Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/231

 Forty years later, in July, 1901, in a letter to the Oreganion, his daughter wrote again about it, more fully and more convincingly:

... From earliest childhood I have heard the facts in connection with the writing of this pioneer book.... My father—in 1842—began The Prairie Flower, incorporating into it many descriptions of actual scenes along the way (to Oregon). The real heroine of the story, as I have always heard, was a beautiful girl of that migration. Her real name I never knew or have forgotten. My mother described her as being very graceful and pretty. A well-known spot on the bluff above the Willamette Falls, called in the book 'The Lover's Retreat", was often pointed out to me as the place where the heroine and her family camped on their arrival at Oregon City. The tale was completed here in Oregon, and parts of it were read at the old Lyceum in the winters of 1842 and 1843. When the Spectator was started and the Argus, later, my father was an occasional contributor, and some of these early effusions are still in his scrapbook.

My father built the first hotel in Oregon, the Main Street House in Oregon City, and among the many guests came eventually William Johnson, an old friend of my father's first wife.... On account of the old association, my father always had a high regard for Mr. Johnson, and when, finally, Mr. Johnson decided to return to the states, he entrusted to Johnson the manuscript of The Prairie Flower, to do with it what he would or could. Mr. Johnson handed the manuscript to Emerson Bennett, who in his preface does not claim to have written it, but gives a fanciful sketch of the mysterious stranger who placed the document in his hands, unexpectedly.

The book became a great success, but my father never received a cent of pay or credit. Oregon was far away then, out of the world, so to speak, and hard to reach or hear from. As a little child I heard all this discussed in the family, but nothing was ever done about it. In the meantime the book went through several editions, amounting in all, so it is claimed, to 100,000 copies, and out of it, Bennett won fame and fortune. No one arising to contest his claim, it always went under his name, and he added to it a weak and inconsequential sequel (Leni Leoti.) I have often heard pioneers say it was the reading of that story that first influenced their fancy for Oregon. Boys, sitting on the old ox-wagon tongues, read it in Missouri, away back in the fifties, before starting out "across the plains". My father is now in his ninety-second year and his memory, of course, is failing, but I speak of matters known in our family for years.

The final document in the case is what Sidney Walter