Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/81

 poet, the laureate of New York's top caste. He could perform admirably on ceremonial occasions that required good taste and smooth technique, but even the amount of feeling necessary for his nature poems accumulated to an articulate pitch only at considerable intervals. Mr. Dishoway knew that the author of Thanatopsis no longer had the sweep of imagination or the vigor of emotion to do justice to the four Nez Perce s and their long trek to get the white man's Book of Heaven.

The theme was not taken up by poets until it had become completely retrospective. It was first used for a poem by Willis T. Hawley, later a United States Congressman from Oregon, on the occasion of the Fourteenth Annual Reunion of the Graduates of Willamette University in June, 1880. A half century later, in 1932, it was very ably done as an epic called Riders from the West by George Charles Kastner, a Seattle poet.

So, as it turned out, poetry was not forthcoming, but it was not needed. Mr. Dishoway's brief but beautiful prose in description of that sublime search was enough. By it congregations were stirred to a warm and widespread response, and they sent messengers with the volume that contained the celestial talk. But the Chief Messenger saw and listened to Dr. McLoughlin, and another crusade was detoured. And the book in which the Great Spirit spoke wisdom to men continued to be absent, to the length of many sleeps, from among the Flatheads—who, in climax of all this criss-crossed illusion, killed the man who finally brought it.