"Simpson's subjects are always well chosen; they are subjects about which it is possible to write poetry, and every heading of the piece shows the man's conception. It is not Mount Hood, but 'Hood,' without peer, self-contained, unrivaled,
White despot of the wild Cascades!
"We know not if Simpson will ever be the fashion, but his pieces are always welcome at our camp."
And while I am making quotations I am tempted to use one more, to close with, that is as appropriate now as it was fifty years ago, when it was first uttered. Congressman Keitt, of South Carolina, in paying a most eloquent tribute to a deceased Senator, had this to say:
"The children of genius are bound together by household ties and the great of earth make but a single family. From earliest to latest of those who wear the glories of mind, there rolls a river of ancestral blood; it rolls through priest and warrior, through bard and king, through generations and empires and history, with all her wealth. There are kings of action as well as kings of thought, and both are emblazoned in the heraldry of this immortal descent."
And is it not a source of supreme pride to the State of Oregon that it had, at so early a date, a man fit for such emblazonry, and whose "raptured lines" are apt to live so long as her mountains stand, and her rivers seek the sea?
NOTE. Samuel Leonidas Simpson was born in Missouri November 10, 1845, and was the second son of Benjamin and Nancy Cooper Simpson. His father was born in Tennessee on March 29, 1818, of Scotch ancestry. His mother was a granddaughter of Col. Cooper, who was a companion of Daniel Boone in Kentucky. He crossed the plains to Oregon with his parents in 1846. His mother taught him the alphabet when he was four years old by tracing letters in the ashes on the hearthstone of the primitive cabin in Marion county in which the family lived in the early days, and then taught him to read. The first poems he ever read, as he once informed the writer of this note, was a much worn volume of Robert Burns which was given to his mother at Oregon City by Dr. John McLoughlin where the Simpson family spent the first winter. An occasional 'country school three months in the year afforded the only opportunity he had for education until he was fifteen years old. Then he was employed as a clerk in the sutler's store of his father at Fort Yamhill, a military post near the Grand Ronde Indian Reservation. It was here that he became acquainted with Lieut. Philip H. Sheridan (afterwards General), an intimate friend of his father's, and here it was that he received a copy of Byron's poems from Sheridan. When sixteen years old Mr. Simpson entered Willamette University, Salem, and was graduated in the class of 1865. Soon afterwards he became editor of the Oregon Statesman, in which his father had an interest at that time, and continued in that relation until the close of 1866. Meanwhile he studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1867, and began practicing; but clients were few, besides the profession of law was not to his liking, hence he entered the journalistic field, that being more to his taste, and followed that the remainder of his life. He was married to Miss Julia Humphrey, of Portland, in 1868, who bore him two sons. He died in Portland June 14, 1900, and was buried in Lone Fir Cemetery.—George H. Himes, Assistant Secretary, Oregon Historical Society.
