasy, feeling myself only an idler in a land so able to fend for itself. I now was much disposed to discuss means of getting back over the long trail to the eastward, to carry the news that Oregon was ours. I had, it must be confessed, nothing new to suggest as to making it firmly and legally ours, beyond what had already been suggested in the minds of our settlers themselves. It was at this time that there occurred a startling and decisive event.