History of Oregon Literature/Chapter 23
CHAPTER 23
Five Personal Essayists
… it is good to feel that life is not wholly usurped by cares for subsistence and physical gratification, but admits, in measures which may be indefinitely enlarged, sentiments and delights worthy of a higher being.
William Ellery CHANNING.
Five men of Oregon who were not primarily men of letters have left us the happy heritage of one book each. These five books, written out of rich lives spent in the Oregon Country, have the objective and subjective mixed in such appealing harmony, have so much buoyancy and freshness of observation and a response of the mind and spirit so deep and wide in interpretation, and have in such measure spontaneous artistry and the charm of style, that they have become autobiographical classics.
They are the highest reach of pioneer reminiscence. In them the things experienced, the raw materials of literature, did not have to wait, as is usually the case, for literary treatment second-hand, but became literature in the first warm recording by the men who experienced them. No middleman craftsman; nothing vicarious; no ghost authorship; no re-write man with artifice and rhetoric; no collaborator of artificial sensitivity.
Likewise these five books do not consist of observations and feelings, first-hand but forced, by writers whose trade was writing. They are not the result of a conscious eye for copy, of a preconceived purpose of making a book—such a motive as was contemptuously attributed to Astor's "scribbling clerks" by Washing ton Irving, who regularly did that himself and seldom with enough sincerity to lift him above an aloof tone of mockery and exaggeration. Woodrow Wilson once said, "Character, gentlemen, is a by-product." Literature isn't that, the way it is generally practiced, by professionals who resent such amateur competition and complain of lowered standards if men who have lived literature want to set it down themselves. In this there is much truth, and the conspicuous and distinctive merit of these five books comes from their being such a notable exception. In them there is a closer conjunction of experience and art without the standard of presentation being lowered.
These five pioneer authors lived and saw and felt before they wrote and without meaning to write; and then, by an unusual combination of gifts, they found themselves possessed of the substance of literature and a sure instinct for its form. One was captain of an emigrant wagon-train, one a lawyer, one a miner and freighter, one a governor of Oregon and one a famous cartoonist—Jesse Applegate, Thomas Nelson Strong, George A. Waggoner, T. T. Geer and Homer Davenport. The books are A Day With the Cow-Column, Cathlamet on the Columbia, Stories of Old Oregon, Fifty Years in Oregon and The Country Boy.
1
Jesse Applegate, "Sage of Yoncalla"
The first public lecture heard in Oregon by the writer of this book was a student assembly talk in Villard Hall at Eugene on Jesse Applegate. It was illustrated by one stereopticon lantern slide, in which, though more beetle-browed and shown in profile, the face bore some resemblance to the strong face of Rameses given in the history books. Though there is now another picture, a photograph, with lineaments softened enough so that he might have passed for a poet, this drawing has remained a favorite of the lecturer, Dr. Joseph Schafer, at that time and for many years professor of history in the University of Oregon and now superintendent of the Wisconsin Historical Society. The two pictures together show the elements of strength and refinement that marked, in union and accord, the character of this great pioneer. Dr. Schafer has written extensively and with understanding on Jesse Applegate, including the following summary of his qualities:
He was deficient in the spirit of co-operation, had a somewhat dictatorial temper, and succeeded best when his leadership was unchallenged. ... In 1849 he had removed to Southern Oregon, settling on a large ranch near the California Trail in the Umpqua Valley, at a place he named Yoncalla. His chief business was raising beef cattle which he drove to the mines. Here he built his "great house", dispensed a generous hospitality to all comers, and entertained men of national distinction. . . He assembled a good private library and remained through life a student, and a writer on public questions for the newspapers. His literary style was distinguished, as witness the appeal of the Provisional Government to Congress in 1847, the report of the American Commission to settle the claims of the Hudson's Bay Company under the treaty of 1846, and especially A Day With the Cow-Column in 1843, which ranks as a western classic. . . . He was aggressively independent, looked like an old Roman, and had many Roman virtues. A frontiersman in the simplicity of his life, he was physically of the mountaineer type, above medium height, thin, wiry, resilient, capable of walking sixty miles a day. He was gifted intellectually and was a good conversationalist but shrank from public speaking. He molded public opinion through the press, through resolutions drafted for general organizations, through a wide correspondence with prominent men, and through personal appeal.
An early contemporary estimate of him is given by an observer used to mixing with men of ability and cultivation, Theodore Winthrop, author of The Canoe and the Saddle, who made a trip to Oregon and wrote about his experiences in his Western Letters and Journals. Writing from "Scottsburg, Umpqua River, June 28, 1853", he said:
My fourth day I was to have arrived at the house at Yoncalla, . . . Mr. Applegate was of the emigration of 1843, and is a man of remarkable intelligence and energy. He looks like a backwoodsman, but thinks like the most cultivated. He has nearly confirmed my partially formed intention of settling in this country.
In further confirmation of those outstanding traits, J. W. Nesmith said of him in 1875, when he was 64 years old:
As a frontiersman, in courage, sagacity, and natural intelligence he is the equal of Daniel Boone. In culture and experience, he is the superior of half the living statesmen of our land.
He was born in Kentucky in 1811, the youngest of the three famous Applegate brothers, of whom the other two were Charles and Lindsay. At the age of 17 he spent a year in the Rock Springs Academy at Shiloh, Illinois, studying mathematics and surveying. He taught school but continued the studies he had started and later became a surveyor by profession, reaching the position of deputy surveyor-general of Missouri. In 1832, at the age of 21, he married Cynthia Parker. They lived for a while on a farm, and then in 1843 started to Oregon in the emigration of that year. He had one of the largest herds and was elected captain of the "cow-column".
He settled first in Yamhill County with his brothers, surveying at Oregon City and Salem. He was active in many ways in public service, the record of which is well known. He removed to the Umpqua Valley, accompanied by Charles, in 1849, and became the "Sage of Yoncalla". On old tax rolls he is shown as one of the heavy taxpayers of the territory. Of him in his affluent days Mrs. Eva Emery Dye has written: "At great expense even in the days of gold had been built the first mansion in southern Oregon, high pillared with stately columns shining afar like Arlington or Monticello against the Calapooia foothills." . . . The old-timers at Yoncalla still tell about it. It burned down in the early 80's.
In his later days he had "crushing reverses" brought about in part "by endorsing notes for friends, which caused the loss of his home and other property." According to H. L. Davis, he lost all that he had and all that his wife had, "and, totally destitute for the first time in his life, went out and hunted up a job, at past sixty years old, working for wages as a sheepherder on the Klamath Falls range".
He and his wife Cynthia had many children, as was the custom in pioneer times. Their home life at Yoncalla has been described by Mrs. S. A. Long:
Mr. Applegate clerked for Allen & McKinley at Scottsburg for some years. He was also frequently at home for months at a time following his vocation of surveying. . . .
During the fifties a sewing machine, melodeon, and large library were brought into the house. Music, books, newspapers, were the amusements of the family—sometimes a little social gathering of the neighbor children.
Mrs. Applegate had received no education and never attempted to read anything other than the large print of her Testament, . . . Her husband had adopted the habit of reading aloud to her in their early married life. This habit he kept up as long as she lived. Of evenings ... or of Sundays and leisure hours of summer, he would read the current news of the day ... as well as books of travel, historical works, novels and poetry.
