Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/336

 he had to interline or reconstruct a stanza after it was written, though he often threw away a good verse containing an excellent poetical idea, because of his failure to get a similar rhyme.

This was in 1879. Not only did the collected volume Dashings of Oregon, as planned at that time, fail to materialize but he never had his poems brought together in a book while he lived. This was finally done in 1910 by his sister and his sons. It was published by J. B. Lippincott, Philadelphia, as The Gold-Gated-West, and was edited, with an introductory preface, by W. T. Burney. The book contains 81 poems grouped as "Poems of Nature", "Historical and Narrative Poems", "Memories of the West", "Occasional Poems", "Poems of Sentiment", "Poems of Patriotism", "Miscellaneous", "In Memoriam", "Life and Death".

The over-editing of this book, by an "alleged literary expert" of the East, had "ruined much of Sam Simpson's work" by presenting it in "this distorted form," according to Colonel R. A. Miller in a report in 1935 to the Sons and Daughters of Oregon Pioneers. Most people, to their loss, know only his one famous poem. What an unhappy situation it is in many ways for an author to write one thing of supreme popularity is cleverly explained in Frank R. Stockton's story His Wife's Deceased Sister, and is confirmed by Sam. L. Simpson's own statement to Wm. W. Fidler that "Beautiful Willamette" had exercised a sort of tyranny over him. This is given here because no book on the literature of Oregon would be complete with out it, but there is also included "The Pioneer Ox" to show how far he was from being a one-poem poet.