History of Oregon Literature/Chapter 19
CHAPTER 19
Mid nature's charm and heaven's smile.
And sang of Genevieve the fair.
No more with him in life to share
Earth's joys among the hills of Lyle.
T. R. COON: The Hills of Lyle.
At Lyle, Washington, in December, 1882, there was a young man of 21, tall, slender, dark-haired, blue-eyed and grave-demeanored, who had just emerged from a long conflict within his soul by being converted at a revival meeting in the community school house. This young man was Frederic Homer Balch.
From his boyhood he had read ancient history and, with an early instinct for creative scholarship, he had carried this over in his own environment to a firsthand study of the myths and legends of the Columbia River tribes, walking miles to visit a tepee that might hold an aged Indian. The Great Spirit of those people had become as real to him and even more to be believed in than the white man's God, for his extensive reading had included the agnostic doctrines of clever and convincing writers, and until that December of 1882 he had been an infidel.
In that month peace was substituted for the questioning agony of his spirit. In the compensatory evangelism of his conversion, he was not content to be a layman. He became a home missionary of the Congregational Church, serving the scattered settlements on the north shore of the Columbia and later acting as pastor at Lyle and White Salmon.
In accepting the Christian religion he made two great renunciations.
To write books was what he had wanted to do from early boyhood. As he grew older his ambition did not fade out or merely linger in dreamy longing. He fixed upon the subject for the literature that he would produce and that subject was the Northwestern Indians.
At Goldendale and at Lyle he had lived in a frontier farmhouse of hewn logs, with a huge stone fireplace that furnished light as well as heat. Part of the summer provisioning against the coming of the long winter evenings was a big collection of pine knots. "One of these when thrown on a bed of coals would blaze into a brilliant light that flooded the room, dying down into a twilight glow."
By such an illumination the dark-haired, blue-eyed young man, in the period of his unbelief, had written a novel. It was called Wallulah. He had spent weeks and months upon it. He wrote it after long labor in the fields. He wrote it after rowing forth and back across the Columbia and ten hours work with pick and shovel on the Oregon Railway & Navigation line, then being built along the south shore. His father had been a school teacher and did not condemn such literary ardor as foolish, or place a veto upon it. His mother, though shocked at its dark philosophy, did not interfere with its progress. And his little sister, seeing how much the pile of penciled foolscap meant to him, and having or needing no other reason, looked upon the thickening manuscript as a precious treasure.
Now, Wallulah was an agnostic novel. After his conversion he appeared upon the hearthstone with it in his hands and, to the horror of the household, cast it into the fire. His orthodox mother, who had suffered because of the skeptical beliefs and theories the book contained, protested in vain against its destruction. His little sister "sobbed and cried as the flames curled around the leaves and reduced them to ashes." The narrow standards of that day made him think it would be sacrilege to write stories while preaching the gospel, and a zealot's duty was upon him to purge his soul of the atheism of his novel. The artist in him was in anguish as crisp and scarlet segments of the burning foolscrap were sucked upward in the draft of the chimney, but he stood stubbornly by and watched it perish.
This was his first great renunciation. With the destruction of the manuscript of Wallulah he gave up his study of profane history and concentrated tn the Bible; instead of probing the long, long retrospects of wrinkled chiefs for myth and tribal chronicle, he now looked upon them as souls to be saved; he pulled out by its deep roots the writing ambition which had persisted through adolescence when other boys were having transient desires for many occupations. He was not an Indian giver—nobody heard him say so if he ever repented of this sacrifice of Wallulah to God and church, but nearly fifty years later one indignantly wants to be apostate for him. Here was the most gifted novelist the Oregon country has produced in a century of settlement, and only the subsequent rebound of his own instinctive genius kept the creative riches within him from being completely smothered and extinguished.
This was his first great renunciation. He was yet to make another.