Mrs. Applegate died on June 1, 1881, and Jesse Applegate seven years later, on April 22, 1888, at the age of 77. Their burial place has been sympathetically described by R. J. Hendricks, writer on Oregon history, in the Salem Statesman for January 7, 1930:
A little way south of Drain, the Pacific Highway passes through the old homestead of Jesse Applegate. Less than a quarter of a mile from where the old dwelling house of Mr. Applegate stood, up on the spur of the hill, is a little cemetery; and here the "Sage of Yoncalla" and his good wife, Cynthia, sleep side by side. The spot is marked by a humble sandstone slab or monument two and a half feet by 20 inches by six inches in dimensions, facing north and south. The stone was fashioned by Mr. Applegate himself, assisted by his son, Peter Skeen Applegate, who did the graving; and was placed there at the time of his wife's death, seven years before the death of Mr. Applegate.
Only a portion of A Day With the Cow-Column can be given for lack of space. It was first printed in the Overland Monthly for August, 1868, the same number in which Bret Harte's The Luck of Roaring Camp appeared. In 1876 he read it before the Oregon Pioneer Association, and it was published in their Transactions of that year. It was reprinted in the Oregon Historical Quarterly in December, 1900; in part, in Dr. Joseph Schafer's History of the Pacific Northwest in 1905; and as a beautiful limited edition book, with an introduction by Dr. Schafer, by The Caxton Club of Chicago in 1934.
A Day With the Cow-Column in 1843
A typical day on the Oregon Trail, "a lifelike picture of the great emigration in motion towards the west, and .. . the camping methods in use for many years among trapping parties and traders, as well as emigrants to Oregon and California." They reached Fort Hall 98 days after leaving Independence, Missouri, and it was nearly 90 days more before they all reached the Willamette Valley.
It is four o'clock a. m.; the sentinels on duty have discharged their rifles—the signal that the hours of sleep are over—and every wagon and tent is pouring forth its night tenants, and slowly kindling smokes begin largely to rise and float away in the morning air. Sixty men start from the corral, spreading as they make through the vast herd of cattle and horses that make a semicircle around the encampment, the most distant perhaps two miles away.
The herders pass the extreme verge and carefully examine for trails beyond, to see that none of the animals have strayed or been stolen during the night. This morning no trails lead beyond the outside animals in sight, and by five o'clock the herders begin to contract the great moving circle, and the well-trained animals move slowly towards camp, clipping here and there a thistle or a tempting bunch of grass on the way. In about an hour five thousand animals are close up to the encampment, and the teamsters are busy selecting their teams and driving them inside the corral to be yoked. The corral is a circle one hundred yards deep, formed with wagons connected strongly with each other; the wagon in the rear being connected with the wagon in front by its tongue and ox chains. It is a strong barrier that the most vicious ox cannot break, and in case of attack from the Sioux would be no contemptible intrenchment.
From six to seven o'clock is a busy time; breakfast is to be eaten, the tents struck, the wagons loaded and the teams yoked and brought up in readiness to be attached to their respective wagons. All know when, at seven o'clock, the signal to march sounds, that those not ready to take their places in the line of march must fall into the dusty rear for the day. There are sixty wagons. They have been divided into fifteen divisions or platoons of four wagons each, and each platoon is entitled to lead in its turn. The leading platoon today will be the rear one tomorrow, and will bring up the rear unless some teamster through indolence or negligence has lost his place in the line, and is condemned to that uncomfortable post. It is within ten minutes of seven; the corral but now a strong barricade is everywhere broken, the teams being attached to the wagons. The women and children have taken their places in them. The pilot (a borderer who has passed his life on the verge of civilization and has been chosen to his post of leader from his knowledge of the savage and his experience in travel through roadless wastes) stands ready, in the midst of his pioneers and aids, to mount and lead the way. Ten or fifteen young men, not today on duty, form another cluster. They are ready to start on a buffalo hunt, are well mounted and well armed, as they need to be, for the unfriendly Sioux have driven the buffalo out of the Platte, and the hunters must ride fifteen or twenty miles to find them. The cow drivers are hastening, as they get ready, to the rear of their charge, to collect and prepare them for the day's march.
It is on the stroke of seven; the rush to and fro, the cracking of whips, the loud command to oxen, and what seemed to be the inextricable confusion of the last ten minutes has ceased. Fortunately everyone has been found and every teamster is at his post. The clear notes of a trumpet sound in the front; the pilot and his guard mount their horses; the leading divisions of the wagons move out of the encampment, and take up the line of march; the rest fall into their places with the precision of clockwork, until the spot so lately full of life sinks back into that solitude that seems to reign over the broad plain and rushing river as the caravan draws its lazy length towards the distant El Dorado. . .
The pilot, by measuring the ground and timing the speed of the horses, has determined the rate of each, so as to enable him to select the nooning place as nearly as the requisite grass and water can be had at the end of five hours' travel of the wagons. Today, the ground being favourable, little time has been lost in preparing the road, so that he and his pioneers are at the nooning place an hour in advance of the wagons, which time is spent in preparing convenient watering places for the animals, and digging little wells near the bank of the Platte. As the teams are not unyoked, but simply turned loose from the wagons, a corral is not formed at noon, but the wagons are drawn up in columns, four abreast, the leading wagon of each platoon on the left, the platoons being formed with that in view. This brings friends together at noon as well as at night.
Today an extra session of the council is being held, to settle a dispute that does not admit of delay, between a proprietor and a young man who has undertaken to do a man's service on the journey for bed and board. . . . The council was a high court in the most exalted sense. It was a senate composed of the ablest and most respected fathers of the emigration. . . .
It is now one o'clock; the bugle has sounded and the caravan has resumed its westward journey. It is in the same order, but the evening is far less animated than the morning march. A drowsiness has fallen apparently on man and beast; teamsters drop asleep on their perches, and even when walking by their teams; and the words of command are now addressed to the slowly creeping oxen in the soft tenor of women or the piping treble of children, while the snores of the teamsters make a droning accompaniment. . . .
The sun is now getting low in the west, and at length the painstaking pilot is standing ready to conduct the train in the circle which he has previously measured and marked out, which is to form the invariable fortification for the night. The leading wagons follow him so nearly around the circle that but a wagon length separates them. Each wagon follows in its track, the rear closing on the front, until its tongue and ox chains will perfectly reach from one to the other; and so accurate [is] the measure and perfect the practice, that the hindmost wagon of the train always precisely closes the gateway. As each wagon is brought into position it is dropped from its team (the teams being inside the circle), the team is unyoked, and the yoke and chains are used to connect the wagon strongly with that in its front. Within ten minutes from the time the leading wagon halted, the barricade is formed, the teams unyoked and driven out to pasture. Everyone is busy preparing fires ... to cook the evening meal, pitching tents and otherwise preparing for the night. . . . [The watches] begin at eight o'clock p. m. and end at four o'clock a. m.
2
Thomas Nelson Strong of Cathlamet and Portland
Cathlamet on the Columbia, a small book of 119 pages by Thomas Nelson Strong, was first published, in an edition of about 200 copies, by The Holly Press of Portland, Oregon, in 1906. It had as a sub-title: "Recollections of the Indian People and Short Stories of Early Pioneer Days in the Valley of the Lower Columbia." The Metropolitan Press printed a new hand-set edition of 800 copies in 1930. It has 170 pages, with a preface by Dr. A. L. Kroeber, professor of anthropology in the University of California, in which he says:
Modestly does the author of these tales refer to them as perhaps of little worth; but he has made a work, which, though small in compass, shines with a quality that endures. It is an unusual book. It possesses savor and sincerity, exactness and charm. Pioneer incidents are told with the warmth that comes of long saturated experience. The Indian scenes are more somber, as befits the race, but related in mellow tones that make the almost forgotten aboriginal live. They embody rare facts of value to the historian and ethnologist. Over all broods the background of river and fir.In this setting Thomas Nelson Strong was born. . . . Scarcely does the author allude to this boy, and never by direct reference. But into the boy's make-up, and the man's, there entered indelibly both the transmitted strain of a standard culture and breeding, and the influence of the surrounding forest, native, and frontier. It is this combination that gives the book its abiding quality of vivid sensitiveness and reality.
