Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/688

 was no poet—his idea was to take 29 Chinamen, to pick up quite haphazardly 29 Kanaka wives for them in the Sandwich Islands and then to establish them at Nootka Sound to start a settlement. Then came Captain George Vancouver and his lieutenant, William R. Broughton. Their utter failure to contribute any poetry to the Oregon Country is indicated by the terminology they bestowed upon something like 75 mountains, rivers, capes, bays and sounds—such names as River Mannings for the Willamette, and Hood for a peak whose incorruptible whiteness was that of the new Jerusalem and whose summit gave frostbite to the unsandaled feet of the angels.

Captain Gray was from Boston, which ought to have meant that poetry was to have a beginning at last. Apparently, however, there was none of that commodity at the wharves for export when the Columbia sailed in 1790.

So it was that up to 1800 the Muse did not reach Oregon by sea, either as a supercargo or a stowaway. Was she waiting to accompany the daring Overlanders?

As has been mentioned, the Lewis and Clark expedition equipped nearly every fourth man with a notebook. With the encouragement of the President who sent them, the two leaders, Patrick Gass and six others kept journals, so that diarying was a routine of nine of the 40-odd in the party, though not one of the nine had the accomplishment of verse. Patrick Gass, in fact, was considered tedious by a critic in the London Quarterly Review, who cited this example: "The day and hour are carefully noted when Captain Lewis is-