company and the American merchants. One writer estimated the company's stock in 1845 at 20,000 bushels, and that this was not half of the surplus. As many farmers reap from sixty to sixty-five bushels of wheat to the acre,[1] and the poorest land returns twenty bushels, no great extent of sowing is required to furnish the market with an amount equal to that named. Agricultural machinery to any considerable extent is not yet known. Threshing is done by driving horses over the sheaves strewn in an enclosure, first trodden hard by the hoofs of wild cattle. In the summer of 1848 Wallace and Wilson of Oregon City construct two threshing-machines with endless chains, which are henceforward much sought after.[2] The usual price of wheat, fixed by the Hudson's Bay Company, is sixty-two and a half cents; but at different times it has been higher, as in 1845, when it reached a dollar and a half a bushel,[3] owing to the influx of population that year.
The flouring of wheat is no longer difficult, for there are in 1848 nine grist-mills in the country.[4] Nor is it any longer impossible to obtain sawed lumber in the lower parts of the valley, or on the Columbia, for a larger number of mills furnish material for building to those who can afford to purchase and provide the means of transportation.[5] The larger number of
- ↑ Hines' Hist. Oregon, 342–6. Thornton, in his Or. and Cal., i. 379, gives the whole production of 1846 at 144,863 bushels, the greatest amount raised in any county being in Tualatin, and the least in Clatsop. Oats, pease, and potatoes were in proportion. See also Or. Spectator, July 23, 1846; Howison's Coast and Country, 29–30. The total wheat crop of 1847 was estimated at 180,000 bushels, and the surplus at 50,000.
- ↑ Crawford's Nar., MS., 164; Ross' Nar., MS., 10.
- ↑ Ekin's Saddle-Maker, MS., 4.
- ↑ The grist-mills were built by the Hudson's Bay Company near Vancouver; McLoughlin and the Oregon Milling Company at Oregon City; by Thomas McKay on French Prairie; by Thomas James O'Neal on the Ricknall in the Applegate Settlement in Polk County; by the Methodist Mission at Salem; by Lot Whitcomb at Milwaukee, on the right bank of the Willamette, between Portland and Oregon City; by Meek and Luelling at the same place; and by Whitman at Waiilatpu. About this time a flouring-mill was begun on Puget Sound. Thornton's Or. and Cal., i. 330; S. F. Californian, April 19, 1848.
- ↑ These saw-mills were often in connection with the flouring-mills, as at Oregon City, Salem, and Vancouver. But there were several others that were
