Excellent, detailed and fascinating two volume set of memoirs written by the well-connected journalist and famous Henry Villard.
"Henry Villard gained national significance as a journalist, advocate of abolition, and railroad financier. For Oregon, he is best remembered as the man who brought the first transcontinental railroad to the Northwest in 1883, connecting Oregon to the rest of the country. He sponsored several trend-setting buildings in Portland and elsewhere in the region and was instrumental in rescuing the fledgling University of Oregon in 1881.
Villard was born Ferdinand Heinrich Gustav Hilgard on April 10, 1835, in Speyer, Rhenish Bavaria, Germany; his father was a judge of the Bavarian Supreme Court. After several years of university study at Munich and Würzburg, and repeated chastisement from his father—he disagreed with his father's rigid monarchist views—Heinrich secretly immigrated to the United States in 1853. He assumed the name of Henry Villard to avoid detection and his father's threat of putting him into forced military service.
Villard gradually moved westward, staying with family members who had already immigrated to America. He contributed to German-language newspapers and (after learning English) for New York newspapers as well, covering the Lincoln-Douglas debates in Illinois. In Colorado, he reported on the Pike's Peak gold strikes and published a book on the Colorado region. He also was a reporter for the New York Tribune, reporting on the Civil War, and the Chicago Tribune. A strong supporter of abolition, he was a close friend of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison; after the war, in 1866, he married Garrison's daughter, Helen Frances Garrison."-Encyclo Oregon.