also with several braces of pistols, returned as winter came on, and began at once to put into effect the improvements they had planned for home while they were washing dust in the California gulches. With the toils and perils of the way, both going and returning, we cannot linger here; but the Argonauts had all the adventures of Jason and Ulysses, and met in California all types of men, under the most favorable conditions for study of human nature. This was the great second education of the Oregon people. The California mining camp was like a metropolis. It was there that the cosmopolitan ideas and manners of the Oregonian, and even more of the Californian, originated.
14
GEORGE H. HIMES
George H. Himes, curator of the museum of the Oregon Historical Society, has for 77 years kept a diary, which is exceeded in the length of time it covers by the records of few personal memorandists among mankind. J. Q. Adams, celebrated as a prolonged diarist, tartly calendared no such sum of years. George H. Himes began his on the first of October, 1858, when he was 14, and has ever since kept it up, with almost daily entries since 1893.
He was born in Pennsylvania on May 18, 1844, and came to Oregon in 1853. His first residence was in Washington Territory, where he attended the "rate bill" schools. Since from the time he was a small boy he liked books and reading and wanted to be a printer, his father made arrangements in the summer of 1861 for him to enter a printing office as an apprentice. The following spring he came to Portland and worked for little over a year as a journeyman compositor on the Oregonian, joining the paper 1 1 months before Harvey W. Scott became its editor. In 1867 he secured a job with William D. Carter, one of the best-known job printers of the city, who had printed Margaret Jewett Bailey's Ruth Rover 13 years before. In 1868 he bought a half -interest in the business and all of it two years later. He conducted a general job shop until 1899, printing Joaquin Miller's first books and a considerable number of other early Oregon volumes as listed in a later chapter of this his tory. He was elected secretary of the Oregon Pioneer Association in 1886, and, because of his wide acquaintance with the pioneers and his long and active interest in preserving the history of the state, was appointed field secretary and curator of the Oregon Historical
