a shelter
with true Western hospitality, including the free use of land to plant a
crop. Accordingly about twenty acres were plowed and sown to wheat. This
work was performed by my elder brothers. Meantime my father had started
out to look for a claim. Nine miles north of Eugene City he purchased a
"claim" of 320 acres, paying therefor an Indian pony and $40 in cash. To
this place we moved early in May, and there began the task of building
up a home in the western wilds. A small cabin of unhewn logs constituted
the only improvement on the "claim," but a new house of hewn logs was
soon erected and a forty-acre field inclosed with split rails. We had
plenty of neighbors who, like ourselves, were improving their lands, and
mutual assistance was the rule.

As summer approached it became necessary to return to our wintering
place, where a crop had been sown, and harvest the same. Accordingly, my
father, accompanied by my two older brothers, the late Judge J. M.
Thompson of Lane County, and Senator S. C. Thompson, Jr., of Wasco, then
boys of 12 and 14 years, went back and cared for the grain. The wheat
was cut with a cradle, bound into bundles and stacked. A piece of ground
was then cleared, the grain laid down on the "tramping floor" and oxen
driven around until the grain was all tramped out. After the grain was
all "threshed out," it was carried on top of a platform built of rails
and poured out on a wagon sheet, trusting to the wind to separate the
wheat kernels from the straw and chaff. By this primitive method the
crop was harvested, threshed, cleaned, and then sacked. It was then
hauled by ox teams to Albany where a small burr mill had been erected by
a man named Monteith, if my memory serves me correctly, and then ground
to flour.

And then, joy of joys! We had wheat bread. No more boiled wheat, nor
flour ground in a coffee mill,--but genuine wheat bread. You, reader,
who probably never ate a meal in your life without bread, have little
conception of the deliciousness of a biscuit after the lapse of a year.
As Captain Applegate once said to the writer, referring to the first
wheat bread he ever remembered eating: "No delicacy,--no morsel of food
ever eaten in after life tasted half so delicious as that bread." It
must be remembered that Captain Applegate crossed the plains in 1843 and
was therefore an "old settler" when we arrived. His trials were
prolonged only a matter of eight years; but looking back, what an
ete