Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/500



John Minto was a pioneer leader in horticulture and sheep husbandry in Oregon, and is best known for his prose writings on these subjects and for his historical sketches on the early days. His inclusion among the early poets is based on a small group of swinging, buoyant rhymes.

He was born in 1822 in England, coming to the United States in 1840 and to Oregon in 1844, where he took up a claim south of Salem. In 1847 he married Martha A. Morrison, the eldest daughter of Captain R. W. Morrison of Clatsop Plains. After the Whitman massacre he was a member of Captain Levi Scott's company that unsuccessfully attempted to cross the Siskiyous in winter to California as an escort to Jesse Applegate. "It was probably at his house that the first Farmers' Club ever formed in Oregon met in 1853." He was later manager of the Oregon State Agricultural Society, and edited the Willamette Farmer for a year. He was a