As the journey was fairly at an end and western civilization had been reached at The Dalles, Oregon, Mrs. Mercer was taken ill, but managed to keep up until the Cascades were reached. There she grew rapidly worse and soon died. Several members of the expedition went to Salem and wintered there, and in the early spring of 1853 Mercer and Dexter Horton came to Seattle and decided to make it their home. Mr. Horton entered immediately upon a business career, the success of which is known in California, Oregon and Washington, and Mr. Mercer settled upon a donation claim whose eastern end was the meander line of Lake Union and the western end, half way across to the bay. Mercer street is the dividing line between his and D. T. Denny's claims, and all of these tracts were included within the city limits about fifteen years ago. Mr. Mercer brought one span of horses and a wagon from the outfit with which he crossed the plains and for some time all the hauling of wood and merchandise was done by him. The wagon was the first one in King county. In 1859 he went to Oregon for the summer and while there married Hester L. Ward, who lived with him nearly forty years, dying last November. During the twenty years succeeding his settlement here he worked hard clearing the farm and carrying on dairying and farming in a small way and doing much work with his team. In 1873 portions of the farm came into demand for homes and his sales soon put him in easy circumstances and in later years made him independent, though the past few years of hard times have left but a small part of the estate. The old home on the farm that the Indians spared when other buildings in the county not protected by soldiers were burned, is still standing and is the oldest building in the county. Mr. D. T. Denny had a log cabin on his place which was not destroyed--these two alone escaped. The Indians were asked, after the war, why they did not burn Mercer's house, to which they replied, "Oh, old Mercer might want it again." Denny and Mercer had always been particularly kind to the natives and just in their dealings, and the savages seem to have felt some little gratitude toward them. In the early '40s Mr. Mercer and Rev. Daniel Bagley were co-workers in the anti-slavery cause with Owen Lovejoy, of Princeton, who was known to all men of that period in the great Middle West. Later Mr. Mercer joined the Republican party and has been an ardent supporter of its men and measures down to the present. He served ten years as probate judge of King county, and at the end of that period declined a renomination. In early life he joined the Methodist Protestant church and has ever been a consistent member of that body. Rev. Daniel Bagley was his pastor fifty-two years ago at Princeton, and continued to hold that relation to him in Seattle from 1860 until 1885, when he resigned his Seattle pastorate.