as the roughest and most rolicksome plenipotentiary the great republican capital had ever seen.
It little concerned Meek that his relative was the president's secretary. Was he not a great American citizen, very free and quite unceremonious, and the representative of other great American citizens who looked out on a sea toward the sunset? Two days had not passed before the apartments of the White House were as familiar to him as the canons of Snake River. Yet he was not wholly void of compunctions.[1]
He began to feel in due time that after all in whatsoever appertained to greatness, there should be applied the eternal fitness, and so he permitted a tailor to trust him for a suit of 'store clothes.' On the 29th of May President Polk laid before both houses a special message on Oregon affairs, in which he quoted some passages from the memorial of the colonial legislature, forwarded by Meek, touching the neglect of congress, and reminded members that in his annual messages of 1846 and 1847 he had urged the immediate organization of a territorial govern-
- ↑ Mrs Victor gives Meek's own account of his feelings, which do him no discredit. 'He felt that the importance of his mission demanded some dignity of appearance—some conformity to established rules and precedents. But of the latter he knew absolutely nothing; and concerning the former he realized the absurdity of a dignitary clothed in blankets and wolf-skin cap. "Joe Meek I must remain, "he said to himself as he stepped out of the tram, and glanced along the platform at the crowd of porters with the names of their hotels on their hatbands. Learning that Coleman's was the most fashionable place, he decided that to Coleman's he would go, judging correctly that it was best to show no littleness of heart even in the matter of hotels. After an amusing scene at Coleman's, which at once introduced him to the cognizance of several senators, he repaired to the presidential mansion, where his cousin Knox Walker was private secretary, to whom also he made himself known in his peculiar style of badinage. Walker insisted on his being Been by Mrs Polk as well as the president. Says Meek: "When I heard the silks rustling in the passage, I felt more frightened than if a hundred Blackfeet had whooped in my ear. A mist came over my eyes, and when Mrs Polk spoke to me I couldn't think of anything to say in return."'
continued to write as inclination prompted, removed to the Pacific coast in 1863, with her husband, who belonged to the engineer corps of the United States navy, and who after resigning perished in the foundering of the steamer Pacific in November 1875. Mrs Victor displayed great industry during her residence in California and Oregon, in studying the natural and historical features of the coast. She wrote many magazine articles and letters of travel, and besides the River of the West, Hartford, 1870, published in San Francisco All Over Oregon and Washington, and a volume of western stories and poems called The New Penelope.
