Bushrod Washington Wilson
[1] His mother was a member of the Pineo family, which dated its North American roots back to French Huguenots who emigrated to Nova Scotia in 1617.
[1] Bush went to school until he was 12,[2] at which time he left to go to work at an early age, taking a job as an office boy for Cornelius Vanderbilt and making the acquaintance of young newspaper publisher Horace Greeley.
[5] In October 1843, at the age of 19, Wilson joined the crew of a whaling ship out of New Bedford, Massachusetts, spending the next two and a half years at sea.
[5] The journey took him to the Society Islands in the South Pacific Ocean where he would remain for six months, followed by a season on the Northwest coast, where the ship on which he served would take 12,000 barrels of oil.
[1] He arrived in San Francisco in July 1850 and spent just two weeks in the city before heading out to try his hand mining on the Yuba and American Rivers — losing money and falling ill in the process.
[6] Discouraged by the situation in California, Wilson sought to pursue greener pastures to the north, having heard promising things about mining opportunities upon the Umpqua River of the Oregon Territory.
[7] After adverse weather which made the journey slow and treacherous, the Reindeer arrived at the mouth of the Umpqua, located near the southern boundary of the Oregon territory, on November 8, 1850.
"[1] There Wilson and his associate joined founding settlers Joseph C. Avery, James F. Dixon, and a small handful of others who had established homesteads under the Donation Land Claim Act.
[17] At the next election he successfully ran for county clerk, winning an office that he would ultimately hold for 15 consecutive terms — a period of thirty years.
[13] In an 1875 letter to his brother Joseph, Bushrod Wilson noted the pecuniary rationale for his aversion to candidacy in state-level politics, writing:
They don't give state officials enough to live in the style that would be required...[18]It has additionally been noted by one biographer of Wilson that the monetary aspect of public service may have had a decisive impact on Wilson's decision not to run for re-election as county clerk in 1894, since that year marked a change of the system of pay of the position from a fee-based schedule to salary.
[17] After paying for the initial surveys out of pocket, Wilson obtained financial commitments from other local investors, who became stockholders in his railway firm.
[21] He was also an investor in the Oregon & California Railroad, running a line from San Francisco to Portland and was influential in gaining federal money for the development of the Yaquina Bay harbor.