At Lyle, in the days of his joyous paganism, when he worked and read and wrote, when with happy zeal he collected the lore of the Indians, his life was given an additional zest and grace by the love of Genevra Whitcomb, daughter of a pioneer neighbor. She possessed a provocative wit, which he practiced in himself and liked in others. Besides the fresh but aesthetic beauty that characterized so many girlhoods of early Oregon, with a culture that blossomed and developed without the help of schools, she had this penchant for bright remarks and discomfiting sallies. The sparkle and repartee of their conversation is what is remembered by his sister. This was, of course, in public. We do not know to what extent their communion changed when they were by themselves, when they took long walks in the neighborhood of Lyle, when they sat together on the Washington bluffs and looked down on "the big salmon water" and the uprising Oregon shores beyond.
Nor can we say exactly how much his joining the church and dedicating himself to the ministry, was responsible for what now took place. It is to be expected that his zealotry, unless she shared it, would have alienating implications for their relationship. Her conversation had taken place the same time as his, during that December revival at the Lyle school house, but this much of acquiescence of her spirit did not suffice. "He soon became absorbed in his work," says his sister, "and thought no more about this girl, sometimes remarking that he evidently had been mistaken about his feelings for her, as she meant nothing to him now." She left Lyle in the fall of 1885 and went to The Dalles to attend school. Soon afterwards he visited her there, and they agreed to forget the past and each other—it was the end between them.
It was indeed the end but in a way that sanctified his love for her and placed her in his dreams forever. It was in the latter part of January, 1886, a winter calendared in the memories of pioneers, for its cold, that Genevra Whitcomb was taken ill with pneumonia at The Dalles. In a few days the little community of Lyle was shocked to hear that she was dead. The first impact of these tragic tidings still did not make him realize the fullness of his bereavement. He received the news while at an evening church service. On the way home he said to his sister: "This proves to me that I did not love Genevra, as I am saddened only as I would be by the loss of any other friend."
From The Dalles through the vast stretches towards its headwaters the great Columbia was flowing through freezing temperatures. The pull of the mighty current kept it from being frozen over between The Dalles and Lyle, but it was full of broken ice being rushed down toward the sea.
All regular transportation was tied up by the cold. Men coated against the weather bore the dead girl to the bank of the river and placed her in a rowboat pulled loose from the frost that gripped it upon the pebbly shore. It was pushed into the ice-filled current, and the cloaked and silent men rowed it ten miles downstream to Lyle.
In that region in the 80's ministers were far remote from one another. Because of the cold and the locked-up transportation, another preacher could not be secured to conduct the obsequies for Genevra Whitcomb. So Frederic Homer Balch preached the funeral sermon for the girl he knew now and would forever know that he loved—who had returned his love and had gone from him in estrangement into the final silence. He completed the service, and no one suspected the anguish with which he did it. The following weeks were among the darkest of his life and he almost lost faith in the religion to which he had given himself with so much consecration. He kept a little spray of artificial lilies from the only floral offerings obtainable during that frozen period. He afterwards wrote:
When the lid of the coffin was removed, and I looked upon her dead face with the little heap of salt on the still lips, it all came back, and I knew that I was looking for the last time upon the face of the only girl I would ever love.
To her he dedicated Genevieve: A Tale of Oregon.
In memory of one, now dead, whose name gives the book its title and whose character is portrayed in its pages, this tale has been written, and to her it is reverently dedicated.
He later met a Scotch girl while a theological student at Oakland, California, a girl also beautiful and of provocative wit, a girl who told her confidences to him, "who told him everything," but he wrote his sister:
After all these years the girl who died at Lyle is more to me than any girl or woman living. If I ever marry anyone it will have to be, I am afraid, a marriage without love, which is not supposed to be desirable.
He was never married. A smooth, broad highway now goes through Lyle; in the little cemetery there you will find the grave of Genevra Whitcomb and
the grave of Frederic Homer Balch. 
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Frederic Homer Balck
This was his second great renunciation.
The two surrenders, leaving him profoundly bereft, caused him at last to write Genevieve: A Tale of Oregon, which he was revising in manuscript at the time of his death.
These abnegations, these harsh experiences of the spirit, tell much; but, for a full understanding of the man and the writer, there should be added the main chronological details of his life of a little less than 3 0 years.
He was born in Lebanon, Oregon, on December 14, 1861.
