Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/373

 nursery.

In 1857 they sold out and moved to California, but, young as he was, he had started to school before they left Oregon City. During his youth in California he worked at farm- ing, blacksmithing and herding sheep and cattle. Then he attended the San Jose Normal School and became a principal and superintendent of schools—writing, al- ways writing on the side. As a boy he was hungry for books but the household had not the money to buy them. At the age of 14 he plowed a 20-acre field for a neighbor. His hire was a $20 goldpiece. He gave this to his mother and asked her to invest it all in books of poetry for him on her annual visit to San Francisco. Previously, a brother who was a printer had gone back to Oregon City to work on a newspaper, leaving behind in a cupboard, where the eager Edwin found them, an Iliad, a Scott and a Byron. "Thereafter Byron and I were insepar- able!" Is it not a little strange—or is it—the important part that Byron has played in Oregon literature? He started Simpson, he started Markham, and Joaquin Miller dreamed of Nottingham "for years and years." This noble of polite sophistication had an influence greater than that of any other writer on the three lead- ing poets of a far frontier commonwealth. Was it for the reason given by Miller: "The free can understand the free"? Under the impact of Byron, Edwin Markham be- gan to write, composing "literally thousands of brief poems" before he had one published. This was in the Calif ornian at the age of 28. Paradoxically,