newspaper plant in 1852, through unwillingness to compete with the Oregonian, he paid $1200 for the languishing Oregon Spectator in 1855 and changed it to the Oregon Argus. It is said that Abraham Lincoln read the Argus and admired the writings of its editor. At any rate, along with Dryer of the Oregonian, he was suitably rewarded in 1861, being made collector of customs at Astoria. While there he helped edit the Marine Gazette. Poor health caused him to resign in 1867, After traveling for two years, he returned to his Yamhill farm.
Then in 1873, at the age of 52, this remarkable man went to Philadelphia and studied medicine for about a year, picking up during that time not only an M.D. degree but an L.L.D. degree and a gold medal for “eminent attainments in medical science.” For three years he enjoyed a big practice in Portland. In 1877 he moved to Hood River, and rounded out his days as Dr. Adams.
The writing urge in him, however, would not permanently be smothered by other activities. In 1888—36 years after his brilliant “Breakspear”—he published another book, this time on a learned subject and having a sober title, but informal and witty and candid in treatment, with a rich and clever garniture of cases and illustrations. It is now very scarce, all the more so because apparently it has not been much known or appreciated by experts in old volumes. Those astute gentlemen, who nevertheless often lose their characteristic awareness where their catalogues do not point the way, may have been deceived by the title page into believing that this was just another medical tract, notwithstanding the Portland and George H. Himes imprint. Although Elwood Evans called it “the most remarkable book of the age”, it is not listed in Smith’s Pacific Northwest Americana. Copies are now owned, however, by the Portland Library and the libraries of the Oregon Historical Society and the University of Oregon Medical School. The author called it History of Medicine and Surgery from the Earliest Times. It exposed “all frauds, medical, theological and political, by which king-
