PERSONAL REMINISCENCES OF SAMUEL L. SIMPSON
By W. W. FIDLER.[1]
My first meeting with Oregon's sweetest singer, Samuel L. Simpson, was wholly unexpected. I had been in the habit for many years of treasuring up the superior specimens of poetry, with which he so greatly enriched our earlier literature, but had about abandoned the hope of ever making his personal acquaintance, when unlooked-for circumstances brought him to my very door. I was sitting alone in my lonesome cabin, away back in the mountains near the head of Williams Creek, Jackson County, quietly musing, as is the wont of single gentlemen similarly circumstanced, when "there came a sudden rapping at my chamber door," the same as came to Edgar Allen Poe in days of yore. I obeyed the summons with reasonable alacrity, when in walked a young lad I knew as George Huffer, followed by a medium-sized man of some thirty odd years of age, whom he introduced as "Mr. Simpson." "What, not the poet?" said I. On being assured that my implied guess was correct, I toned down my excitement as gracefully as possible, and proceeded to make them welcome. The conversation first turned to practical, matter-of-fact affairs, and not to poetry. Mr. Simpson and his companion were on an expedition to the recently discovered Josephine County caves; they had camped down by the creek and wanted some feed for their pony. Although they already had their blankets spread for a night's{{rule]]
- ↑ Mr. William W. Fidler was born in Indiana in 1842, and a few years later his parents removed to Iowa. In 1849 his father went to the California mines. The next year he came to Oregon and took up a donation claim in Lane county where Coburg now stands. In 1852 he sold out for $600, returned to "The States" and brought his family across the plains in 1853, and settled on the Willamette river at Spores' ferry, where young William served as ferryman for awhile. In 1856 the Fidler family removed to Jackson county. In 1857 Mr. Fidler returned to Eugene to enter Columbia College, of which Rev. E. P. Henderson was the principal. [[Author:Cincinnatus Hiner Miller}}, better known as "Joaquin" Miller, Judge James Finley Watson, and a number of other well known men were students at that early institution. The college building burned down in the winter of 1857–58, and soon afterwards Mr. Fidler returned to Jackson county, remaining until 1870, when he removed to Josephine county and took up a homestead, and at the present time he is a resident of Grants Pass. Since his permanent residence in southern Oregon Mr. Fidler has been engaged in mining, journalism, teaching and fanning. George H. Himes, Assistant Secretary, Oregon Historical Society.
