Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/147

 gressman from 1873 to 1875. He died in 1885 at Rickreall. The home he had established there is interestingly described by his daughter Mrs. Harriet Nesmith McArthur, in her Recollections of the Rickreall. "As for his qualities of mind, he will be longest remembered for his wit and strong sense of humor.... His stories and sayings gained a world-wide celebrity, and rivaled Lincoln's in their appositeness and wit."

An idea of what he was like as a speaker at the age of 50 may be secured from a report in the Eugene City Guard for Saturday, June 4, 1870: "Hon. J. W. Nesmith spoke to an appreciative audience at the Court House on last Wednesday, for two and one half hours. His address was seasonably varied with sound logic, scathing sarcasm, and side-splitting ridicule, with occasional touches of true eloquence. He makes no pretensions to oratory, but in all that constitutes the effective speaker, in conclusive logic and clearness of diction, he stands to the frothy and bombastic Geo. S. Woods as 'Hyperion to a Satyr'. Any attempt at a synopsis would deprive the speech of half its pith—to be properly appreciated, it must be heard from Mr. Nesmith's own lips."

We do not have that speech, but we have another, of reminiscent nature, delivered before the Oregon Pioneer Association:

As an illustration of the honest and simple directness which pervaded our Legislative proceedings of that day, I will mention that in 1847 I had the honor of a seat in the Legislature of the provisional government. It was my first step on the slippery rungs of the political ladder. The Legislature then consisted of but one House and we sat in the old Methodist church at the Falls. Close by the church Barton Lee had constructed a ten-pin alley to which some of my fellow members were in the habit of resorting to seek relaxation and refreshment after the Legislative toils. I had aspired to the Speakership and had supposed myself sure of the position, but the same uncertainty existed in political matters that I have seen so much of since. Some of my friends "threw off" on me and elected a better man in the person of Dr. Robert Newell—God bless his soul! In the small collection of books at the Falls, known as the Multnomah Library, I found what I had never heard of before—a copy of "Jefferson's Manual"—and after giving it an evening's perusal by the light of an armful of pitch knots, I