Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 11.djvu/189

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Recollections of a Pioneer of 1859.
175

fied, more than three score desperate characters had been hanged and twice as many more, seeing the handwriting on the wall, had flown to climes more congenial.

After leaving Walla Walla in the spring of '65, Mr. Stockman never saw the place again until 1906, when it had grown to be a beautiful city of nearly twenty thousand souls. Every vestige of the old town of the early sixties had perished, and it was with difficulty that he could even locate the spots where the principal buildings stood, and only two men could be found whom he knew there in that far-away time. The great, frowning penitentiary at the outskirts of the city held more people than could have been found of the white race, all told, in what is now eastern Washington, in 1859.

He is a devoted member of the Christian church and attends the functions of that society regularly. On the first Sunday in February of the present year he counted into the birthday offering box of the Sunday school eighty-one cents, each of which represented a year of his life, and his physical condition gives promise of several more years.

In the days of his youth, in Ohio, he had for a schoolmate, James A. Garfield, and also Lucretia R. Rudolph, who afterward became the wife of Garfield. Speaking of those school days, he says Garfield rarely took time to play the common games with other boys, being too closely devoted to his studies, and his discovery of a new analysis for the 47th problem of Euclid, in after years, almost rivaling the invention of Pythagoras himself, was not considered marvelous by those who were familiar with his studious disposition.

He pays a high tribute to the Masonic order, of which he has been a member since 1850, having joined the lodge at Minerva, Ohio, in that year. When a lodge was instituted in Walla Walla, in the first years of his sojourn there, he was, by reason of his experience, called upon to take an active part in its deliberations and assisted the lodge in conferring its initial degree.

The first formal meeting of Masons in Montana was held