remainder, and in the following September harvested the equivalent
of one bale of hops, 180 pounds. This was sold for eighty-five cents a
pound, or a little more than a hundred and fifty dollars for the bale.

This sum was more money than had been received by any of the settlers in
the Puyallup valley, except perhaps two, from the products of their
farms for that year. My father's near neighbors obtained a barrel of hop
roots from California the next year, and planted them the following
spring--four acres. I obtained what roots I could get that year, but not
enough to plant an acre. The following year (1867) I planted four acres,
and for twenty-six successive years thereafter we added to the area
planted, until our holdings reached past the five-hundred-acre mark and
our production was more than four hundred tons a year.

None of us knew anything about the hop business, and it was entirely by
accident that we engaged in it. But seeing that there were possibilities
of great gain, I took pains to study hop culture, and found that by
allowing our hops to mature thoroughly, curing them at a low
temperature, and baling them while hot, we could produce hops that would
compete with any product in the world. Others of my neighbors planted
them, and so did many people in Oregon, until soon there came to be a
field for purchasing and shipping hops. But the fluctuations in price
were so great that in a few years many growers became discouraged and
lost their holdings.

[Illustration: The site of the cabin home in Puyallup is now Pioneer
Park, Ezra Meeker's gift to the city that he founded. In it still stands
the ivy vine that for fifty years grew over the cabin.]

Finally, during the failure of the world's hop crop in the year 1882,
there came to be unheard-of prices for hops, and fully one third of the
crop of the Puyallup valley was sold for a dollar a pound. I had that
year nearly one hundred thousand pounds, which brought an average of
seventy cents a pound.

My first hop house was built in 1868--a log house. It still stands in
Pioneer Park in Puyallup. We frequently employed more than a thousand
people during harvest time. Many of these were Indians, some of whom
would come for a thousand miles down the coast from British Columbia
and even the confines of Alaska; they came in the great cedar-log canoes
manned with twenty paddlers or more. For the most part I managed my
Indian workers very easily. Once I had to tie up two