He had been away from this Indian village as a resident nearly fifty years when he wrote about it from childhood recollections and from "the gatherings of many years of wilderness life with native hunters and exploring parties in the Pacific Northwest." He was born there, to be a playmate of Indian children, on March 17, 1853, the son of Judge William Strong, associate justice of the supreme court of Oregon Territory. In 1861, at the age of eight, he removed with his family to Portland, where, with an interval of law study in the East, he lived the rest of his life. He attended the public schools of Portland, studied law in his father's office and in Albany, New York, and in 1872 formed a law partnership with his father and older brother, Fred. His rise in his profession was rapid, and he became one of the most prominent attorneys of his time in Portland.
He was a member of the Annette Island Company organized for Father Duncan of Metlakahtla, "the Apostle of Alaska". Another of his clients was Mrs. Xarifa Jane Failing, whom he represented for 40 years and who in her second will of 1915 bequeathed him an estate of $600,000. He was attacked with palsy in 1911 and was subsequently in failing health. It was his illness after his long service to her that prompted Mrs. Failing to will a fortune to him, much of which he might have kept in the litigation that followed but which he lost through his own highly honorable conduct. In 1878, at the age of 25, he was married in Portland to Mary Stone, who was four years younger and who had been
born on a farm in Yamhill County. They had five children, three daughters and two sons. She died in 1923 and he died in Portland on April IS, 1927, at the age of 74. He was buried in the Riverview Cemetery. A few pages from Cathlamet on the Columbia have been printed in the chapter "Squaw Wives and Squaw Men". Here will be added, instead of another selection from that book, a portion of a delightful essay that appeared in the Oregonian for November 1 1, 1900, on the recreations of pioneer boys in Portland. Pioneer Pastimes Portland, in 1859, '61 and '62, was becoming a city. . . . Fishing and hunting were the principal amusements of the most active boys of the day. ... I do not thing that there is a boy who was then in Portland of fishing age who did not fish the stream at one time or another. In the woods, which then extended from Seventh or Eighth Streets to the hills, we hunted squirrels and even grouse and pheasants with bows and arrows, and in the little streams we built dams and float- ed miniature navies. . . . The incidents of one trip represent fairly the incidents of all, and in one of the earliest I remember the party started from the White place with a heavy wagon, two horses and a motley array of riding ponies. There was only one man in the party, and he knew nothing of hunting. The boys were six or eight in number, and could not have averaged more than from 12 to 15 years old. Striking off to the southwest from Oregon City, we sampled every orchard and were hospitably received at every farmhouse on the way, passed beyond the settlements and came to Wilhoit Springs, then in their natural condition, where we camped. Hearing of a deer lick farther on, six of us decided to watch by it during the night. After a hard tramp over a blind trail, we came at dark to a spring in the woods which was evidently much used by game. Deer trails were worn to it in every direction through the salal brush.
Selecting a spot about 100 yards away, where we could see over the salal, we awaited developments. Developments ar- rived. Of course we had no fire, and with night came a dark- ness so dark that we could not see each other. We could hear the deer walking down the trails and splashing in the pools, but to aim was impossible. Just what time in the night it was, none of the frightened boys could ever say, but suddenly the cry of a hunting cougar sounded so clear and loud that it seemed right in the party. No one who hears that cry in the woods ever forgets it. Even old hunters do not like the devil- ish wildcat scream that has in it a note as of a woman or child in extremity. The cougar hunting down to the Spring had suddenly blundered upon our party, and unmindful of the deer, which, we could hear scattering in every direction, was intent upon looking the humans up, and, half eager and half afraid, was almost on us. One of the boys insists to this day that he saved my life by hauling me out from under the paws of the big cat, but all I know is that in an instant a frightened lot of boys were clustered together in the dark- ness, so scared that every one of them wanted to go home to his ma, and wanted to go home quick. All night the brute kept up a stealthy walk around us, oc- casionally coming close in, when we would frighten him away by firing at him. Just before dawn he decamped, and with the daylight came courage. Whatever astronomers and other wise men may say, that night in Oregon was 50 hours long. The next day, after abandoning the wagon and packing the horses, the party went over a rough trail into the moun- tains to Table and Panther Rock. Here, by a beaver dam in a small prairie, we made our camp and organized a big hunt, to be conducted strictly by daylight. It was a roue;h country, covered with heavy fir timber and a great deal of under- brush, but with occasional little onen prairies of a few acres each. They posted Charlie J. and myself at a point in the woods a mile or two from camp, where a sharp ravine opened the only path down a precipitous rock wall, and gave us care-
ful instructions what to do if elk should go down or up this trail. We, being the little fellows of the party, were thus happily disposed of. That day was a long one, too, for we were bound to wait for the other hunters to come back, and the woods grew so fearsome that we were nearly desperate. Noon passed and a little relief was obtained by eating the slice or two of bread brought with us for lunch, but after that the loneliness fell upon us in masses. An Oregon forest . . . could give the Ancient Mariner suggestions on loneliness. The afternoon slowly dragged away, fearful doubts arose as to whether the other boys could find us again and whis- pered consultations were held as to what we should do in that event. I was busy cutting my initials on a tree when Charlie with an odd sound of relief in his voice said that one of the boys was coming. He stepped out a little farther and announced that there were two of them, and then in a shout: "Tom, it's a bear; the biggest bear I ever saw," and bang went his gun. At the sound of bear I was on my feet, gun in hand. Across the ravine, not 20 yards away on a rocky pedestal, upon which he had stepped from out the brush and looking big enough to eat 40 boys, was the most magnificent specimen of a black bear I have ever seen, and I have seen many. At the crack of the old Yager rifle he fell, struggling fearfully. The excitement was intense. Charlie wanted my gun, but I needed it, and so he started to reload his own, pouring the powder out of his powder-horn loosely into his hands. All my read- ing had led me to expect a charge, for that is what wounded animals do in books. So I stood trying to steady myself for the moment when the big beast should come charging in and everything would depend on one shot. The suspense lasted only a few seconds, for the wounded brute, scattering gravel and dust in every direction, caught the ground with his pow- erful claws, and with a rush went off at right angles directly over the face of the cliff, 100 feet to the rocks below. Charlie and I crept to the top of the rocky wall and listened. We could hear the bear groaning below and promptly decided that it would be indelicate to intrude upon his last struggles. And great glory was ours, and we were the babes in the wood no longer, for when the other boys came back they found a badly smashed bear and two boys who did not know what fear was. That night Charlie preferred not to shoot off his own gun and we fired it with a string from behind a tree and so proved his wisdom, for it went off like a cannon, and would certainly have kicked him into the next township.
