Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/448

 tions such as Hubert Howe Bancroft came all the way from San Francisco with an amanuensis to get; the history of a frontier conquest was in their memories and upon their tongues; and biography, rich, intimate and of varying mood, was among them a common topic: the pretensions of black Anderson Winslow or Winslow Anderson, the come-hither look of Solomon Smith's magnetic squaw, the sad declining years of the imperious McLoughlin, spent as by a sleepwalker—"a mighty somnambulist in a vanished dream."

This was all about her, in all its color and stimulus, with clues of more to be had elsewhere by one trained in the finding of facts. She had her husband, and to her two children two more in time were added, but she had a master's degree and she had always wanted to write. The affirmatives in the situation were indeed dominant. So, as clients came to her husband's law office, she resigned her place at the Barclay School and began to write. Her subject was Oregon and in all her books it has never been anything else.

That pathos in the idiom that told about McLoughlin's final days, his gold-headed cane no longer a scepter, first touched her interest and her sympathy, and first caused her to recognize that here ready for art to mold into form was the raw material of literature.

In this way it happened that her first book was about McLoughlin. It was completed four years after she reached Oregon City but was not published until ten years after she reached it.

It was called ''McLoughlin and Old Oregon. A Chronicle''. It was a book of 43 chapters and 381 pages, and was finally