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Elizabeth Markham
In 1847, five years before Edwin Markham's birth, his father, and his mother, Elizabeth Markham, came to Oregon City, where they lived for ten years. In 1857, when the poet was five, they moved to California, taking up sheep and cattle raising in a little valley in the Suisun Hills of Mendocino County. His father died in 1859, but his mother, who seems to have been at all times the better manager of the two, continued to run the ranch, justifying her son's description, "My mother was a Roman matron, a woman of power, one who could have led an army to battle. . . ."
Dr. J. B. Horner referred to her as "a stern mother with a poetic taste." Of the character of her poetry her son has said, "Her verse celebrated all the local affairs, such as the arrival of ships, the deaths of pioneers, the flight of strange birds." She began contributing to the Oregon Spectator in 1848, and, in sober truth, that paper printed much local verse that was better than hers. It is to be feared that if her son had not become a great poet nothing would have been heard in these late times of her poetic efforts. While he was in Oregon in May, 1921, he was given a souvenir pamphlet of his mother's verses collected by J. D. Lee from the early numbers of the Spectator, from 1848 to 1851. There were twelve of them for those three years, so that if she was not the Spectator's best poet she was perhaps its most prolific and steadfast. The pieces bore the following titles: "A Contrast on Matrimony," "Hearts May Warm the Winter," "The Maiden's Dream," "Imaginary Ship Wreck," "The Departure," "My Native Home," "Voice of Intemperance," "The Dream of Ambition," "Woman," "Road to Oregon," "Lines," "Friendship."
Lines
Composed whilst the hot Whitcomb made
her first ascent of the Rapids.
The Lot Whitcomb, plying between Oregon City and Portland, had been hung up on a sand bar for some days. Edwin Markham tells how the editor of the Oregon Spectator, shirt-sleeved and excited, rushed into his mother's store and said: "Mrs. Markham, the Lot Whitcomb is coming—the Spectator is ready to go to press. I want you to write a poem in honor of the Lot Whitcomb getting off the sand bar. I will wait for it. Can you have it done in half an hour?" In this journalistic haste, she wrote the poem, "perched on a stool at the counter in her store.