3
George A. Waggoner of Corvallis and Lebanon
George Andrew Waggoner arrived at The Dalles on his tenth birthday. With his parents and two brothers and two sisters, he had come to Oregon by ox team from Iowa, arriving on October 8, 1852. At Powder River his mother had died of cholera, and by the time they had reached the Grand Ronde Valley and camped on the present site of La Grande, their food gave out. The motherless family consisted of his two sisters, Francis, 18, and Emily, 5; his two brothers, Thomas, 14, and Byrd, 7; his father and himself. Provisions arrived from Portland and were distributed among the destitute families in camp, but their troubles were still not ended. They managed to drive their emaciated oxen, at the rate of a few miles a day, across the Blue Mountains, but on the Umatilla River one of them "gave entirely out and could go no further". Of the rest of the trip, he has told as follows:
We left our wagon on the Umatilla, not far from the present town of Pendleton. We packed our bedding on Old Nig, the last ox left us, and started on afoot. Poor old Nig. He was a wonderful ox. He was coal black. My father sold him at The Dalles for $20 to buy food.
We stopped two weeks at The Dalles. Father found an old stove and rigged up a table out of some old endgates and sideboards of an abandoned wagon and ran a lunch counter for the soldiers and civilians who were building the military post there. My eldest sister made pumpkin pies, which she sold for two bits each as fast as she could cook them. With the pie counter money father bought a couple of canoes and we started for Portland. At Portland the citizens gave us food and shelter without charge and treated us kindly.
Leaving the two girls in Portland with Colonel Chapman, who kindly provided a home for them in his household, the three boys of 7, 10 and 14, with their father, made their way on foot through the Willamette Valley to a donation claim which they located "on the foothills above Brownsville." The next spring their older sister Frances joined them, but little Emily had died at Colonel Chapman's house.
In the spring of 1861, at the age of 19, he left for the Idaho Mines, stopping by the country schoolhouse near Brownsville to say goodby to the teacher who was beginning to creep into his "plans for the future in the queerest way".
She was seated on a low railing of a little bridge near the school house, for I had promised to say good-bye. We walked on together on my road for half a mile, when she declared she must return. I took her hand and promised to come back to her in the fall, and she promised—well, no matter.
I mounted my horse and rode on. Looking back, I saw her still standing in the road, and playfully told her to run back to school. "No," she said, "I am going to stand here until I can see you no more, for when you go out of sight over the next hill, I shall never see you again."
. . . Ten years from that time I again rode over the top of that hill. A mist hid the spot where she had stood to watch me go, but I knew where to seek her, and as I stood where for eight years the grass had grown and the flowers had blossomed upon her grave, I thought of her last words to me, and of her short journey and my long wandering.
For fourteen years after he left behind that prophetic girl, he freighted to Florence, Elk City, Oro Fino, Bannock and other towns and camps in the Idaho gold region. And when he rode back and stopped in tender retrospection at her grave, he had been married for several years to Ellen Scott of Walla Walla. It was during his residence at Walla Walla that T. T. Geer's story of the "Pieplant Pie" occurred, as given a few pages farther along in this book and in which Waggoner figured as one of the "Walla Walla hog buyers" with the voracious appetites.
After returning from his adventures, his mining and his freighting, he made his home for several years at Corvallis, and in 1880 and in 1887 was sent from Benton County as a representative to the state legislature He was a member of the first Oregon Railroad Commission, created in 1887. He also served two terms on the city council of Corvallis. In 1883, three years after the death of his first wife, he was married to Wilhelmina Robertson of Albany. He had four children by his first marriage and three by his second. He spent the later years of his life at Lebanon, where he died on October 7, 1916, one day before his 74th birthday. He was buried in the Keeney Cemetery, six miles south of Brownsville, in the burying ground of the community to which he had come afoot from Portland 64 years before. He was a frequent contributor to the Oregon Native Son during its short period of publication and was well known among the members of the Oregon Pioneer Association. His book, Stories of Old Oregon, was printed by the Statesman Publishing Company, Salem, in 1905. It is a book of 293 pages, with the following chapters:
1. STORIES OF OLD OREGON. 2. A TEST OF COURAGE. 9. A LEGEND OF WALLOWA LAKE. 10. NED LEACH'S STORY. 11. JACK HART'S ENCOUNTER WITH ROAD AGENTS. 12. WAS IT LUCK OR PROVIDENCE. 13. BUCKSKIN'S FIGHT WITH THE WOLVES. 14. A CHANCE MEETING OF OLD FRIENDS. 15. DANDY JAM. Stories of Old Oregon has for several years been out of print and can now be secured only at second-hand book- stores, usually at a price three or four times as great as it sold for originally. George A. Waggoner's granddaughter, Elea- 3-| 4- 5- 6. ADVENTURES IN THE MINES.
HOW CAPTAIN DOBBINS WAS PROMOTE D.
nor Allen, is a well-known Oregon poet, who is considered elsewhere in this book. "Buckskin's Fight with the Wolves" is one of the best boy's stories of Oregon ever written. Buckskin's Fight with the Wolves Condensed from Stories of Old Oregon, 1905 What was known thirty years ago as Central Ferry was some eighteen or twenty miles above Farewell bend on Snake river. . . . When the travel ceased for the winter of 1863, Mart and Guy remained to take care of the ferry. Mart was a well-preserved bachelor of 35 or 40 years, and Guy was a handsome boy of 16. . . . As the winter holidays approached, there came a heavy fall of snow, covering the ground to the depth of two feet or more. . . . The only domestic animal near them was an old packhorse which had been turned out early in the fall by some packers. . . . He was on the opposite side of the river from the house and frequently came down to the ferry landing, looking for company. . . . Buckskin, ... he was called, in compliment to his rich tan color. After the snow fell . . . with a glass ... he was seen . . about two miles distant . . . standing up to his knees in the snow, digging away industriously for his dinner. With one forefoot he would make about fifteen or twenty strokes, making the snow fly in every direction, then he would rest that foot by using the other one. In this way he reached the grass and satisfied his hunger. . . . One day, as Guy was standing in the yard with the glass in his hand, he cried: "O, Uncle Mart! Come here quick! There's a lot of wolves fighting old Buckskin. Look! Look! A great band of them." "How can I see him without the glass?" said Mart. "Here! Here! Quick! They are trying to pull him down. » "Don't be uneasy," said Mart, as he adjusted the glass to his eye and leveled it on the distant pony, "the wolves are getting the worst of it so far. Old Buckskin is a warrior. He is knocking and kicking them right and left. I believe he will whip them all . . . He can outrun the wolves in the deep snow. It only comes to his knees, while it is side deep to them. . . . He is coming down hill. Now, look! Look!..."
"How do you expect me to look at him two miles off while you have the glass," said Guy.
"That's so. Here it is. . . . Take it. See how he is doing on the flat."
"Bounding like an antelope," said Guy. "The wolves are away behind. ..."
Buckskin made straight for the ferry. . . . the wolves . . . arrived a few moments later.
