get to work as early as possible and as a matter of fact, we never had much time to get into mischief. General John Adair, the collector of customs, had enough pull to move the custom house and the postoffice to upper Astoria. Lower Astoria had the sawmill, the stores and the bulk of the population.
"Dr. C. J. Trenchard fixed up a subscription paper and I went around to all of the stores and residences of lower Astoria and got the people to agree to pay me to deliver their mail before I said anything to my father about it. I was to go twice a week for the river mail and make two extra trips a month for the steamer mail that came from California and brought the mail from the East. The stores paid from 75 cents to $1.50 a month, while the private individuals paid 25 to 50 cents a month. I guess that was about the first city mail delivery in Oregon, as that was back in 1855. I started for the mail in the morning, summer and winter, at 5:30 o'clock. It kept me busy until school time distributing it. I often had from twenty-five to forty pounds of mail, and! for a ten-year-old boy, climbing around the cliffs, that was a pretty good load. How I used to hate the people who took papers. Some of them took bulky papers, and to bring four or five bulky papers to some one, and only get 25 cents a month for it, I thought was pretty tough. I made from $30 to $35 a month. My mother wanted me to save my money. Father said, 'It is Willy's money. Let him spend it as he pleases. He will have to learn for himself.Peaches in those days were ten cents and oranges 25 cents apiece, and I was the most popular boy in school with all of the big girls. I never was much of a hand at saving, and when a pretty girl or two or three of them wanted oranges, and I had the money, they generally got the oranges.
"When I was 13 years old we moved to British Columbia. This was in 1858. I began working with canoes and bateaux on the Fraser river. A good many people got drowned on the Fraser river, as it is a dangerous stream, but father used to say that danger was all in a day's work, and one must take what comes. We ran from Hope to Yale. Father was an expert woodworker, having learned the cabinet maker's trade, and I worked with him in the building of sloops and river boats.
