fashion. I regret that lack of space prevents the republication of these remarks in full.
From time to time the newspapers mentioned the continued scarcity of women here, but nothing practical was ever done until early in 1861 a young gentleman, Asa S. Mercer, arrived in Seattle, fresh from college. Besides having attractive manners and plenty of confidence in himself, he found here an elder brother, one of the oldest and most influential pioneers, Judge Thomas Mercer, who numbered every man and woman in the county his friend. Also Dexter Horton and Daniel Bagley had been friends of the Mercer family at the old home in Illinois. With these three pioneers to introduce him, it was not long before young Mercer was one of the best known young men on Puget Sound. He soon went to work in helping to clear the old University site. and did much manual labor of different kinds during the erection of the university building in 1861.
In the fall of 1862 he became the first president of the Territorial University and taught a five-months' term. All the classes sat and recited in one room, the one in the southwest corner of the building.
Judge Mercer often made it a subject of semi-jocose comment that young women should be so scarce in this new community, and often suggested an effort to secure territorial or governmental aid for bringing out from New England a party of young women, who were needed as school teachers, seamstresses, housekeepers, and for other positions far removed from that of household servants.
This set young Mercer to thinking on the subject, and the more he thought of it the more he favored it. He talked the matter over with William Pickering, then Governor of the Territory, and with members of the legislature, and while everybody favored the proposition, the public treasury was empty, and public credit fully fifty per cent below par, so he failed in the effort to secure territorial aid. Nothing daunted, he went from place to place and obtained quite a number of generous private contributions to a fund that enabled him to go to Boston, and there the proposition was placed before the public for
