I took the train for Puyallup, went to bed at the usual hour, and slept soundly, as I always do.
As expected, in a few days a bank examiner came to take possession of the bank, having received direct orders from Washington from Mr. Eckles, the comptroller. In a week he was willing to quit, and asked that the bank should be turned over to the directors, and was ordered to do so. The affairs of the bank were closed up without litigation, but the capital was gone, and all that was left was the furniture and the charter, which is held to be valid to this day, and so it would seem I am yet the president of the First National Bank of Puyallup, and have been for nearly twenty years.
A few years ago the late Charles Fogg, of Tacoma, acting as an attorney for a group of capitalists, undertook to marshal the scattered and really worthless stock with a view to rehabilitate the bank and save the name, but were met by some obstinate stockholders who refused to either co-operate or dispose of their holdings and so the bank sleeps though not dead. Possibly when the "Rip Van Winkle sleep" has lapsed and when the little city of Puyallup has reached the twenty-thousand mark of inhabitants and one or two more of the recalcitrant stockholders die (one of the chief obstructionists died since the attempt was made), the bank may reappear as one of the institutions of the rising city of Puyallup.
After the failure of the hop business, I undertook a venture to the mines of the north. This resulted in a real live adventure of exciting experience.
I had lived in the old Oregon country forty-four years and had never seen a mine. Mining had no attraction for me, any more than corner lots in new, embryo cities. I did not understand the value of either, and left both severely alone. But when my accumulations had all been swallowed up, the land I had previously owned gone into other hands, and, in fact, my occupation gone, I concluded to take a chance in a mining country; matters could not well be much worse, and probably could be made better, and so in the spring of 1898 I made my first trip over the Chilcoot Pass, and then down the Yukon River to Dawson in a flatboat, and ran the famous White Horse Rapids with my load of vegetables for the Klondike miners.