The beleaguered horse neighed loudly to the ferrymen, who now realized they were powerless to help him in this, his hour of sorest need. The river was frozen over, except a channel of about 100 feet in the center. The skiff had accidentally become loosened from the bank and floated off some time before the freeze came, and the ferryboat was frozen fast in the bank. The river was too wide for the range of a rifle at this place. Buckskin might have brought his enemies within range by coming out on the ice near the channel, but he was afraid to do this, probably knowing if he should fall, he would be at their mercy. It looked as if, however much sympathy was felt for him, he would have to fight the unequal battle alone. Neighing frequently for help, he selected his position near the bank of the river and waited the attack. It was sharp and furious. The wolves were hungry and determined to waste as little time in combat as Possible. Two sprang at his throat, and two tried to reach his haunches. Neither was successful. With his ears laid flat on his neck, his eyes flashing, and with his teeth bared and gleaming white as snow, he struck down those in front; and before the two behind could fasten on him, they were sent, by two well-directed licks rolling in the snow. So completely were they cowed they did not dare to attack again, but after
maneuvering some time for advantage, without success, sneaked away. . . . The horse . . . remained unmolested for several days, when he was again seen making for the ferry with another pack of wolves at his heels. This time there were no less than a dozen, and it looked as if Buckskin's last moments were approaching very fast. Mart ran out on the ice and fired at the wolves when they had surrounded their victim on the bank, but the distance was too great for him to hit them. The report of the gun, however, frightened them so they did not attack, but sneaked around until it was dark, when the noise of snort- ing and snapping of teeth told Buck's friends that the battle was on again. It raged with more or less fury through the night. It was impossible for our bachelors to go to rest while the old horse was so bravely fighting for his life. A fire was built on the bank and guns were fired at short intervals until morning. When' it came, old Buck was still defiant, yet his tireless enemies still beset him. "What shall we do?" said Guy. "It is awful to stay here and not aid the poor old fellow when he neighs to us so piteously. . . . Can't we cut a channel through the ice for the ferryboat?" "That would be impossible. The ice has drifted and lodged about it many inches thick," answered his uncle. "Then let us make a raft." "I have been thinking about that," said Mart, "but we have nothing with which to make it. Our whole house, if taken down and made into a raft, would scarcely float us and we would freeze to death in this weather before we could build it again." "I'll tell you what," said Guy, "there are two large bar- rels in the house. They would float one of us." "Yes, but one of them is full of old rye whisky, which cost $4 a gallon, and there is nothing in which to empty it," said Mart.
"Let us pour it out," begged Guy. "We can put some of it in the water bucket and camp kettle, and then pour it back when we are done."
"I am afraid your father would not approve of that," answered Mart.
"If he was here he would. I know him too well to think he would ever let a horse die like that. None of us like whisky. What does he want with it?"
"It belongs to the man at Payette station, and it is here because he has not yet come for it," answered Mart. "He will be after it when the snow melts a little, and would not like it if we threw it out."
Guy had again taken the glass, and was looking intently at the battle. He could plainly see that the old horse was being worried and starved to death. Blood showed on several parts of his body, where the wolves had torn him with their sharp teeth. All at once a large one darted from the pack, and, missing the horse's throat, fastened on his shoulder. Buckskin seized the wolf in his teeth, and, tearing him loose, pressed him to the ground and struck him again and again furious blows with his forefeet until he lay apparently lifeless. The rest attempted to close in, but the courageous horse showed such a determined and hostile front that they paused, afraid to invoke the fate of their comrade.
Guy could endure it no longer. He turned to his uncle, with his face streaming with tears. "I can't stand it any longer, uncle. You and father promised me $50 a month to help run the ferry. You owe me $150. I will pay for that whisky, and you can take it out of my wages, and I want that barrel. I am going over the river to help old Buck."
Mart . . . threw both arms around the boy and blurted out: "That's just like you, Guy.... I am with you. . . . Now run and rip off those two planks fastened to the stanchions of the ferryboat while I get the barrels."
In a very few moments the two large barrels were rolled down on the ice. . . . Mart said: "Now bring both rifles, our 
Mart had managed to save most of the whisky in emptying the barrel. The cooking vessels were all filled, including the frying pan and coffee pot; and last, but by no means least, a pair of Mart's huge boots did good service in holding a couple of gallons of the fiery liquid.
When all was ready, they pushed the raft ahead of them on the ice until they came to the channel. . . . The barrels were tightly corked, and proved quite buoyant enough to bear the two men. . . .
The wolves paid but little attention to them. They had renewed the fight with greater vigor than ever and were pressing old Buckskin closer and closer. ... In his battles he had developed a kind of science of fighting. He kept near the bank, never allowing his foes to get behind him. . . . Both guns rang out with one report, and two of old Buck's foes fell. Then with pistols the battle was opened in earnest. Crack! Crack! Crack! The wolves scampered off, leaving four of their number dead on the field. . . .
Buckskin was nearly as much surprised at his deliverance as were the wolves at their defeat. . . .
They led him out on the ice, but he, who had fought so bravely, was reluctant to try a bath in the cold waters of the swift river. He was coaxed and pushed into the channel, led across behind the raft, and pulled out on the ice, on the other shore. The next morning his two friends helped him to break a trail through the snow to the hills, where the wind had blown the grass bare, and left him with plenty of food at his feet. Soon after the snow disappeared and spring invited the wolves back to their native haunts in the mountains. When the flowers came again Buckskin was fat and sleek, coming every few days to the ferry to see his friends, and to look for company of his own kind. He was quite a handsome pony, but through his shining, glossy coat could be seen the scars of his many wounds, mute witness of the terrible conflict through which he passed.
4
T. T. Geer of Grand Ronde Valley and the Waldo Hills
T. T. Geer became the tenth governor of Oregon. The ability to write was the chief handmaiden of his career; it was his main solace during 20 years of toil on a farm in the Waldo Hills; he composed articles, as Burns did poems, while he plowed in the fields; good at phrases, like Wilson, he coined one in a letter, "I dislike very much to be considered a 'miscellaneous candidate'," which did him much political service; and at the age of 60 he sat down with his pen in retrospect of an interesting and useful life and spent five months writing 536 printed pages of one of the most fascinating books of reminiscence we have in Oregon.
His full name was Theodore Thurston Geer. The two given names were alliterative but not beautiful and, with a feeling for the effect of words, he shortened them to T. T.
He was born on March 12, 1851, on a farm in the Waldo Hills, near Silverton, to which his parents soon removed, and from there, when he was ten, to Salem. The Willamette Woolen Mills in North Salem struck his boyish fancy and he became ambitious to work there, but his parents banished that idea in a hurry. Soon he turned his attention to Nicklin's Sawmill, and to be head sawyer seemed to him the grandest thing in the world. These industrial aspirations, instead of homesickness for the serenity of Silverton he had left, were characteristic all through his life of an eager response to new experiences.
When he was eleven, his father left for the mines of British Columbia, Eastern Oregon and Idaho, and his mother took his brother and sister and went to California, never to return. It was 18 months before he saw his father, and he did not see his mother again for 23 years, although he kept up a regular correspondence with her.
For a while he went to the Central School in Salem, but most of the little boys felt that there was more prestige in attending Willamette University. He was importunate in presenting the superior advantages of going there, and it was finally arranged, just before he became homeless. "By dent of much maneuvering I managed to remain in school until the spring of 1865, eighteen months, when I was compelled to abandon further efforts in that direction and go to work for a living—at fourteen years of age."
He was employed for year by a cousin in the Waldo Hills, his wages being his clothes and his keep. He hired out to another cousin for four months for a horse. He then left for the Grand Ronde Valley to join his father, who had married again and was going into the nursery business. The 15-year-old boy took with him "an enormous trunk full of fruit seeds and roots."
