high place among Oregon autobiographies. Through it too there runs a strain of sadness, peculiarly characteristic of books of Oregon reminiscence, as though a deep experience of the country still touches the whites with melancholy as it did the Indians. The following poignant little story is an example. It should be remembered that the father who left his voracious guests to comfort his little daughters was himself only 25:
The "Pieplant" Pie
From Fifty Years in Oregon, 1912
The man, George Waggoner, who "usurped" my place on the first Oregon Railroad Commission, was a member of the session of the Legislature in 1880, where we became good friends, a relation which has been maintained to date. But I knew him first while I lived in Union County when he was a resident of Walla Walla. One day in the early spring of 1876 my wife had made a "pieplant" pie, and it was a great delicacy, being the first fruit of the year, and all kinds of fruit being very scarce in that country in those days, my two little tow-headed girls, Maud and Dosia, aged respectively five and three years, could hardly wait until the noon hour for the pleasure of tasting it. In fact, they had been watching the growth of those few stalks of rhubarb for two weeks, and each day came in reporting that they were sure they were large enough to pull.
So this day the little things stood by the table as their mother stewed the fruit and made it into a pie. They watched it as it was placed in the oven, and as it came out, full of juice. We were about to seat ourselves around the table when there was a shout at the front gate. Upon investigation it proved to be two Walla Walla hog buyers who were anxious, they said, to get their dinners. It is never customary in the country to refuse a man his dinner, so they were invited in and after seeing that their horses were fed we began the meal.
