Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/221

Rh down in the Umpqua Valley was writing frontier short stories.

Thus we had five authors of literary works of a genuine nature, in the second decade of actual Oregon settlement. It was a handsome showing in quantity and it was at least good enough in quality so that one of the books became a sort of best seller in the country at large, attaining a sale of 100,000 copies.

These first Oregon literary productions were self-reliant; they were motivated by the far western scene; they were indigenous. It has been said, in fact, that they were over-indigenous. According to some critics, they were a little too realistic, stuck a little too closely to the details of immigration and Oregon living, and correspondingly showed a lack of imagination for works of fiction.

It has been possible to find copies of three of the books so that selections from them are given in this chapter to enable the reader to get some idea of what they were like. It has been impossible to locate the other two.

One of these contains the stories of Charles Applegate. His granddaughter of Portland, Captain O. C. Applegate of Klamath Falls, and the descendants of that distinguished pioneer family still residing in Douglas County, did not themselves have the book and could not tell where a single copy had been preserved. Yoncalla, where the stories were written, and all of Douglas County have been covered like a blanket with inquiries, but neither manuscript nor clippings nor the little volume itself, if the sketches appeared in that form, could be turned up. And it is not in the