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290 where he attended the log-cabin schools of that pioneer period until he was fifteen. At this time he was employed for a while in his father's store on the Grande Ronde Indian Reservation. He frequently saw and talked with Grant and Sheridan. The latter gave him a copy of Byron's poems. It is interesting alike that Sheridan, who was living with a beautiful squaw wife, should have owned this book with its philosophy of love in confirmation of his own, and that a fifteenyear-old frontier boy should have sufficiently impressed a soldier with his sensitiveness and his interest in poetry to make such a gift seem suitable.

At the age of 16 he entered Willamette University at Salem with his elder brother Sylvester, and was graduated in 1865, a few months before he was twenty. In 1866, his father, Benjamin Simpson, bought the Salem Statesman. This opportunity, however, did not immediately attract him to journalism as a profession. Instead, he continued to study law and was admitted to the bar. From December 28, 1867, to April 11, 1868—a week before he wrote "Beautiful Willamette"—he practiced with J. Quinn Thornton at Albany, and later for about two years at Corvallis. His "characteristic timidity" was not a happy quality in such an aggressive calling as the law, and in 1870 he quit it for good.

In the meantime, in 1868, he had married Miss Julia Humphrey, whom he had met while both were students at Willamette and of whom he wrote in one of his verses, "O she was fair as a red-lipped lily, a rosy marble of moulded song." Their marriage did not remain happy.