Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/372

 City chamber of commerce, at the trouble of considerable research, to locate the exact place in the town where he was born. In 1921 the poet had done this himself, with the help of Mrs. Eva Emery Dye and F. W. Parker, but he had picked out the wrong house, a cottage which now stands on an alleyway, where the Markham family had later lived.

Oregon City presents an interesting cultural study. Vancouver, under the Hudson's Bay Company, was founded on beaver-skins and profits. Oregon City, mecca of the pioneers and settlers, started out with churches, libraries, debating societies, schools, poets, orators, novelists and a literary newspaper. Apparently if a town begins with a sufficient cultural bent the odds are in favor of its remaining that way. All of which is preliminary to saying that Edwin Markham's having been born in Oregon City is much less significant than the fact that the commercial body of that town should be interested and active to such a degree about it 8 3 years afterwards. "He was born," they tell us, "in a little yellow house which stood at Fifth and Water Street in this city, facing the Willamette River, and which went out in the flood of 1861–2."

The time of his birth was April 23, 1852. He was the youngest of 12 children. The brother just older than himself was a deaf mute and his mother was "a strangely silent woman." Could this soundless environment in his infant years have accustomed him to hearken to inner voices? His father found work on a ranch in the mountains, leaving his mother in Oregon City to run their little store and conduct a fruit-tree nursery.