George Hunter, Pacific County Sheriff 1860-1862

     I’ve just begun reading a book that is making the rounds among some of my friends.  It is called “Reminiscences of An Old Timer” and was written in 1887 by Colonel George Hunter, a “Pioneer, Hunter, Miner and Scout of the Pacific Northwest” according to the title page.  Hunter also happened to be the fourth sheriff of Pacific County in Washington Territory.  He lived in Oysterville in the 1860s and counted my great-grandfather, R. H. Espy, and sheep farmer Lewis Loomis (later of railroad fame) among his friends.
     The book, itself, is a first edition, is in amazingly good condition for its age, and contains fifteen beautiful illustrations – lithographs, I think, but I am not very knowledgeable in that arena.  Unfortunately, I could find no acknowledgement as to the illustrator.  These days we would assume, therefore, that they were done by the author.  If that was the case, George Hunter was a very talented man, indeed.
     Like many other books of the period, it does not offer the benefit of an index.  Instead, on the table of contents, each chapter is described in detail through a list of the topics covered.  James Swan’s “The Northwest Coast or Three Years’ Residence in Washington Territory,” written a generation earlier, also uses that style of detailed chapter listings.  (Swan, however, included an index.)
     I’ve browsed the book a bit – looking for the Oysterville portion! – and have now begun reading in earnest.  I am well into Chapter I in which Hunter describes his family’s trek over the Oregon Trail in 1852.  As he says, “Of the dangers, trials, privations, hardships, heart-rendings and sufferings endured by those who crossed the plains in the early days, very much has been said and written, but not enough…”  I am greatly enjoying what Colonel Hunter has to add to the record.