As a youngster, for three months out of the year Philip attended school at a log cabin school which was four miles from home, KY; he later taught school for one year at Bacon Creek, KY, ten miles from home.
On 3 May 1849, he left with a party of nineteen for the California Gold Rush, arriving Sacramento in November 1849. It was a very hard trip; seven died of cholera and Philip was ill many times. He kept a daily diary during the trip. Gold mining was a disappointment! He learned quickly that the only people that really struck gold were those supplying the miners, and he found work as a baker for $250 a month, good wages in 1849/50.
In 1851 he went to Oregon where he erected a sawmill on Bear Creek, southern Oregon. He enlisted in the U. S. Army and engaged in Indian warfare in 1853 and was severely injured. Upon leaving the hospital he was commissioned a captain, Assisstant Commissary of Subsistance. Philip returned East in the Fall of 1853 by ship and studied daguerreotyping in New York. He returned to the Northwest by ship and became a pioneer photographer. 1857 was a banner year for Phillip! He married Iantha Jane Davis, a widow with two children and bought a livery station in Eugene, Oregon, which he operated until 1865. Selling that he moved to Walla Walla, WA where he engaged in photography until 1867. (Short blank space here) Then Philip moved to Portland in 1878. Sometime after Janes death in 1897 and before the 1910 census, Phillip moved to or near his daughter's home in Berkeley, California where he lived at the time of his death. His body was returned to Eugene Oregon for interment next to his wife Jane.
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