"Not a great deal. You see they were a mean lot, and would lay hands on anything they could steal; but there wasn't a great deal of fight in them. One time they had been robbing one of the neighbors of some cattle, and they went and told the old man. He went up all alone to the Indian camp with his rifle, and picked out the man he wanted out of a crowd of fifty of them; and he took him and tied him to a white-oak tree, and laid on to him with a sapling till he thought he'd had enough, and not one of the whole crowd dared raise a hand against him. Now the old gentleman's got three thousand acres of land and all he wants. How's that for an early settler?" "Why, pretty good. But you came over the Plains yourself, didn't you?" "Yes; I was but a little shaver then, in 1845. We came by way of the Dalles." "What sort of a crowd had you?" [Sidenote: _RAFTING ON THE COLUMBIA._] "Well, there was my father, Nahum his name was, and my four brothers, all older than I was, and there was the Watsons and the Chambers and their families in the company. We crossed the Plains all right and got to the Dalles. There were thirteen wagons in the party, and we rafted them and the cattle and all the rest of it down the Columbia." "How on earth did you make a raft big enough?" "Well, we just cut the logs in the woods on the edge of the river, and rolled them in and pegged them together with lighter trees laid across. It took us about all the morning to get out into the current, and all the afternoon to get back again. But, after all, we got to the Cascades." "How did you get past them?" "We had to just put the wagons together, and cut a road for ourselves, six miles round the portage, till we could take to the river again. Then we got boats and came all right down the Columbia and up the Willamette past where Portland now stands." "Where was Portland then?" "There was no Portland, I tell you--just a few houses and cabins. I forget what they called the place. Anyhow, we got pretty soon to the Tualitin Plains, where Forest-grove Station is now, and there we passed that first winter in Oregon." "Was it rough on you?" "Well, no--not particularly. All the lot of us crowded into one little cabin; but we lived pretty well." "What did you live on?" "Well, there was a little grist-mill near by, and the folks had raised a little wheat and some potatoes and peas. We got no meat at all that winter. The next spring we came on into King's Valley and took up the old place--you know where I showed it you--under the hill." "Weren't there plenty of Indians there?" "Indians! I should think so; about two or three hundred Klick-i-tats were camped in that valley then. Good Indians they were, tall, and straight as a dart." "Who was the chief?"