Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/361

Rh This was his second great renunciation.

The two surrenders, leaving him profoundly bereft, caused him at last to write Genevieve: A Tale of Oregon, which he was revising in manuscript at the time of his death.

These abnegations, these harsh experiences of the spirit, tell much; but, for a full understanding of the man and the writer, there should be added the main chronological details of his life of a little less than 3 0 years.

He was born in Lebanon, Oregon, on December 14, 1861.

His father was James A. Balch, a graduate of Wabash College, Indiana, who came to Oregon in 1851, teaching for a few years and then, in 1857, becoming a photographer. His first "picture gallery" was at Silverton, where the recollection of him is as "a great lover of music and a melancholy man." He later took his business of making daguerreotypes to Brownsville.

His mother was Harriet Maria Snider, an orphan. With Mary Stephenson, another orphan, she crossed the plains by ox-team in 1852 in the party of Dr. Robert Crawford. These two orphan girls of sixteen, whose duty it was to drive the loose cattle, realized more than all the dreams they could have dreamed as they trudged through the alkali dust churned up by the wagons—one of them married a governor of Oregon, the other became the mother of the author of The Bridge of the Gods. She was twice previously married, however, both husbands dying and each leaving a child. By the first it was Allie Gallagher. By the second it was William Benson Helm. It was this