Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/718



Paul E. Tracy of Baker County is a plumber by trade. He spent his boyhood in Southern Idaho, attended the College of Idaho at Caldwell, and has been a fanner—"dry land and damp"—a lineman and a soldier. He is married and has one son. Dr. H. G. Merriam, editor of Frontier and Midland, who has published several of his poems since 1928, says of him: "His sense of values is independent and discriminating. Literature means to him life and not escape from life." If he keeps on, sustaining his quality and increasing his too slender output, there is a specal place for him in Oregon literature as the comprehensive interpreter of all the country between the Cascades and the Snake. When, with continuing inclusion of the aspects of that region, he has added enough poems of equal merit to "Horsemeat", "Circuit Rider", "Horned Toad" and "Westerners", he will have the first volume to give a full poetic description of Eastern Oregon, not merely its desert, its cattle ranges, its Indans or its round-up.