the children with feet almost bare, with nothing to eat, were still eighty miles from the settlements. Their wants were partially relieved by others in a not much better condition. Three of those who had first reached Oregon City were met returning with horses; and a company was found at the crossing of the Sandy cutting out a road toward the settlements from this point; the low land along the stream being covered with a heavy growth of fir and cedar.
Two of the horses in Palmer's party became too weak to proceed and were left. Of the eleven sent with provisions, not one survived. On the 30th Palmer arrived at the house of Samuel McSwain of the previous year's pilgrimage, who subsequently sold his claim to Philip Foster, and it became the recruiting station in crossing the mountains. The next night was spent at the house of Peter H. Hatch, in the Clackamas Valley. On the 1st day of November he arrived at Oregon City, having passed a month in the Cascade Mountains; but it was not until December that the last of the belated people arrived in the Willamette Valley.[1] Nor did those who last reached the Columbia River arrive in the valley any earlier. The same detentions and misfortunes which awaited every company here were meted out to these. A raft of logs becoming water-soaked, four women, mother and three
- ↑ Bacon's Mercantile Life Or. City, MS., 7. Joel Palmer was born near the foot of Lake Ontario, Canada, 1810, of Quaker parentage. When a boy he went to Pennsylvania, and married in Buck County; removing afterward to Indiana, where he was a large canal contractor and then a farmer; being also a member of the legislature in the winter of 1844-5. The excitement on the boundary question was then at its height, and influenced him to go to Oregon. Palmer returned to the States in 1846 to bring out his family. He kept a journal of his travels, which he published. In a manuscript called Palmer's Wagon Train, he gives an account of the publication of his Journal, and of the main incidents of the return to Oregon. He says that he contracted in Cincinnati for the printing of the narrative of his journey to and from Oregon, with his observations on the country, the condition of the people, the government, and other matters, the whole constituting a fund of information of value to persons intending to emigrate. He expected to have his book ready to sell to the immigration, and to realize from it enough to pay most, it not all, the expense of his second journey; but although he waited almost two months, he never received more than a dozen or two copies, and was compelled to leave it behind for the publisher to dispose of as he pleased. This is to be regretted, as it is one of the best of its kind.
