Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/154

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now come to take her away; the recovered joys of civilized life were held out to her with overwhelming suddenness, but there was her Indian man looking down into her face in terrible suspense, saying nothing, only with a deep and anguished appeal in his dark eyes, and with him she fled in continuance of their love under the stars and in the broad silences. This point of view has not actually prevented a great amount of mating with Indian women but it has stifled sympathetic literature about it. How many books of fiction or of poetry can you recall, with the heroine a full-blooded Indian woman and the hero a white man? The most important Oregon novel in 90 years of Oregon novel writing is The Bridge of The Gods, in which the lovely Wallulah, daughter of Chief Multnomah, was only a half-breed. The author, Fred eric Homer Balch, was a preacher as well as a novelist, and the preachers and missionaries, for all such mar riages they solemnized, were never spiritually recon ciled to the practice. The first ones to come were hor rified at the amount of sinful living they saw all about ; and, while they quickened the consciences of several old-timers to belated and remedial ceremonies in order to make bad matters a little better, and gave formality to the start of new unions in order to keep things straight, they could never quite see that all this mixing up was a good and proper business. This view did not change but crystallized and widened, so that Balch must have felt much the same way about it while writing The Bridge of the Gods in 1890. His own sympathy was not enough to create a full-blooded Indian heroine almost too appealing for his missionary