The next summer he outfitted a wagon, secured a partner and unsuccessfully joined a gold rush to the Umpqua. In 1852 he married 20-year-old Harriett T. Buckingham, sold a sawmill which he had started in Portland and bought out a land claim near Salem, moving into that town to live in 1859.
In the early 60's he hearkened to another gold boom, this time at Auburn in what is now Baker County and again unsuccessfully. Discouraged with the prospects of a mining claim he had taken up, he sold it, and the man he sold it to cleaned up $100,000. Here he was once more active in political science. At the age of 24 he was "father of Portland" and at the age of 35 he shared in the paternity of Baker County, with a county seat at Auburn, now a ghost town which was located about nine miles from the present city of Baker. He had returned to Salem and was a clerk at the legislature that created the county in 1862. He served as its first county clerk.
He spent several months in the East. On his return to Oregon through San Francisco, he met in that city the railroad promoters with whom he associated in organizing in 1865 the Oregon and California Railroad Company, later the Oregon Central Railroad Company, of which he was secretary for three years until it was sold to Ben Holladay in 1868. His was the company known in Oregon railroad history as the "Salem Company" that promoted a route along the east side of the Willamette, to distinguish it from the rival Oregon Central Railroad Company with a right-of-way along the west side. It is interesting that the two competitive secretaries of these East-Side and
