"About eighty agreed to go, but a good many weakened before the time came, and only about forty of them started; some twenty came in afterward, so that our party was sixty strong. When we left St. Joe, in Missouri, we had twenty wagons. I had a nice carriage with four mules for my wife, and a half-share in a wagon and ox-team. We left St. Joe in May, 1852, and arrived in Oregon four months and a half afterward." "Did you travel all the time?" "We laid over for Sundays, and I preached every Sunday on the journey but one, when we were crossing an alkali desert, and had to push on through to water." "Were there many emigrants on the road, minister?" "There was the heaviest emigration to Oregon that year that there has ever been. Many times I have climbed a hill just off the great emigrant trail, and counted a hundred wagons and more ahead, and more than a hundred behind us." "Did you carry any feed for your stock?" "Not any, and it was terribly hard on stock, as the bunch-grass on and near the trail was eaten down so close. It was harder on the oxen than on the mules. I brought all my mules safe into Oregon, but only one ox out of our team." "How did you do when the oxen gave out?" "Oh, a man just cut his wagon in half and hitched what oxen he had left on to the front half, and left the hinder end there in the desert." "Did you have trouble with the Indians?" "None at all; all quiet and peaceable. We came into Oregon by way of Boisé City, Idaho, and Umatilla and the Dalles. The last sixty miles my wife and I walked nearly all the way, for the mules gave out crossing the Cascades, and we drove them before us into this valley. The first milk and butter was at Foster's, near Oregon City; but one old lady in the crowd would not eat the butter her son had bought for her: she said it tasted too strong of silver." [Sidenote: _THE PRESBYTERIAN COLONY._] "Where did you settle down?" "About three miles from Corvallis, or Marysville, as it was called then. Just twelve houses in the place, and two of them stores." "What did you do for a house?" "Just set to and built one. I built it round my wife as she camped in the middle. I cut me down a big fir-tree, and split it out into boards and shingles." "What was this valley like then?" "All open prairie. A man could drive seventy miles without stopping--from Salem to Eugene. All this oak-brush has grown up since." "What became of your Presbyterians?" "Well, we organized the church the next fall, in 1853, with just seven of the sixty persons who had left the East with me the year before. So you see we have grown a good deal in these seven-and-twenty years." Here the minister got up and left the circle. So we turned to a brown-coated, cheery fellow in the next arm-chair. "You came round the Horn, didn't you, Bush?"