His father was James A. Balch, a graduate of Wabash College, Indiana, who came to Oregon in 1851, teaching for a few years and then, in 1857, becoming a photographer. His first "picture gallery" was at Silverton, where the recollection of him is as "a great lover of music and a melancholy man." He later took his business of making daguerreotypes to Brownsville.
His mother was Harriet Maria Snider, an orphan. With Mary Stephenson, another orphan, she crossed the plains by ox-team in 1852 in the party of Dr. Robert Crawford. These two orphan girls of sixteen, whose duty it was to drive the loose cattle, realized more than all the dreams they could have dreamed as they trudged through the alkali dust churned up by the wagons—one of them married a governor of Oregon, the other became the mother of the author of The Bridge of the Gods. She was twice previously married, however, both husbands dying and each leaving a child. By the first it was Allie Gallagher. By the second it was William Benson Helm. It was this widow with two children whom Frederic Homer Balch's father met and married while he had his daguerreotype gallery at Brownsville. He served on the frontier with the Oregon Volunteers from 1864 to 1866.
In 1871, when Frederic Homer Balch was ten, the family left the Willamette Valley because of the need of a drier climate for Mrs. Balch, and moved to Goldendale, Washington. By this time he had a baby sister, Gertrude, now Mrs. J. W. Ingalls of Hood River, the only member of the family now living. A brother, Herbert, was born at Goldendale in 1873.
Mrs. Balch's improved health permitted them to settle in 1876 on a farm near Rocky Butte, east of Portland, and Frederic Homer Balch at the age of 15 went to school for the first time in his life. This does not mean that he had been allowed to grow up in ignorance. His father, a college graduate, simply had too much respect for the quality of his son's mind to expose it to the treatment of the usual pioneer pedagogue, and, with a regular routine of lessons, had taught him at home. He knew and respected the abilities of Mr. and Mrs. T. R. Coon—both still living—who were teaching the Mt. Tabor school, and was glad to send his son there.
The boy had already formed the habit of reading every book he could get his hands on and re-reading the good ones in the absence of something fresh. At Goldendale, between his 10th and 15th years, "whenever a new family arrived in the community, Frederic soon learned if they had any books, and it would not be long before he would have the coveted privilege of reading them." Already, too, the writer's ambition was fastened on him to the extent that when he told Mrs. Coon he hated grammar and she said he would have to learn grammar if he were going to write, the motivation worked.
Mrs. Coon said of the reading of this boy of 15 at the time he was in the Mt. Tabor school in 1876:
He always carried a book in his pocket, and utilized every moment. The book was not about school work nor an amusing story, but the work of some standard author. If he were urged by his comrades to make up a team for a game, he would respond, but was eager to get back to his book. At the time he was in school he had read Milton's Paradise Lost, Scott's Lady of the Lake, some of Shakespeare's plays, some of Macaulay's writings and poems by Longfellow, Bryant, Burns and Moore. He frequently asked advice from the principal about profitable books for him to read and one time inquired what I thought of the merits of David Copperfield, and where a copy could be obtained.
The more he read books the more he was determined to write them. It was not a vague, inarticulate kind of aspiration, but he had a concrete idea of the kind of books he meant to write:
To make Oregon as famous as Scott made Scotland; to make the Cascades as widely known as the Highlands; the Santiam like the Ayer of Tweed; to make the splendid scenery of the Willamette the background for romance full of passion and grandeur, grew more and more into the one central ambition of my life.
His mother's asthma made it necessary to move back to Goldendale. Six months was all he spent in the Mt. Tabor school, the only schooling he had until he went to the Pacific Theological Seminary at Oakland at the age of 28. The half year with Mr. and Mrs. Coon, however, sent him back to Goldendale with his mind widened, stimulated and disciplined and with his ambitions to write burning brighter than ever. He always gratefully remembered the Coons, who were later members of his congregation at Hood River.