He lived in the Grand Ronde Valley for ten and a half years, from Christmas, 1866, to May, 1877. Two years after his arrival, at the age of 17, he wrote his first article—anonymously, secretly and in a sudden desire for literary expression that had no premonitions. At La Grande had been started, in the spring of 1868, the Blue Mountain Times, the first newspaper in Eastern Oregon. Young T. T. Geer, already an ardent Republican, was disappointed that it did not pitch into the Democrats enough. To supply the need and show up the opposition with force and logic was the motivation of his first literary venture, carried out, as has been indicated, with great secretiveness. His father and stepmother were to be gone on a visit for the entire day. Let him tell the rest of the story:
While they were getting ready for the trip it suddenly occurred to me that, since I was to be alone several hours, I would employ the time in writing my communication.... As soon as I was left alone, therefore, securing the family pen and pad of paper, I sat down and began the work. It proved very agreeable.... Having completed my broadside, I read it over, pronounced it good and put it away, for not for the world would I have had my father know what I had done. I didn't know what degree of excellence was required in a newspaper communication and, therefore, had some misgivings as to its acceptance. I read it over several times and with each succeeding perusal it seemed to lose some of its biting sarcasm....
Early on Monday morning, after writing my communication, I went down to the residence of Mr. Cowles and deposited it in the receiving box, while nobody was looking, and hied myself away. The ensuing week was a very trying one for me. I was in constant torture lest my letter should not be printed, and at the same time suffering distressing pangs lest it should.
... on Saturday ... I took my place in the outer circle of the crowd, and when Mr. Cowles took up the package containing the Times I leaned against a window-sill and prepared myself for the worst—still undecided whether I wished the letter printed or not. ... a man standing near me ... placed the paper in my hands and I at once hurried out of the house.
Having escaped, I did not know which way to go... .Finally, I went behind the schoolhouse and with trembling hands opened the paper—and there was my letter, graphically portending the fall of the Democratic party!
I didn't stop to read it. My first consideration was to get away....
So I hurried up the hill toward home, but after I had reached a place of probable safety I could no longer repress my longing to see how my production looked and to know what it sounded like. I therefore seated myself in a corner of old man Martin's fence and read the letter through. This relieved me somewhat, and I proceeded on my way until I fell the victim of an overweening desire to read it again, when I sat on a rock by Sam Colwell's fence and gave it a second perusal! This satisfied me until I reached home, when I handed the paper over to my father. He at once saw the communication from the Cove, read it, pronounced it a good thing, and wondered "who in Sam Patch wrote it." He had me read it aloud, asking my opinion as to who its author could be. We suggested several wellknown men as the guilty parties, but finally gave it up as a riddle too difficult for us to solve.
This, my first effort in the field of newspaper writing, which accupied the leading place on the editorial page of the Blue Mountain Times, issued May 2, 1869, was a full column and was signed "RAM PANT," printed in capital letters....
Having broken the ice successfully, I continued to send letters to the Times for several months without being suspected of their authorship, which, by the way, occasioned much speculation even among the Republicans. . . . Having gained the necessary confidence to push forward, I soared into the realms of poetry, made incursions into the Bible, quoted from Shakespeare and did all sorts of foolish things, enjoying the experience immensely.... In some way it was discovered that the "RAM PANT" letters were written by me—a seventeen-year-old boy with flaxen hair, of whom such a thing was never suspected.
At the age of 19 he married his stepmother's sister—Mrs. Nancy Batte, a widow with a little girl. When they left the Grand Ronde Valley in May, 1877, to return to the Waldo Hills, they had two girls and a boy, in addition to his step-daughter. With such responsibilities at the age of 26, and with only his two hands to meet them, it looked like even his eager and imaginative spirit could not long be harborage for dreams.
He took possession of a farm of 320 acres in the Waldo Hills and for the next 20 years he was engaged "solely in the endless work" of improving it and making a living from it. The only rest he had was the four terms of 40 days each as a member of the legislature, and the time spent in making public speeches.
More than by these brief periods of recess, however, he had a means of escape from the drudgery of his life, something to keep his mind from settling into emptiness as he followed the furrows, something to keep his outlook from being narrower than the encircling hills. That habit he had started so impulsively during a boyhood day alone in the farmhouse in Union County, had now become his daily comfort, his refreshment and his recreation. Twenty times harvest followed planting, he went from 26 to 56, but dullness was warded off, zest was retained, and a man of unblunted sensitiveness went from the house to the barn and from the barn to the field in unceasing routine, because he had formed the regular practice of setting down his thoughts and feelings on paper. After all, the delightful style of Fifty Years in Oregon did not come to him from an unconscious source at the age of 60. Its grace was perfected in a substantial way during a score of years by an over-worked farmer, whose toil it paradoxically increased but lightened. The explanation is in the following paragraphs:
Early in life I found myself possessed of a liking for newspaper writing.... I rather cultivated the tendency during my farm life. Indeed, I found it the only diversion from really hard work, and without some mental rest or occupation to vary the daily grind of farm labor, the life one leads there is not so different from that of the horses one drives every day and for whose physical necessities he provides. The man whose occupation requires all his daylight hours and whose duties call for the constant bending of the back, the crooking of the elbows and straining of the arms, really leads a life which differs so little outwardly from that of the work-mule that the distinction is hardly worth considering....
So, as I have intimated, I found some relaxation after the daily routine ... in spending my evenings writing for the newspapers. Often, while plowing, I have thought of the substance of an article for publication and, having constructed and reconstructed a sentence until I was satisfied with its arrangement, have stopped the team and, sitting on the plow beam, jotted it down on a paper which I carried with me for that purpose. This process would be repeated many times, then late some evening, while the family slept, would devote two or three hours to the actual writing of the letter.
He served as governor of Oregon from 1899 to 1903, being elected by a large majority. His first wife had been an invalid for ten years, and in 1898, the year of his nomination, she died. In 1900, while he was governor, he was married to Isabelle Trullinger of Astoria.
After his term of governor, his ability to write, which had been so important a factor in his political elevation, provided him with a profession. In 1903 he became editor of the Salem Statesman and in 1905 he purchased the Pendleton Tribune. Three years later he moved to Portland, spending much of his later life developing his real estate properties. At the time of his death, on February 21,1924, at the age of 73, he was bailiff of the Multnomah County jury.
From March 12 to August 8, 1911, a period of five months, he wrote Fifty Years in Oregon, a book of approximately 200,000 words, including the quoted matter. In a sub-title he called it "Experiences, Observations, and Commentaries upon Men, Measures, and Customs in Pioneer Days and Later Times." It was published in 1912 by The Neale Publishing Company, New York. It has humor and wisdom and a fresh and original style that have given it a high place among Oregon autobiographies. Through it too there runs a strain of sadness, peculiarly characteristic of books of Oregon reminiscence, as though a deep experience of the country still touches the whites with melancholy as it did the Indians. The following poignant little story is an example. It should be remembered that the father who left his voracious guests to comfort his little daughters was himself only 25:
The "Pieplant" Pie
From Fifty Years in Oregon, 1912
The man, George Waggoner, who "usurped" my place on the first Oregon Railroad Commission, was a member of the session of the Legislature in 1880, where we became good friends, a relation which has been maintained to date. But I knew him first while I lived in Union County when he was a resident of Walla Walla. One day in the early spring of 1876 my wife had made a "pieplant" pie, and it was a great delicacy, being the first fruit of the year, and all kinds of fruit being very scarce in that country in those days, my two little tow-headed girls, Maud and Dosia, aged respectively five and three years, could hardly wait until the noon hour for the pleasure of tasting it. In fact, they had been watching the growth of those few stalks of rhubarb for two weeks, and each day came in reporting that they were sure they were large enough to pull.
