History of Oregon Literature/Chapter 21
CHAPTER 21
Samuel A. Clarke
Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.
SHEFFIELD.
At Salem in 1872 was printed a 40-page pamphlet that contains as much poetry of high excellence and as little that is not excellent as any similar quantity of pages ever published in Oregon. The man who wrote it was 45 years old. In his preface he asked, with eagerness but with dignity, for a sign of favor that he might be encouraged to quit daily journalism and give himself to literature. What was the answer? In the Library of the Oregon Historical Society are 12 thick scrapbooks of the things he wrote and 17 bound volumes of newspapers that he edited. On the shelves of that library and many libraries are two volumes of a history on Oregon, accepted as one of the best we have, completed and published when he was 78. Such was the answer: his finer prose long deferred, and never another volume of poetry, not even another in the thinness of 40 pages—and the first one not included in the listings of Smith's Pacific Northwest Americana, and owned by fewer libraries in the state than can be counted on the fingers of a single hand.
The little volume is Sounds by the Western Sea and Other Poems. The author was Samuel A. Clarke, known by many for his important contributions to Oregon as a pioneer, journalist and historian, but, in a land of unusual sensitivity to poetry, strangely forgotten and never fully recognized as a poet.
It is to be expected that even such good of poetry as the people of Oregon would finally reach the point of satiety, if in a cumulative production none should ever be discarded. The fairly good of the old must be thrown out to make room for the fairly good of the new, but neither the limitations of our enjoyment nor the wealth of our creative talent will justify treating with prodigality such gifts as Sounds by the Western Sea. In reference to that little pamphlet there was in the Oregon public, ordinarily so sure and warmly quick, a curious embargo of the appreciative senses—eyes closed to the gleam shining through the small type and poor format, ears unresponsive to its cadences, imagination unquickened by the sweep and compass of its connotations. Whatever the causes that have obscured the merit of those 40 pages, they represent, next to the disdained legacies of the Indians, the greatest loss suffered by Oregon literature. Fortunately, the loss need not be permanent, if they could be reprinted and submitted to the altered and awakened taste of a later public.
When Samuel A. Clarke wrote them he was not an unknown man of unproved ability, but during 22 years in Oregon had become prominent through business enterprises, journalism and civic leadership.
Born on a Cuban plantation in 1827, he came to Portland in the fall of 1850 and a few months later was largely responsible for getting it and its 400 people incorporated as a city. "He circulated a petition, obtained 144 names and with M. King went to Oregon City, when the legislature was in session." In January, 1851, Portland was incorporated "as a result of his work."
The next summer he outfitted a wagon, secured a partner and unsuccessfully joined a gold rush to the Umpqua. In 1852 he married 20-year-old Harriett T. Buckingham, sold a sawmill which he had started in Portland and bought out a land claim near Salem, moving into that town to live in 1859.
In the early 60's he hearkened to another gold boom, this time at Auburn in what is now Baker County and again unsuccessfully. Discouraged with the prospects of a mining claim he had taken up, he sold it, and the man he sold it to cleaned up $100,000. Here he was once more active in political science. At the age of 24 he was "father of Portland" and at the age of 35 he shared in the paternity of Baker County, with a county seat at Auburn, now a ghost town which was located about nine miles from the present city of Baker. He had returned to Salem and was a clerk at the legislature that created the county in 1862. He served as its first county clerk.
He spent several months in the East. On his return to Oregon through San Francisco, he met in that city the railroad promoters with whom he associated in organizing in 1865 the Oregon and California Railroad Company, later the Oregon Central Railroad Company, of which he was secretary for three years until it was sold to Ben Holladay in 1868. His was the company known in Oregon railroad history as the "Salem Company" that promoted a route along the east side of the Willamette, to distinguish it from the rival Oregon Central Railroad Company with a right-of-way along the west side. It is interesting that the two competitive secretaries of these East-Side and West-Side Railroads, Samuel A. Clarke and Joseph Gaston, should both afterwards write histories of Oregon.
His three years as a railroad executive were preceded and followed by editorial positions. For a year, in 1864–65, he was editor of the Oregonian. He stepped out to join the Oregon and California Company; a young man by the name of Harvey W. Scott who had been contributing pieces to the paper and acting as city librarian and studying law, stepped into the place and became famous. He took his portion of the Ben Holladay purchase money and bought the Salem Statesman, which had been renamed the Unionist after Sam. L. Simpson's father had sold it. He gave it back its old name and edited it for three years until 1872. He then bought, in partnership with D. W. Craig, the Willamette Farmer, which he ran until 1878, when he moved to Portland to serve as head of the literary bureau of the Villard railroad syndicate until Villard's failure in 1883.
In 1884 he shipped the first car of cured prunes from the Pacific Northwest.