Upon his return to Goldendale, according to his sister:
He began studying the history and traditions of the Northwestern Indians. He had always been deeply interested in ancient history, and found himself fascinated by the weird tales and legends the old Indians recited of their dim and almost forgotten past. As these were unfolded to him, he felt himself called upon to gather the fragments that remained in the fast passing tribes, and save what could yet be learned of the history of the Western Indians. He overlooked no opportunity of interviewing aged Indians and finding those who were the last remnant of tribes that had almost passed out of existence. Whenever a rumor reached him that an old Indian might be found in some far distant tepee, no matter how isolated the village might be from civilization, he spared no effort to locate him and gather all that lingered in the old man's memory. No endeavor was too hard if at the end of the trail he found a representative of some old tribe, who remembered fragments of talks before the campfires, fantastic legends told by his forefathers, tales of old kings and councilors, mighty warriors and their conquests, that still burned as memories of the time when he was a youthful warrior. As the years went on, the desire grew more and more to preserve all these bits of history relating to the past of a disappearing race and weave them into a form of literature for coming generations.
This was the work that was interrupted by his conversion.
Goldendale became the county-seat of Klickitat County and his father served a term as county judge. In the fall of 1880 they moved to a farm near Lyle. The house was located opposite from but back and out of the melancholy sight of Memaloose Island, around which the dashing current of the mighty river "sounds the Indian death wail forever." His father's health and memory failed, leaving him to support the family by work on the farm and on the railroad under construction across the river. He attended the revival meeting; he became a home missionary and a preacher; Wallulah was burned; and Genevra Whitcomb was lowered into the frozen earth at Lyle.
In 1886 he moved to Hood River where his largest congregation was located, but continued to be the pastor of several small congregations on both sides of the river. At Hood River an average of eighty-five or a hundred a Sunday came to hear him preach, as is remembered by Mrs. Coon, his old teacher, who regularly attended:
Mr. Balch never read his sermons, neither did he make any attempt at fine speaking. His language was plain, simple and easily understood. His voice seldom rose above a conversational tone, but he always had a message to deliver and he made it clear and convincing. His sincere earnestness won the confidence of the audience and made him many friends.
His mother and her family lived with him at Hood River. After getting well settled in his work there he found time once more for writing, and he was no longer deterred by the belief that it was wicked for ministers to write stories. By the summer of 1887 he had written Genevieve: A Tale of Oregon.
It was later to be extensively revised and changed, but in the meantime, after having it copied, he laid it aside to respond to the inspiration that was heavy upon him to write what was to turn out to be one of the famous and enduring books of American fiction.
In August, 1887, he took a vacation trip to British Columbia and while there he wrote the opening chapters of The Bridge of the Gods. He finished the book at Hood River, working on it for two years before he thought it was good enough to submit to a publisher. During that time he was full of it. He talked about it to several friends and read it to some for their opinion. In the later editions the dedication is left out. In the first edition it was dedicated to Mrs. Almeda Hodge Barrett. She was a woman of education, the wife of a pioneer physician, living near Hood River. She spent a great deal of time with him in correcting and revising the manuscript. Finally it was as good as both of them could make it. It was copied and sent off. He waited in suspense; it came back; he sent it off again. It was a routine to which he was to become calloused before it ended. It made many trips to many publishers and was always rejected. He began to despair of ever seeing it in print, when at last and considerably to his surprise, so accustomed had he become to getting it back, it was accepted by A. C. McClurg & Company of Chicago. But they wanted another title. While traveling about as a manuscript among the publishers it had borne the title Cecil Gray, the Missionary. It was Mrs. Barrett who suggested the name The Bridge of the Gods.
It was published in September, 1890, in a first edition of 1500 copies—a brown book with an Indian picture stamped on the front cover. It immediately gained favorable attention in the reviews and, though far from being a best seller, it did well enough to bring new encouragement to the author and to be regarded as a successful book by those who published it. Ten years later, A. C. McClurg & Company spoke with satisfaction of the "steady" sale it had enjoyed and issued an illustrated edition with drawings by L. Maynard Dixon. The author was well enough known by 1900 so that the Pacific Monthly had an article about him and printed two of his poems. The Oregonian ran a half-page feature on him in 1902, and the same year J. B. Horner in the second edition of his Oregon Literature devoted to him a picture, two and a half pages of biography and nine and a half pages of quotations from The Bridge of the Gods.
