Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/407

Rh enough so that he might have passed for a poet, this drawing has remained a favorite of the lecturer, Dr. Joseph Schafer, at that time and for many years professor of history in the University of Oregon and now superintendent of the Wisconsin Historical Society. The two pictures together show the elements of strength and refinement that marked, in union and accord, the character of this great pioneer. Dr. Schafer has written extensively and with understanding on Jesse Applegate, including the following summary of his qualities:

"He was deficient in the spirit of co-operation, had a somewhat dictatorial temper, and succeeded best when his leadership was unchallenged. ... In 1849 he had removed to Southern Oregon, settling on a large ranch near the California Trail in the Umpqua Valley, at a place he named Yoncalla. His chief business was raising beef cattle which he drove to the mines. Here he built his "great house", dispensed a generous hospitality to all comers, and entertained men of national distinction. . . He assembled a good private library and remained through life a student, and a writer on public questions for the newspapers. His literary style was distinguished, as witness the appeal of the Provisional Government to Congress in 1847, the report of the American Commission to settle the claims of the Hudson's Bay Company under the treaty of 1846, and especially A Day With the Cow-Column in 1843, which ranks as a western classic. . . . He was aggressively independent, looked like an old Roman, and had many Roman virtues. A frontiersman in the simplicity of his life, he was physically of the mountaineer type, above medium height, thin, wiry, resilient, capable of walking sixty miles a day. He was gifted intellectually and was a good conversationalist but shrank from public speaking. He molded public opinion through the press, through resolutions drafted for general organizations, through a wide correspondence with prominent men, and through personal appeal."

An early contemporary estimate of him is given by an observer used to mixing with men of ability and cultivation, Theodore Winthrop, author of The Canoe and the Saddle, who made a trip to Oregon and wrote about his experiences in his Western Letters and Journals. Writing from "Scottsburg, Umpqua River, June 28, 1853", he said:

My fourth day I was to have arrived at the house at Yoncalla,. . . Mr. Applegate was of the emigration of 1843, and is a man of