So this day the little things stood by the table as their mother stewed the fruit and made it into a pie. They watched it as it was placed in the oven, and as it came out, full of juice. We were about to seat ourselves around the table when there was a shout at the front gate. Upon investigation it proved to be two Walla Walla hog buyers who were anxious, they said, to get their dinners. It is never customary in the country to refuse a man his dinner, so they were invited in and after seeing that their horses were fed we began the meal.
This unexpected intrusion made it necessary for the two little girls to wait, and as they stood in the partition door between the kitchen and sitting-room, leaning against the "jamb," they presented about as doleful a pair of countenances as one would run across in an average lifetime. I am perfectly honest when I say that I felt so sorry for them in their disappointment that I did not enjoy either the meal or the visitors. They—the visitors—had voracious appetites, it being my opinion then, I remember, that they must have been fasting since leaving Walla Walla three days before, and were just "coming to".
When it came time to "pass the pie" my wife cut it in six pieces, remembering the little girls. The visitors were fairly ecstatic in their praise of the pie. It had been years since they had had the pleasure of eating a pieplant pie; they had always been wonderfully partial to that kind of pie anyway; they wondered why farmers did not raise more rhubarb, since they understood it was easily grown. And, then, my wife was certainly an expert at making pies, for they had not found anything quite so good in all their travels. By this time their consignments were gone and, with knives firmly gripped in their right hands and forks in their left, they looked at those two remaining pieces with a yearning that was fierce to behold. I was certain that if I didn't invite them to have another helping they would rake the remnants in anyway, so I asked them to have another piece. I passed the plate, and unhesitatingly, without a tremor, without batting an eye, the gallant Walla Wallaians accepted the invitation,—the remainder of that pie went glimmering and the plate was empty!
At this phase of the catastrophe I looked at the children, and they rushed out of the house, screaming with all their might, and down into the raspberry "patch." There I found them, as soon as I could excuse myself, crying as if their hearts would break and, like Rachel of old, they refused to be comforted. Upon my return I told the guests one of the little girls had been stung by a yellow jacket, though that insect was not due for yet four months. And yet they had really been "stung!"
One of these men of abnormal appetite, was George Waggoner and the other was Obadiah Osborne, a preacher in the United Brethren Church. They were, of course, entirely unconscious of the part they had played in the tragedy of the pie. In January, 1891, when I was Speaker of the House of Representatives, my daughters, then eighteen and twenty years respectively, visited me for a few days in Salem. Happening to meet Waggoner in the corridors of the State House, I informed the girls, after an introduction, that he was the man whom they had never forgotten, recalling to his mind at the same time the two little girls who had so suddenly fled from the kitchen on that day 'way back in 1876, trying to escape from a yellow jacket, in April.
The instance was related in the presence of a dozen House members and it was unanimously agreed among them afterwards that it was the only time in their acquaintance with Waggoner that he was plainly embarrassed. He apologized profusely to the girls, urging a furious appetite in extenuaation, but seemed wholly unable to think of a way of making restitution that would be in any sense adequate.
5
Homer Davenport of Silverton
A man, more than a woman, is subjectively and retrospectively gripped by a childhood environment, and at odd times through life he keeps looking back at it wistfully from whatever change may be his of geography or of status. A man bears the coming of old age more complacently than a woman, but a boyhood seems somehow more difficult to leave behind in forgotten severance than a girlhood. This characteristic existed in unique emphasis and magnitude in Homer Davenport, so that he is a pronounced example of a regional product. All the time that he worked in a great city as a famous man he was nostalgic for Silverton. When he was back in Oregon to exhibit his Arabian horses at the Lewis and Clark Exposition he was known as the world's greatest cartoonist, but he drew a picture on the west porch of the old Geer house in the Waldo Hills—a picture that is still there of a tall young man kneeling in grief, with these words above it:
I want to say that from this old porch I see my favorite view of all that the earth affords. It was the favorite of my dear Mother and of my Father, and why shouldn't it be the same to me? It's where my happiest hours have been spent.
He was born on March 8, 1867, on a farm four miles south of Silverton. His mother died when he was three and a half years old. He tells with humorous exaggeration of the tearful session on the part of his two grandmothers when he first told them that he was going to move into town, where his father was to run a general merchandise store. This municipality, which seemed so glamorous to him in prospect and which still looked so glamorous in retrospect, had a population of about 300. He opened the store in the mornings while his father was having breakfast, waited on customers to some extent, and played the snare drum in the Silverton band. Mostly, however, he drew pictures. He has been described as a boy by one of his aunts:
He was long, lank, ungainly and awkward. He wouldn't study, you couldn't make him work, and he handled the truth very recklessly. The one thing he could do was draw. Our barn doors and the fly leaves of books in our library were covered with drawings of horses, bulldogs, chickens and game roosters.
His wise father was not at all arbitrary about the work and let him draw. He attended a business college in Portland for a while, but wasted his time with drawing instead of learning bookkeeping and penmanship. Next, when efforts were changed from dislodging this dominant occupation to giving it discipline and training, he came back to Silverton from an art school in California, "because he was compelled to draw by scribe and rule." The hard-working people of Silverton began to feel sorry for his father, and the well-dressed drummers told him "that in Paris most everybody drew pictures, and that some day they'd take me." He finally got a temporary job with the Portland Mercury, which gave him the assignment of going to New Orleans to draw pictures of a prize fight. Then he secured a position on the art staff of the Oregonian, but he didn't last long. Again he came back to Silverton, and neighborly commiseration was increased for his father, who continued to be his "champion against all comers who believed that I should have done manual labor, while he was satisfied if I would only draw pictures." He raised chickens, did odd jobs and kept on drawing pictures. In 1892, when his next chance came, the people of Silverton said goodby to the accompaniment of good advice, one old woman telling him as she shook hands:
Homer, if you fail this time, come home and give up this here making pictures, and help your father work, as he's getting pretty old!
He did not fail. In 1895, after three years on the San Francisco Examiner, he was taken by Hearst to New York, where he became famous.
He was mostly a cartoonist in the eyes of the world, but he was also a lecturer, a writer, a raiser of pheasants and a breeder of Arabian horses. In the fall of 1893 he married Daisy Moore of San Francisco. They had two children.
The Silverton people who felt sorry for his father, changed their moods when echoes of his great fame came back to them and when they heard of the big salary he was getting. His life had been magnificently justified in their eyes-but not in his own. Acknowledging so fully the influence of his native community on all that he was or became, he conspicuously confirms the observations made at various times in this book that complete gaiety and lightheartedness are not traits of Oregon character as revealed in biography, history and literature. He made people laugh with his merry lectures on Silverton, he gladdened hundreds of thousands with his cartoons, and part of the fresh charm of his written style is his humor, but there are also the somberness and melancholy, as a pervading note or in clutching brevity, that seem inseparable from a deep sensitivity to Oregon. His life, for all its outward success, was inwardly unsatisfying and unhappy, as has been well described by Sterling Green in an article published in the Oregon Journal on March 31, 1935:
His later years were mostly bitter ones. He had made much money and lost it, but what really stung was a feeling of inferiority, of having missed his opportunities to do real service with his gift, of having prostituted his talents. Without reckoning the pleasure he had brought to millions, he castigated himself for ignorance and social clumsiness. To William B. Wells, a Portland writer who understood him as well as anyone, he once complained he was always being mistaken for the groom or the coachman. Death was hastened by domestic unhappiness. His wife sued for divorce and took their children. In 1911 his father died. A year later Homer Davenport was dead at 45.
He died in New York but was brought back to Silverton for burial. In 1925 money was raised by popular subscription to erect a monument over his grave.