The book was indeed steadily making its way, but it was given its first quick impulse towards being a famous book in 1911, when it was presented as "a spectacular drama" at the Astoria Centennial Exposition under the direction of Miss Mabel Farris, and was later repeated on Multnomah Field in Portland. It has now reached its 29th edition, meaning an average of about two editions every three years since it was published. Such is the history of a book that was rejected by practically all the leading publishers doing business in 1890.
Meanwhile, in 1889, he secured a leave of absence from the Hood River Church and enrolled in the Pacific Theological Seminary at Oakland, California. He earned his way by filling pulpits in the city and country and working in the little mission churches. He saw more and more of the Scotch girl until he became greatly concerned as to what his honorable course should be. He wrote to his sister. It was a very serious letter but he knew his Hood River and it had this ending:
Write me a letter that will guide me in my perplexities, and keep my perplexities to yourself for goodness sake.
After the publication of his book and the encouragement of its success, he wrote feverishly, adding this labor to his studies and his preaching. His tubercular constitution could not stand so much and his second year in school was one of increasing illness. He returned to Hood River in March, 1891, and died in the Good Samaritan Hospital in Portland on June 3, lacking six months of being thirty years old.
He left the manuscripts of a few poems that are less important than his prose, though "What the Zither Said" has some lyrical value and some genuine pathos. It was first published in the Pacific, a religious paper, in 1887, when grief was fresh in his heart. It begins with "I learned a lesson, Genevieve, tonight from what the zither said," and later has the two lines "I see a grave beneath the pine, the river floating by." This and two other poems and two prose sketches were collected into a little volume called Memaloose, privately printed in Portland in 1934, in a limited hand-set edition, by Myron Ricketts and Thomas Binford, two students in the school of journalism of the University of Oregon.
Genevieve: A Tale of Oregon was published by the Metropolitan Press in Portland in 1932. Thus of his three books, two were published more than 40 years after his death.
In his old copy of Joaquin Miller's Poems there is a notation of titles for his books in the order he expected to write them:
As he then called Genevieve: A Tale of Oregon.
The Bridge of the Gods
Kenasket
This was to be a tale of Oregon in 1818. He left the manuscript of six chapters.
Crossing the Plains
A Tale of Waiilat-pu
The Senator
Not only had he selected the titles but he had the plots pretty well outlined in his mind.
To the extent permitted by use of his spare time from studying theology and earning his way at Oakland, the creative impulse he received from the publication and success of The Bridge of the Gods was spent largely in extensive revision of Genevieve: A Tale of Oregon. He wrote it, as has been said, before he wrote The Bridge of the Gods. A White Salmon girl who had attend the old Holmes Business College in Portland, came in May or June, 1887, into the Balch home at Hood River and spent about three weeks typing it for him. He put it aside, only correcting passages in it now and then, while he worked on The Bridge of the Gods, which he started in August of that year. After the latter was published he again gave his eager attention to the older manuscript.
Writing to his sister from Oakland on November 23, 1890—two months after The Bridge of the Gods had come out—he said:
Almost every evening I put in at Genevieve revising and cutting down. Am getting it in very good shape, though you would be surprised at some of the sweeping changes I have made. Whole chapters have gone out entire, though the omitted chapters will be preserved and altered and put into shape in short story form. I have not destroyed anything.
This frugality might indicate that he was a little repentant, after all, for the burning of Wallulah.
He was still working on it when he returned ill to Hood River in March, 1891, and was discussing with his family plans for even further revision when he died.
Two funeral processions climbed the steeply ascending road, one in the January cold in 1886, bearing a girl of 18; the other in the gladness of June in 1891, bearing a young man not quite 30, who nevertheless had given to American literature one of its greatest romances in a book and one of its saddest in life. The graves of Genevra Whitcomb and Frederic Homer Balch are only a few yards apart in the Lyle cemetery, perhaps the most beautifully and suitably located burial ground in the Pacific Northwest, high on the hills and hemmed in as it is by three great emblems of eternity—far below, the perpetual waters of the broad Columbia; just around the bend, Memaloose Island where for centuries those of another race have awaited resurrection; and to the southwest, Mt. Hood, lofty and clear, with the pure whiteness of the New Jerusalem.
On pages 137, 138 and 139 has been printed a selection from The Bridge of the Gods.