Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 16.djvu/359



JOHN MINTO 331

In my first acquaintance with him about 1900 we were soon matching quotations from Burns. I spent a night, rather than an evening, with him at Salem, soon afterward, and well may I wish such another but vainly. It was two in the morn- ing when we said good night; and our talk and song for it was a responsive celebration, the listener of us twain being ready with another when the speaker or singer had finished was nearly all from Burns.

What would have been the trend of John Minto's "educa- tion" if he had found a few leaves of Pope or Dryden, or Mrs. Barbauld ? Certainly he had gathered not a little from Thomas Campbell. His reading in his youth and early manhood was very limited ; but the comparative leisure of his life in Oregon, after having comfortably established himself and family on the farm of Chehulpum, gave him the opportunity which he had hungered for, and little that was good or great escaped him. The newspapers too a few of the best he not only read, but seemed to re-edit. He missed nothing of real im- portance in the news of the day, and especially nothing what- ever that related to Oregon. Our fisheries, coal, lumber, ship- ping matters in which, with his many active concerns, we might think he could have had little interest, were all important subjects to him, as was everything that related to the industries or products or history of Oregon.

We were passing Knappa in a train one day, and I called his attention to that fine promontory where the old hotel stands. I thought it the most charming spot in the hundred miles from Portland to Astoria, and asked him if he had ever noticed it. As though he had forgotten the place for fifty years he looked out upon the hill and said: "Why, I sowed the first seed that ever was planted on that ground."

He loved "the Willamette" as few ever loved it above all the state he knew so well ; but next the Clatsop Plains. He had gone thither in the early winter of '44, the year of his arrival in Oregon, with Captain Morrison and his family, to help row the boat they voyaged in borrowed from Doctor