TOLD by the PIONEERS - Washington Secretary of State

Told
by the Pioneers
GBORGE W. WILSON
Pacific County
In the year 1834, a family group consisting of my gTeat-grandfather,
James Wilson, grandfather, Dan P. Wilson, and my father, George W.
\Vilson, together with their families, left Pennsylvania and started
west. Father was a very small boy at that time.
In telling me the story in later years, father relates how they traveled
in wagons until they reached the Ohio river. There they stopped
and cut trees, which were split and hewed into lumber. They made a
scow and floated down to the mouth of the river, where they unloaded
the three good wagons and oxen and drove up into the State of Illinois
to Jacksonville. They lived there until 1861. Then they started west
again in ox wagons across the plains. When they attempted to cross
the Platte river one wagon was lost in the river, together with a great
deal of their supplies.
}1'ather related that great-grandfather James \Vilson died in Illinois,
but grandfather Dan P. Wilson and himself arrived in Portland,
Oregon in 1852. In 1853 they came down the Columbia river to Chinook,
where they stayed a short time and then came north to Bear
river, where they obtained a canoe from the Indians and headed on
north down Shoalwater Bay to "Goose Point," or what is now Bay
Center. They landed across the Palix river on the east side of Bay
Center, and built a log house. It was in this house that I was born in
1866. Soon after landing on this site, father and mother filed on the
donation claim where I still live and own the greater part of the claim,
320 acres. A small school house was built on the claim, a one-room
affair, very crudely constructed. When I was nine years old, I attended
this school, together with my sister and two brothers. I remember
the building had a window in one end and we could see daylight
through the cracks ill the walls. We had a two-month's term,
and father paid the teacher $14 a month. .My mother died when I was
very young, and my sister, .Mary, being the eldest child, kept house
and raised we younger children.
Our school was quite different from the schools of today. 'Ve had
to cut our own wood and help keep things going, but still found time
to make bows and arrows and have sport, shooting at marks. The
Indians showed us how to make these things and how to shoot birds.
The Indians did most of their hunting with these weapons, as they
made no noise. They could kill bear, deer and coons with their bows
and arrows. I used to watch them cut big cedar logs and dig out their
canoes in which thev traveled over the bav and across the river to
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