James E. R. Harrell 191 there, which we ran for eight years. Like lots of other young fools, I got restless and so I hoofed it across coun- try to Corvallis. Here I ran across two men named Moore and Fell. Fell had married Moore's niece. They were buying cattle throughout the valley, to drive to the California gold mines, and when I tackled them for a job, they put me on as a driver and furnished me a mule to ride. We went to Yreka where they sold the cattle, paid me off, and I went to mining. Moore and Fell did pretty well. After a few years they had made a stake and decided to go to their old home in the East. They went by way of the Isthmus of Panama, but the boat they were on was wrecked. Among the last to leave the boat were these two men. The little boat they were in was tipped over and they were both drowned. Mrs. Fell with her two children were saved, and she managed to put her small hand-trunk in the boat with her. It had in it $12,000 in gold dust. I followed placer mining for five years at Yreka. It's a hard game to break away from, particularly if you are mining in pockety ground. Some days I'd strike a pocket and clean up a hundred dollars, and then for a week I wouldn't make more than wages. "In 1859 I came back to the Willamette Valley and settled on a place near Forest Grove. I stayed at the Grove till 1864, when I went to the Eagle Creek mines in eastern Oregon. I mined there for the next seven years. Time kept drifting along and I kept drifting with it, till I found I was 48 years old and I figured that if I was going to get married, I'd better be getting at it, so on April 21, 1878, I was married. I was married about ten miles north of Hillsboro on the place joining Joe Meek's place. Our first child, Hollis Eric Harrell, was born on May 15, 1879. He works for the Union Pacific Railroad Company here in Portland. Our next child was a girl, Ona Myrtle Harrell, who was born on September 7, 1885. I have lived in quite a number of places in the