He devoted the next two years to research and writing, another literary period that met with final frustration, as described in the Oregon Native Son:
The years 1885–6 he devoted to historical work that was published in the Oregonian as Pioneer Days. He gathered material from fur trader, mountaineer, Hudson Bay sources, missionaries and the earliest pioneers, many of whom he knew. He hoped to devote his life to a continuance of this work, but ill health and the death of his wife, who was his life's inspiration, as well as his assistant, prevented. Overwork had caused nervous prostration that lasted for years, from which he recovered when the world was in the panic of 1893.
From 1898 until 1908 he was librarian of the General Land Office at Washington, D. C. He died at Salem on August 20, 1909, at the age of 82.
He was married in 1852 to Harriet T. Buckingham in Portland. They had three daughters and one son. One daughter, Mrs. Sarah Clarke Dyer of Salem, presented to the Oregon Historical Society a case full of material, including his history, a personal copy of Sounds by the Western Sea, clippings of his writings in 12 volumes, 17 bound volumes of the Salem Statesman and the Willamette Farmer which he edited, and other things connected with his life and that of Mrs. Clarke.
Reference in a quotation has been made to her as his assistant. She did indeed greatly help him in his editorial work "by conducting a department for home and youth, so had become well known over a wide region." She died on January 27, 1890.
Well-known persons of Oregon and those that passed through Oregon came to visit them, according to an Oregonian account:
The Clarke home was renowned for its hospitality, as Mrs. Clarke was a charming hostess. Among the many noted people who were guests there were President Grant, Schuyler Colfax, General Sheridan, Joaquin Miller, Henry Villard, Bret Harte, David Starr Jordan and George Bancroft, the historian.
In his old age while enjoying his sinecure position in the library of the General Land Office, he found time at last to write his two-volume history of Oregon, Pioneer Days of Oregon History. This was published in 1905, the year of the Lewis and Clark fair, with the name of J. K. Gill Company on the title page as publisher, although he said in a "Notice":
To avoid the charges made by publishers, I have become my own publisher, and am having the work done by the Burr Printing House, one of the greatest printing houses in New York City, to be able to offer it for less than half any popular publishing house would charge. I desire to bring it within reach of every home in this Pacific Northwest, and attract many of those who will visit the Lewis and Clark Exposition, where I hope to meet many of my old friends among the pioneers and their families, as well as those who have come of later day.
It was a revision of the series, Pioneer Days, contributed to the Oregonian nearly 20 years before.
In his preface to the history he gave testimony of the help of Mrs. Clarke:
My work as a writer had the encouragement and assistance that association and inspiration with another soul can afford, and for forty years had depended on. She, who had aided and inspired whatever success had been attained, planned that we should work together to mould the historical labors of the past into connected form. It was a beautiful suggestion, that our labors should close with such effort, and the result remain a joint tribute for posterity. Death sundered that alliance and left me for years discouraged as well as suffering from nervous prostration. But there comes to me, after all these years of waiting, the ambition to complete the work as she had planned it; to leave the product as an humble monument to the past of which it will treat, also as remembrance of the lovely character and beautiful soul of the woman whose life was blended with mine, and was a blessing to all who knew her.
Sounds by the Western Sea contained six poems in its 40 pages of 8-point type—"Sounds by the Western Sea", given by the author as a commencement poem at Willamette University on June 17, 1872; "The Legend of Tillamook"; "A Message from the Sea", written in 1871; "Song of the Willamette", written in 1871; "Legend of the Cascades"; and "The Sailor's Grave".
It was printed by "Clarke & Craig, Willamette Farmer Office, Salem, Oregon."
In his "Introductory", he said:
This pamphlet is published for no other purpose than to be able to present to publishers and critics the easiest means to judge of the ability of the writer.
Should my efforts be deemed of sufficient value to warrant their continuance, I may devote myself, more or less, to literary pursuits in the future; and should they find no appreciation from those to whose favor I thus commit them, they will, at least, have served to interest me and employ me during weary months when I was an invalid, and unable to follow the busy round of daily journalism.
I offer these desultory efforts as specimens of what I have done, not as tests of what I can do. Such as they are, they have flowed from my pen freely, and have seemed to come unasked.
I have carried freshly in my memory, for many years, the legends peculiar to Oregon and its primitive race. My home has been here for nearly a quarter of a century.
My fears almost mock the hope that, at the age of forty-five, I can lay down my pen as a journalist to win success in more graceful paths of literature. I scarce dare hope so much.
I confide these specimens to their fate as I would launch a frail bark on uncertain waters.
S. A. CLARKE.
SALEM, OREGON, NOVEMBER 1, 1872.
One editor responded to this method of submitting manuscripts. Harper's New Monthly Magazine bought "Legend of the Cascades", and published it, with illustrations, as the featured contribution in the February number, 1874.
