Famous Single Poems
churches," and one suspects from the internal evidence of his poems that later on Darwin got him. At any rate, he gravitated to a printing office and into newspaper work, and in 1857 started west to seek his fortune, stopping finally at Delhi, Iowa, where he bought a weekly paper, The Delaware County Journal, giving a mortgage to cover most of the purchase price.
He was publishing this paper in 1859, and he continued to publish it during the Civil War, but he failed to make a success of it, and shortly after the war moved to Dubuque, where he worked in some sort of editorial capacity on both the Times and the Herald for twelve or fourteen years. At the end of that time, he managed in some way to secure the patronage of Senator Allison, who got him a long-desired appointment as stenographer to the Committee on Indian Affairs at Washington, and McCreery spent the remainder of his life at Washington in minor governmental positions. He died on September 6, 1906 (at Duluth, Minn., as it happened, after an operation for appendicitis), leaving a wife and two daughters.
He seems to have had a thoroughly unpractical character, and was quite unable to get along in the world or to lift himself out of the groove of governmental routine. Like many such men, he harbored various vague and grandiose schemes for the betterment of mankind, for he says in
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