196 F. G. YOUNG
accounting records of Ewing Young and his estate are more than a domesday book for the Oregon of the later thirties and early forties. They show the people of early Oregon in action and dynamic.
They were in need of horse power and he brought it from the neighboring California region. They needed cattle to convert the unlimited pasturage of the valley into milk and meat and leather material for shoes and harnesses and he led in getting the first supply they could call their own. 35 They needed the use of their abundant water power to drive the saw for lumber for their houses and barns and he built and operated the first saw mill and supplied the valley settlement. 36 He was collecting" the machinery for a grist mill when his life was cut short. 37
He had the vision, the enterprise, the discernment and the purpose that make the representative pioneer. Such a pioneer was desperately needed in his day. The same type is probably still more desperately needed now, and he will ever be needed if progress, and yea, if safety, are to be insured. The needed innovations he initiated were quite as difficult as those we need now. In a large sense the livestock and dairy and the lumber industries and the power development of Oregon today are his memorials.
Sentiment there still was in 1844 to have a paling put around his grave at a cost of $60.00. 38 The desecrating use at the same time of the major portion of the proceeds of his estate by the Territorial Government for the erection of a territorial jail is to be condoned, for by that time the great majority of the settlers were recent comers so absorbed with their in- dividual problems of establishing themselves that they could little appreciate what Ewing Young had done towards build- ing up the morale of the Oregon community.
35 The larger later expedition for securing California live-stock in 1842-3, under Captain Joseph Gale, that started in the Star of Oregon, is described by Col. J. W. Nesmith, in The Transactions of the Oregon Pioneer Association, 1880, pp. 10-12.
36 See "Day Book," Documentary Record, appendix, III.
37 Walker, op. cit., p. 58; Documentary Record, appendix, IX, Financial Statements, p. 291.
38 Walker, op. cit.; Documentary Record, appendix, IV, p. 270.
