Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 15.djvu/284



My first meeting with Oregon's sweetest singer, Samuel L. Simpson, was wholly unexpected. I had been in the habit for many years of treasuring up the superior specimens of poetry, with which he so greatly enriched our earlier literature, but had about abandoned the hope of ever making his personal acquaintance, when unlooked-for circumstances brought him to my very door. I was sitting alone in my lonesome cabin, away back in the mountains near the head of Williams Creek, Jackson County, quietly musing, as is the wont of single gentlemen similarly circumstanced, when "there came a sudden rapping at my chamber door," the same as came to Edgar Allen Poe in days of yore. I obeyed the summons with reasonable alacrity, when in walked a young lad I knew as George Huffer, followed by a medium-sized man of some thirty odd years of age, whom he introduced as "Mr. Simpson." "What, not the poet?" said I. On being assured that my implied guess was correct, I toned down my excitement as gracefully as possible, and proceeded to make them welcome. The conversation first turned to practical, matter-of-fact affairs, and not to poetry. Mr. Simpson and his companion were on an expedition to the recently discovered Josephine County caves; they had camped down by the creek and wanted some feed for their pony. Although they already had their blankets spread for a night's {{rule]] {{smallrefs}}