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T. T. Geer of Grand Ronde Valley and the Waldo Hills
T. T. Geer became the tenth governor of Oregon. The ability to write was the chief handmaiden of his career; it was his main solace during 20 years of toil on a farm in the Waldo Hills; he composed articles, as Burns did poems, while he plowed in the fields; good at phrases, like Wilson, he coined one in a letter, "I dislike very much to be considered a 'miscellaneous candidate'," which did him much political service; and at the age of 60 he sat down with his pen in retrospect of an interesting and useful life and spent five months writing 536 printed pages of one of the most fascinating books of reminiscence we have in Oregon.
His full name was Theodore Thurston Geer. The two given names were alliterative but not beautiful and, with a feeling for the effect of words, he shortened them to T. T.
He was born on March 12, 1851, on a farm in the Waldo Hills, near Silverton, to which his parents soon removed, and from there, when he was ten, to Salem. The Willamette Woolen Mills in North Salem struck his boyish fancy and he became ambitious to work there, but his parents banished that idea in a hurry. Soon he turned his attention to Nicklin's Sawmill, and to be head sawyer seemed to him the grandest thing in the world. These industrial aspirations, instead of homesickness for the serenity of Silverton he had left, were characteristic all through his life of an eager response to new experiences.
When he was eleven, his father left for the mines of British Columbia, Eastern Oregon and Idaho, and his mother took his brother and sister and went to California, never to return. It was 18 months before he saw his father, and he did not see his mother again for 23 years, although he kept up a regular correspondence with her.
For a while he went to the Central School in Salem, but
