Fish family papers

              iqzety  I \  THE PISH FAMILY  in England and America  Thomas  and John Fishe, sons of Robert and Alice (Fyshe),left the shores of England and landed in Portsmouth,R.I.,in 1643. (Thomas established the line down through Col.Joseph M. Fish)  ******* Extract bearing on Washington State (With corrections and added details)  Walter  Fish,b. 1818 d. . A merchant at Oregon City, and  one of the earliest Oregon settlers.  Milton  Fish,b. 1819 d. 1897 A sea captain, son of Joshua and Catherine (Sides) Fish, b. Galveston, Tex.25 May 1819. His mother died when he was seven years of age? two years later his father moved to the North East in Dutchess Co., N.Y., and in 1832 to Moreau, a village in Saratoga Co.,N.Y.  He taught school for two years; at twenty-two (1841) went to sea, and followed the sea, all told, for twenty years. He was captain of a ship in general traffic to the Hawaiian Islands and in the gold rush to California in 1849. In 1850 he delivered a ship to new owners in Astoria, Ore. He visited Oregon City Ore. and Fort Vancouver Wa. Returning East by land he traveled to the Kettle Falls with a party of Canadian fur traders. He visited St.Paul's mission (1845-1851) and the Hudson Bay Company's Old Fort Colville (1825-1871). * He stayed there until a party was formed to travel east to the headwaters of the Missouri River in Montana and to the East coast. In 1851-52 he fitted out a trading vessel at Stonington,Conn., on his own account. His first trip was to the Azores, he was a whaler in the Arctic and Okhost seas for several years, and also engaged in the fur trade with the natives of Alaska. He crossed the ocean seventeen times and encircled the globe once. For a time he gave up the sea, and probably induced by his brother Walter took up a land claim in Oregon, but he became land-sick for the sea and went back to it again. He finally returned to New York and settled in Stillwater,where he d. in 1897. We have no record of his having married.  * He was deeply inpressed with grandeur and beauty of the great interior. It was then that he conceived the idea that the Falls was the practical limit to navigation on the Columbia River and would some day be the queen city of the Inland Northwest. and the path to the Missouri River. This was his legacy to his nephew Col. Joseph Merritt Fish.