In 1920 Guy Stonestreet of New York issued a priced catalogue of 1539 of his drawings, which he offered for sale at prices of $3, $5 and $10, most of them at $3, and regarding which he made the following statement:
The cartoons herein described are all original pen and ink drawings by Mr. Davenport of which only one copy was made and for which he received from $50 to $100 each. They were reproduced in the Mail & Express and New York Journal. Two specimens, one of which was entitled "He's Good Enough for Me," and the Dewey drawing entitled "Lest We Forget," have been sold for $250 and $350 each. I have purchased the entire collection from his widow and now offer them for sale at prices affixed.
His cartoons, his lectures, his birds and his horses did not fully take care of the urges that were within him, so that he also was the author of one pamphlet and six books: A booklet on pheasants, not in any of the public libraries of Oregon and not listed in the bibliographies, but referred to on December 14, 1900, in the Albany Democrat; Cartoons, 1898; The Bell of Silverton, 1899; Other Stories of Oregon, 1900; The Dollar or the Man, about 1900; My Quest of the Arab Horse, 1909; The Country Boy, 1910.
For several years Robert H. Down, the Portland historian, who also was born in Silverton, has been gathering material for a book-length biography of him.
The Return of the Wild Goose
From The Country Boy, 1910
Although Silverton was situated in a great hunting country and had lots of good shots, I never took much to hunting, perhaps because I was a poor wing shot and deer were too pretty to kill; but I had heard of the great flocks of geese and ducks out on the coast of Nestucca, so I went over to have a great hunt, and the first day I was there I actually found a band of geese big enough so that when I shot into the entire bunch one on the outskirts fell. When this small goose hit the sand, he raised to his feet and ran, me after him, and after quite a run I overtook him and found only one wing broken. I always had wanted to own live wild birds and things, so I saw my chance. I carried him to the cabin carefully and cut up a cigar box lid into splints and set his wing and I was overjoyed to see an expression in his cute little black eyes that he sort o' knew I was trying to cure him instead o' kill him. He got rapidly better and I started for Silverton with him and there astonished our family by the kindly way this Hutchins goose let me doctor his wing. Father helped me doctor him and finally when we took the splints off his wing, his affection showed more than ever, and to tell the truth he and I grew to be the nearest and dearest friends possible, not being of the same species. He used to follow me all over the place, and once when I was sitting down by him in the barnyard he brought me some straws, evidently wanting me to build a nest. He was a great talker and an alarmist; he would come to me after I had been away downtown and try his best to tell me what had been going on in the barnyard while I had been away.
In fact, he was my real chum. When I came into the barnyard mornings when the frost was on the ground, he would greet me all smiles, as much as a goose could smile, then he would step up on one of my boots, which was quite an effort, and hold his other foot up in his feathers to warm it; and if I started to move he would chatter and cackle that peculiar note of the Hutchins geese, as much as to say, "Hold on, don't move, I'll tell you another story." Meanwhile he would warm his other foot.
When I went for a walk in the back pasture, he would walk with me at my side, just as a dog would do. There he spied a slight knoll and he went and stood on it erect, as much as to say, "I'll watch out for hunters while you eat grass in peace and comfort." When I had finished my pretext at eating grass I went and stood on the knoll, and as long as I stood there he fed with perfect confidence that I was watching out for his welfare, but when I walked away he ran to me chattering something good naturedly, perhaps telling me that he had not finished. We really had great times together, but finally spring was approaching and I had noticed how he could fly around the barnyard. Father came to me one day and warned me that if I wanted to keep that goose I had better clip his wings, but he said, "I hope you won't. You say that you love animals; now show it by letting this goose alone; then when his kind come by in a few weeks going north for the breeding season, he will join them and be happier than he is here."
I replied that "of course an outsider might think he would leave, but in reality he would not. The goose and I have talked it over and he don't care for anything better than I am, so he ain't goin' away."
"Well," said father, "when I see you two together I think as much, but when you go downtown loitering around with people that aren't half as smart as this goose, it's then that he misses you, and it's on that account that I wish you would leave his wings the way they are now. But because after he is gone you will feel bad and mope around for a few days, I thought I would tell you now that when spring comes he will leave you, notwithstanding the bond of friendship; so if you want him kept here (which I hope you don't) you had better cut the feathers on one wing."
I didn't want to multilate his feathers so I left them on. A few weeks later coming from one of those important trips downtown, they told me at the house that my pet had gone. I said, "I guess not." I didn't want to let on that I was alarmed, but when they were not looking I made some big strides for the barnyard, and it was actually as still as death. I whistled but no sound, save an echo, came in return.
I noticed the leaves hung silent on our trees, though the neighbors' trees were in action. I went back of the barn and called, but the call was wasted on a few old hens that "didn't belong." I tried to ginger up some life into the landscape by throwing a few old potatoes at things, but the brakes were set in general on everything and I went into the house and found all the family sitting in front of an empty fireplace with long faces. No one spoke and the only noise was the clock, which ticked louder than ever. It was about dark when father arose and said it was for the best, that "here in Silverton there were no opportunities for him, in fact no pond for him to swim in even and when you were away downtown, no one that he apparently loved, and if you will think of it a moment, it would have been cruel for you, a lover of animals, to have kept him here all of his life." But there were no answers, just long breaths now and then, until it was time to light a candle. Then the world took on a brighter aspect.
In a few days I recovered with the rest and the long, beautiful spring came. No rain to speak of, and it was fine. I never saw so many picnics and never went with so many pretty girls, and the ball games ran all through the summer and the jolliest threshing crews you ever heard of. Fall came and I was hauling wood into the barnyard one day when I heard wild geese; lots of them had been passing over for a week past, on their way south for the winter, but presently, just over the cone of the barn, came some large bird. I thought at first it was a condor; he lit in the barnyard and I was astonished that it was a wild goose. Our rooster hit him and he rose and circled and again lit twenty feet from me. I yelled for the neighbor who kept guns and one ran over, resting his gun on the fence and shot him, while I held fast to the team. It was great to think of killing game right in your own barnyard. I ran to pick him up, when father who was in the orchard yelled at me not to touch him. I said, "We have killed a goose in the barnyard, a wild goose." "No," said he, "don't handle him; I want to feel of your head first to see if you have any bump of memory," Father said, "Do you see that band of geese flying in a circle next to the hill? You used to tell me you could understand this little goose's language and could talk some of it. If you remember any of it now, go out there as near as they will let you approach them and tell them they need not wait for their friend; he is never coming back."
By this time I had realized all. I could recognize his every feature, even to the little black, glossy, soft eyes, which were now half open. Father asked if I saw what had happened, and said, "I'll tell you, as I believe you are too dumb to comprehend. Your friend that used to be has brought that band of geese five hundred or a thousand miles out of their beaten course that he might bring them here to show them where a lover of birds and things treated him so well. They likely objected, but! he persuaded and finally they have obeyed, and he left them there at a safe distance and came to see you, and so perhaps renew his love, and there he lies; and if you never commit another murder I hope this one will punish you to your grave. Some murders can be explained to the dead one's relatives, but you can never explain this one and I want to show you his right wing. I think it was in that one that we used to treat."
I didn't want to see his wing, but father was determined, and as he lifted the feathers at the middle joint, we saw a scar, a knot in the bone where it had healed.
Everybody is a criminal more or less, and some of the crimes are done by stupid people. Thus I console myself in a way over the death of the Hutchins goose, that perhaps I am a murderer through stupidity and not by premeditation.