Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/689

 sued a glass of whiskey to all the crew; and when ‘Captain Clark gave the sick a dose of Rush's pills, to see what effect they would have’.”

Did poetry come to the Columbia with Dr. McLoughlin and find a special hospitality in the “stately halls” of Fort Vancouver? His numerous adherents in all their polemics about him have hardly claimed that.

Then, how and when did this winsome goddess, so very much present now, make her elusive entry into the country? With Ewing Young coming up through the southern wilderness with his precious two-volume Shakespeare? On the May Dacre with hymn books in her arms? At the campfires of two beaver trappers—Osborne Russel composing the stanzas of “The Hunter's Farewell” and James Clyman writing the first Mt. Hood poem on the inside of the front cover of his notebook? In Anna Maria Pittman Lee's bare little private room at Willamette Mission while she wrote her goodby verses to Jason Lee?

Perhaps the coming of this goddess “of more than mortal purity” cannot be traced because she has been here all the time, a gracious and indigenous presence, reaching out her white fingers and touching a chosen few of a darker race—on the memaloose islands; through the high passes and by the sounding water falls; in the valleys of the Rogue, the Grand Ronde, the Willamette; all along “the big salmon water” until it met the ocean in a tumultuous embrace; on the windy headland of Cape Blanco, where Oregon stretches farthest towards the sunset, comes closest to the crimson bars of evening.

It cannot be definitely said whether she was here