Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/328

292 The weeks without editorials were probably the weeks when he was not sober enough to write them, for he takes front rank, with Burns and Poe, among the drinking poets. It was the habit, inescapably fastened upon him at 29 and 30, that was to cause it to be said of him in newspaper obituaries after his death, "But the genius of Oregon's singer and poet laureate was dimmed by the besetting sin of his life."

Later he worked on newspapers in Salem, Astoria and Portland, but success, as men measure it, did not come to him. In the later period of his life, instead of being the powerful voice of a great metropolitan journal as his talents warranted, he was editor for two years of the Ilwaco Tribune. Author of "Beautiful Willamette" at 22, with the future beckoning brightly before him, and in charge of a small country weekly at 50—it was not much distance run in the practical scheme of turning up a career. Though his irregular habits disenfranchised him for places of high responsibility, he retained his dignity and his status as an important literary man while earning his living in modest journalistic positions. Merle R. Chessman, present publisher of the Astorian-Budget, tells how, during the Spanish-American War, the business men of Astoria made up a purse to pay the telegraph tolls to send his poem, "Launching of the Battleship Oregon", to San Francisco. It is a poem of 78 lines that may be found in his published volume. Wiring it to San Francisco at their expense was the idea of his Astoria neighbors, not his. They had that much admiration of his poem and that much pride in him, and their attitude is characteristic of the respect he commanded as a