of them to a tree
for getting drunk; their friends came and stole away the
prisoners--which was what I intended they should do.

It was in 1870, eighteen years after my arrival from across the Plains,
that I made my first return journey to the States. I had to go through
the mud to the Columbia River, then out over the bar to the Pacific
Ocean, and down to San Francisco. Then there was the seven days' journey
over the Central and Union Pacific and connecting lines; this meant
sitting bolt upright all the way, for there were no sleeping cars then,
and no diners either.

About 1882 I had come to realize that the important market for hops was
in England, and E. Meeker & Co. began sending trial shipments, first
seven bales, then the following year five hundred bales, then fifteen
hundred. Finally our annual shipments reached eleven thousand bales a
year, or the equivalent in value of half a million dollars--said at that
time to be the largest export hop business of any one concern in the
United States. At one time I had two full trainloads between the Pacific
and the Atlantic, on their way to London. I spent four winters in London
dealing in the hop market.

Little as I had thought ever to handle an international business, still
less had I thought ever to write a book. My first publication was an
eighty-page pamphlet descriptive of Washington Territory, printed in
1870. My first real book, _Hop Culture in the United States_, was
published in 1883. I mention this fact simply as one instance out of the
many that could be given of the unexpected lines of development that
life in the new land opened out to the pioneers.

The hop business could not be called a venture; it was simply a growth.
The conditions were favorable to us in that we could produce hops for
the world's market at the lowest prices. We actually pressed the English
growers so closely that more than fifteen thousand acres of hops were
destroyed in that country.

Our great prosperity was not to last. One evening in 1892, as I stepped
out of my office and cast my eyes toward one group of hop houses, it
struck me that the hop foliage of a field near by was off color--did not
look natural. One of my clerks from the office said the same thing--the
vines did not look natural. I walked down to the yards, a quarter of a
mile away, and there first saw the hop louse. The yard was literally
alive with lice, and they were destroying at least the quality of the
hops. I