The Pacific Monthly.
Oregon Writers.
By Eva Emery Dye.
Where beautiful scenery abounds, there legends usually cluster. This is true of the Rhine, of the Scottish Highlands, of the Hudson River, and of Oregon. Already every bold peak and smiling glen of the coast and the Columbia has its legend waiting for an artist to give it setting. Like a faint perfume this whole emerald Northwest is redolent of song and story. The earliest comers felt this. Franchere’s charming “Narrative” of the Astor expedition gave Washington Irving his best glimpses of “Astoria.”
The first considerable body of settlers, aside from fur-hunters and missionaries, crossed the plains in 1842. With them came Oregon’s first romancer, Sidney Walter Moss, who wrote “The Prairie Flower,” upon his journey.[ua 1] The manuscript was sent back by a returning immigrant to Emerson Bennett, who gave it to the world under his own name, prefaced by a fanciful story of the mysterious stranger who placed it in his hand. The book created a sensation in its day, and no wonder, for it was the very first story ever published of that journey, in itself sufficiently wonderful to attract attention without any embellishment of romance. For years all western stories had been imitations of Cooper, but this was another and a newer West, whose capital features were Sioux and buffalo, Fort Laramie, Kit Carson, Great Salt Lake and Oregon. Any information of that trans-Missouri of the Rockies and the Pacific was welcome, doubly so in the sugar-coated romance of “The Prairie Flower,” that in successive editions reached its ninety-second thousand. The veteran author is living yet at Oregon City.
Oregon was a state of schools from the first. The early missionaries brought colleges with them. Willamette University landed in Oregon with Jason Lee. Whitman College came over the mountains with a hero of the West. Pacific University grew from a little log school house. In the fifties, Columbia College, the germ of the State University at Eugene, counted among its students Joaquin Miller, the Poet of the Sierras.
Cincinnatus Heine Miller came with his parents and brothers and sister with the old ox-team across the plains in 1852, and grew up in Oregon. Immediately from college he went, as he himself says,[1] “into the heart of the then unknown and unnamed Idaho and Montana; gold dust was as wheat in harvest time; I and another, born to the saddle, formed an express line, and carried letters in from the Oregon River, and gold dust out, gold dust by the horseload after horseload, till we earned all the gold we wanted. Such rides! And each alone! Indians holding the plunging horses ready for us at relays. Those matchless night rides under the
- ↑ Joaquin Miller’s Poems; Whitaker & Ray Edition, San Francisco. (external scans (multiple parts): 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) (Wikisource contributor note)
- Notes
- ↑ Prairie Flower: or, Adventures in the Far West, by Emerson Bennett (1881) (external scan) (Wikisource contributor note)