How much encouragement this gave him and his wife we can imagine, but apparently no publisher made a bid for the whole book.
This explains, in part, at least, why the people of Oregon did not give to his pamphlet of poems the appreciation it deserved. They did not have a fair chance. If he had submitted Sounds by the Western Sea in a sufficiently large edition to them directly instead of printing a few copies for the judgment of "publishers and critics", the outcome might have been different. The little volume might have been well known today instead of existing in only a few crumbling copies.
Several poems, some in lighter mood and of a topical nature, may be found in his scrapbooks, and three were printed in 1902 in the second edition of Horner's Oregon Literature, but none of this material is of the high order of Sounds by the Western Sea.
The Vanishing Indian
These few lines are taken from "Legend of the Cascades", a long poem of 566 lines. After it appeared in Sounds by the Western Sea, it was published, with illustrations, in Harper's New Monthly Magazine in February, 1874.
He ceased to catch the salmon or hunt on hill or plain—
He laid him down with folded arms to never hunt again.
My people are no longer like the bended heads of clover—
The red men and their children are not leaves the forest over—
They do not fill the valleys as the red cones dot the pine,
But where there's yet a Clickitat to fish or hunt at will
He treads the lands his fathers trod to hunt and fish there still.
Sang Blue of the Beeswax Ship
Here are given the last six verses of the poem "The Legend of Tillamook", which occupies 14 pages of 8-point type in Sounds by the Western Sea.
It is a poetical version of the legend of the Beeswax Ship. In the poem, Champoeg was a rich Chinese merchant of Shanghai, who had his junks on many a sea. He said: "I know there are shores which line this ocean eastward." The captain of his fleet, a seaman that could be depended upon in any situation, was Sang Blue—
And eve that never quailed when typhoons shook;
With blue cotton trousers bagging at the knees
A trifle wider than his jacket sleeves.
Champoeg called him and said: "Sang Blue, I need a man of deeds and sent for you." The plan was all right with him, so they sailed east to find the West the same year another man was sailing west to find the East—in 1492. At last they came in sight of the Oregon Coast. Outside of Tillamook Bay they saw Indian boats and called for a pilot, but the Indians, scared half to death paddled towards home with all their might. Sang Blue, trusting in their knowledge of the channel, used their flight as pilotage and followed after them. Maybe they did not deceive him by their course, maybe it was only the greater draft of his ship that brought disaster. It was grounded upon the outer bar, and only two men still clung to the wreckage amidst the breakers, Champoeg and Sang Blue—but Champoeg was dead.
From this ship came the mysterious beeswax found in such large quantities and over so long a period of time along the Tillamook Coast. The subsequent buccaneering career of Sang Blue from Port Orford to the Columbia is told in the part of the poem given here. He did not forget his religion and he did not forget Champoeg, causing the latter's name to be reverenced among the tribes and to be given to an Indian village on the Willamette.
Still stranger legends, which relate
That far, far back in other
Who, all along the Western shore,
With war canoes of hemlock made,
Dashed through where noisy breakers pour,
And battles won with gleaming blade,—
With brazen gongs made great uproar—
And all the coast in tribute laid.
They swoop'd as if by eagle flown,
And still they say that no canoes
Like these have ever since been known.
And this bold Nelson of the bays—
Most daring that the past e'er knew—
Though nameless in our later days,
Who could he be but brave Sang Blue?
Perchance they from the wreck could save,
Ere buried in the yielding sands,
Some useful tools and weapons brave,
And wield them, too, with skillful hands,
With these the towering hemlock fell,
And by their hands was fashioned well
To ride upon the ocean swell.
Made raids along the crested shore;
It awed the nations of Chinook,
And thence in triumph southward bore
To near Yaquina and Siletz,
To Orford, Coos and far Coquille;
Where stream or bay the shore line frets,
They hewed a wav with gleaming steel.
A very treasury of spoil,
Thus gathered from the wealthy sea,
A tribute levied without toil.
And ever still the Buddha true,
Where lordly pine and hemlock grew
They brought as offering to their god.
The groves God's temples were of old,
And 'neath some broadly spreading tree
They knelt upon the grass-grown mold
And offering made to deity.
Of towering hemlock, spruce and pine,
As if by Titans planted, where
Through thickest boughs no sunbeams shine
They walk there with an awful tread;
They think the grove is holy ground,
And there the ever silent dead
Are sepultered without a sound.
Alike on sounding shore and sea,
And plows the wave and plows the land,
And treats the red man slightingly,
They dream by night and pray by day,
That, as by ancient seers foretold,
The time may come when on that bay
Shall dash that war fleet, as of old,
To bring again to Tillamook
The power and glory that of yore
Ruled all from Coos to far Chinook,
To rule it thus forever more.