The next thing that came into my life, of any importance, was meeting my first husband. In the fall of '52 Mr. Gieger had two brothers come from Michigan and they spent the winter with him and in the spring went to the mines in Southern Oregon, then on the northern California, where they mined a while and then started a store. There were the two Grieger boys and associated with them were the two Hazlett brothers and Mat Fultz. Someone was always coming down with pack animals to get supplies, as they had to be packed out from Portland or Scotsburg. This summer Everett Gieger came and one of the Hazletts came with him and spent the summer, returning in the fall with supplies. One morning I was sweeping the floor and was around with the children. About ten or eleven o'clock a man came to the door. He had long hair down over his shoulders; he wanted know if this was where Mr. Gieger lived. I was barefooted and not in trim to see visitors, but the stranger said "Everett Gieger would be along the next day; that he had stopped to visit someone and he had come on ahead." They spent the summer there. During the summer, they made up a party--Mr. Gieger and his wife, her sister and myself, and a man by the name of Mr. Blank, made a trip over to Tillamook Bay. We went up to the head of the Yamhill valley, that is now the Siletz Reserve. We crossed the mountains on just a thread of a heavily timbered trail and were the second party of women that had crossed the mountains. We were two days going over the mountain to come down into the valley of Tillamook and on down to what is known as Traskville. A man by the name of Trask lived there and made butter and took it to Portland to sell. Mr. Grieger and Mr. Trask were acquainted. We spent a night and a couple of days there; then went on down and camped on Tillamook Bay and hired a boat to go down the bay to the mouth of the river and I had my first glimpse of the Pacific ocean. That was the first time I ever saw any clams. The gnats were terrible. We spent a few days near the shore and then came back to Yamhill and Mrs. Gieger's father's home. We staid there a few days and then returned to our own home. In the meantime Mr. Everett Gieger had fallen in love with Narcissa Cornwall, Mrs. Gieger's sister. I was promised to marry Mr. Hazlett. The two men went away in October, back to the mines. In February they were to return and we were to be married and go back to Illinois to live. But meantime they changed their minds and concluded they would go into the stock business in the Little Shasta valley. They took up a farm there and didn't come down until May. They bought a lot of stock to drive down, two yokes of oxen and a wagon; the oxen had worked or been driven across the plains.