"and, totally destitute for the first time in his life, went out and hunted up a job, at past sixty years old, working for wages as a sheepherder on the Klamath Falls range".
He and his wife Cynthia had many children, as was the custom in pioneer times. Their home life at Yoncalla has been described by Mrs. S. A. Long:
Mr. Applegate clerked for Allen & McKinley at Scottsburg for some years. He was also frequently at home for months at a time following his vocation of surveying. . . .
During the fifties a sewing machine, melodeon, and large library were brought into the house. Music, books, newspapers, were the amusements of the family—sometimes a little social gathering of the neighbor children.
Mrs. Applegate had received no education and never attempted to read anything other than the large print of her Testament, . . . Her husband had adopted the habit of reading aloud to her in their early married life. This habit he kept up as long as she lived. Of evenings ... or of Sundays and leisure hours of summer, he would read the current news of the day ... as well as books of travel, historical works, novels and poetry.
Mrs. Applegate died on June 1, 1881, and Jesse Applegate seven years later, on April 22, 1888, at the age of 77. Their burial place has been sympathetically described by R. J. Hendricks, writer on Oregon history, in the Salem Statesman for January 7, 1930:
A little way south of Drain, the Pacific Highway passes through the old homestead of Jesse Applegate. Less than a quarter of a mile from where the old dwelling house of Mr. Applegate stood, up on the spur of the hill, is a little cemetery; and here the "Sage of Yoncalla" and his good wife, Cynthia, sleep side by side. The spot is marked by a humble sandstone slab or monument two and a half feet by 20 inches by six inches in dimensions, facing north and south. The stone was fashioned by Mr. Applegate himself, assisted by his son, Peter Skeen Applegate, who did the graving; and was placed there at the time of his wife's death, seven years before the death of Mr. Applegate.
Only a portion of A Day With the Cow-Column can be given for lack of space. It was first printed in the Overland Monthly for August, 1868, the same number in which Bret Harte's The Luck of Roaring Camp appeared. In 1876 he
