Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 3.djvu/314

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304
Daniel Knight Warren.

house in which he had lain sick was burned, and his physician, Doctor Rose, was killed by the Indians.

At Astoria, where he arrived with only the clothes he wore and $3.00 cash, he found work in a logging camp, at the mouth of the Walluski River. He was paid $75 per month, but after three months his employer broke up and absconded. Mr. Warren says, however, that he "did not claim all the credit for his failure, as there were ten others working for the man." What was another's extremity proved Mr. Warren's opportunity, as he soon went to logging on his own account, and continued this with fair success until the summer of '55, when he determined to try once more his luck in the mines. He went up the Columbia to the Colville district, taking a claim at the mouth of the Pen d'Oreille; but this enterprise was soon broken off by the general Indian uprising of that year, and the miners were compelled to seek safety in flight.

Returning to Astoria in '55, being then nineteen years old, Mr. Warren resumed his logging operations, and continued until '59. In the mean time he purchased a tract of 360 acres of timber land on the Columbia, thirteen miles above Astoria. This was on the present site of Knappa. Life here was free and busy, but not altogether satisfactory to the young man. He had a few acres in cultivation, and a small house, a barn, and a young orchard. On this little place he "batched" a part of the time, alternating this, when it became monotonous, with boarding at a neighbor's; but tiring of a life that offered so few advantages, especially in the way of society or personal culture, he decided to return to Illinois, and made the journey in company with his brother, P. C. Warren. They left Astoria in February of 1860 on the steamship Panama for San Francisco; thence on the Cortez to the Isthmus, which they crossed upon the railroad then but