Page:History of Oregon volume 1.djvu/465

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414
THE IMMIGRATION OF 1843.

was employed on the flouring mill of the milling company at Oregon City, and finally built a house and engaged in the manufacture of furniture, being by trade a cabinet-maker.[1]

Like Hastings of the year before, Ricord was offered employment by McLoughlin as his legal adviser; but he held to the missionaries, as I have elsewhere related, and in the spring went to the Hawaiian Islands, where he became chancellor to the king, whom he left for the gold-fields of California in 1849.[2]

    a large establishment and mill, with hundreds of Indian servants. Another was a wealthy farmer in Missouri at the time of Mrs Applegate's marriage. After a long and useful life, she died at her residence in Umpqua Valley, in the spring of 1881. Applegate's Correspondence, MS., 30. Lindsey Applegate was born in Henry County, Kentucky, in 1808. Afterward his father, David Applegate, a soldier of the revolution, emigrated to Missouri, where he settled near St Louis, then a small French town, and where Lindsey had few educational advantages. In his fifteenth year he left home to join Ashley in his expedition to the Rocky Mountains. One part of Ashley's company ascended the Missouri in boats; the rest proceeded overland. Young Applegate belonged to the river detachment, which was attacked by the Arickarees, defeated, and driven back to Council Bluffs. Falling ill at this place, he was sent back with the wounded to St Louis. He afterward worked in the lead-mines of Illinois, and served in the Black Hawk war. He was married in 1831 to Miss Elizabeth Miller of Cole County, Missouri, and removed soon after to the south-western part of the state, where he built the first grist-mill erected in that portion of Missouri, and where he resided till 1843. Mrs Applegate was a woman of superior character and abilities; she died at her home in Ashland in the spring of 1882. Jacksonville Sentinel, July 30, 1879; Ashland, Or. Tidings, Aug. 8, 1879. Charles Applegate was two years the senior of Lindsey. In 1829 he married Miss Melinda Miller, and with her and several children emigrated to Oregon. He is described as a man of iron constitution, determined will, and charitable disposition. He also possessed considerable natural ability as a writer, having published several tales of frontier life. He died at his home in Douglas County, in August 1879; respected by all who knew him. Salem Statesmen, Aug. 15, 1879; Roseburg West Star, Aug. 15, 1879.

  1. Athey gives an interesting account in a brief dictation in a manuscript called Workshops, of the introduction of furniture in Oregon, and other matters. He says: 'At first I made breakfast-tables, bedsteads, chairs, and all articles of common furniture. I had a turning-lathe which I made myself, probably the first one on the Pacific coast. But I could not get enough to do to pay me. They went to shipping old furniture in here from the east. Captain Wm K. Kilborn of the brig Henry brought a cargo of it so nearly in pieces that I charged him more for mending it up than it cost. It was second-hand furniture, stoves, and everything. It was just like coining money to sell that off. Stoves sold for $45 and $60. It was a venture from Newburyport. I afterward did some turning in iron. I bought a wheel from a school-teacher at Vancouver, made a lathe, and used it for turning iron. That was not till 1847, and was nothing more than tinkering and making such things as I wanted for my own use.' Athey was born in Virginia in 1816. He took up a claim on the Tualatin River in 1851, and cleared it, but did not succeed at farming, and sold it after a few years for $1,800. He afterward engaged in building a small steamer.
  2. Honolulu Polynesian, Dec. 27, 1845; Camp-fire Orations, MS., 13.