Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/582

536 thing more than bookkeepers struggling for a trial balance and could settle down and write history in a buoyant and happy mood.

Often an honest chronicler, in a laudable attempt to be concrete, has wished to use an exact hour, day and month in his reference, finding them available all right but in such amazing disagreement that he has to give up in despair and say something general to keep from adding to the bewilderment. Such variety, however, is not the only difficulty of historical chronology, though probably the most frequent. Sometimes a too faithful agreement presents interesting results. This has been the case with a date long perpetuated in Oregon literature — the death of Sam. L. Simpson.

In all the printed matter about him that has been circulated during a quarter of a century, the poet has been vouchsafed something by the biographers that only God can grant. He has been credited with a year of life he didn't live. What has now become a regular delta of error can be traced back through a Bull Run watershed of reliable recorders, to a reliable source. Only there was a slip of the pen or of the memory on the part of one whose chief weakness was that he re called things too well. George H. Himes wrote a short biographical sketch of Sam. L. Simpson that was printed in the Oregon Historical Quarterly. Now, both Dr. J. B. Horner and Mr. Himes possessed as tonishing memories. Coleridge, according to his son, "trusted to his memory, knowing it to be powerful, and not aware that it was inaccurate, in order to save his legs and his eyes." Probably the fact that Mr. Himes' head was such a good encyclopedia was