Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/414

 are told with the warmth that comes of long saturated experience. The Indian scenes are more somber, as befits the race, but related in mellow tones that make the almost forgotten aboriginal live. They embody rare facts of value to the historian and ethnologist. Over all broods the background of river and fir.

In this setting Thomas Nelson Strong was born. . . . Scarcely does the author allude to this boy, and never by direct reference. But into the boy's make-up, and the man's, there entered indelibly both the transmitted strain of a standard culture and breeding, and the influence of the surrounding forest, native, and frontier. It is this combination that gives the book its abiding quality of vivid sensitiveness and reality.

He had been away from this Indian village as a resident nearly fifty years when he wrote about it from childhood recollections and from "the gatherings of many years of wilderness life with native hunters and exploring parties in the Pacific Northwest." He was born there, to be a playmate of Indian children, on March 17, 1853, the son of Judge William Strong, associate justice of the supreme court of Oregon Territory. In 1861, at the age of eight, he removed with his family to Portland, where, with an interval of law study in the East, he lived the rest of his life. He attended the public schools of Portland, studied law in his father's office and in Albany, New York, and in 1872 formed a law partnership with his father and older brother, Fred. His rise in his profession was rapid, and he became one of the most prominent attorneys of his time in Portland.

He was a member of the Annette Island Company organized for Father Duncan of Metlakahtla, "the Apostle of Alaska". Another of his clients was Mrs. Xarifa Jane Failing, whom he represented for 40 years and who in her second will of 1915 bequeathed him an estate of $600,000. He was attacked with palsy in 1911 and was subsequently in failing health. It was his illness after his long service to her that prompted Mrs. Failing to will a fortune to him, much of which he might have kept in the litigation that followed but which he lost through his own highly honorable conduct. In 1878, at the age of 25, he was married in Portland to Mary Stone, who was four years younger and who had been