Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/447

 of research. Of her method of writing and of her need of a factual basis, she has said:

Writing is like any other business. I don't need any inspiration to write. If I have the facts I can write—I just have to have something to say. I never write far into the night like some writers when they are "in the mood," because, if I do, I am all worn out the next day. Yet, when I read back over some of the writings of my earlier years, I feel that I must have been almost inspired. I do not understand how I could write so well.

More than 2500 letters have been accumulated by her "through her investigation into sources for her various books." These have been well received nationally as well as locally, their total sales running into many thousands of copies. Dr. George Rebec, dean of the graduate division of the State System of Higher Education, says that her books were an influence in bringing him from Michigan to Oregon.

She herself came to the state while it still retained many pioneer aspects and still had a numerous pioneer population in whose retrospect were the oxen and alkali of the Oregon Trail. Still living contemporaneously with her in Oregon City were those who had known the great figures of the very beginnings of the Oregon Country—John McLoughlin, Peter Skene Ogden, Peter Burnett, Jesse Applegate, Joe Meek and Jason Lee, their very names onomatopoetic of wilderness deeds.

She came to a town in which Harriet Prescott Spofford and Edwin Markham had been born; from which Ella Higginson had but recently moved away; upon the streets of which the author of The Prairie Flower was still a familiar figure. Her neighbors had recollec-