Page:The Pacific Monthly volume 4.djvu/359

Rh short story.” The scenes of Mrs. Higginson’s stories are laid in Oregon and Washington.

Mrs. Higginson’s sister, Carrie Blake Morgan, of Portland, is also a popular writer of stories and verse for Lippincott’s, McClure’s, the Overland, and other magazines.

In the same year with Joaquin Miller, Frederick Schwatka came by the immigrant trail from Galena, Illinois, when he was four years old. His life work remains among the permanent records of the nation. His books, “Along Alaska’s Great River,” “Children of the Cold,” “The Nimrod of the North,” and “In the Land of the Cave and the Cliff Dwellers,” all commemorate land and naval expeditions led by this noted author and explorer.

In that eventful year for Oregon letters, 1852, the Scott family left the Elm Tree Farm in Taxewell county, Illinois, on the ox-line journey to the far, far West. It was in the dread cholera time, a scourge that took away the mother in a few brief hours. Harvey W. Scott was then a boy of sixteen. Arriving in Oregon he became the first graduate of Pacific University, and in 1865 took up his life work on the great paper of the Northwest. What Benjamin Franklin was to the Atlantic colonies, that Harvey Scott has been to the Pacific Coast—a fearless writer, constantly hammering into the people industry, economy, temperance, pure politics and plain, common sense. No account of the great editors of our time can omit the name of Harvey Scott, of the Oregonian.

Abigail Scott Duniway, a sister of the great editor, enjoys the proud distinction of being the pioneer literary woman of the Pacific Coast. In 1852, as a young lady of 19, she embodied her emigration adventures in a tale entitled “Captain Gray’s Company,” that has delighted two generations of readers. For many years she was editor of “The New Northwest,” and for half a century her pen has been wielded in support of every good cause and work.

Mrs. C. A. Coburn, another sister of the same family, is the founder of the Portland Evening Telegram.

Among the native Oregon writers, may be mentioned Louis Albert Banks, whose delightful book, “An Oregon Boyhood,” ought to be in every school library. Another of precious memory is FrederickFrederic [sic] Homer Balch, whose exquisite “Bridge of the Gods,” is the high water mark of Oregon letters. This old legend of the Cascades, that a granite bridge once extended from Mt. Hood across the Columbia to Mt. Adams, has passages in it worthy of Irving. Balch died in the Portland hospital with a valise full of half-written romances at his bedside.

Edwin Markham was born at Oregon City in 1852. His most noted poem, “The Man with the Hoe,” has stirred two continents with its pathos. It is a study in human conditions, depicting the unlettered peasant of Europe rather than the wide-awake American farmer.

Oregon has been rich in delvers among original documents, and of these Frances Fuller Victor and Harvey K. Hines have attained the most distinction. They have unearthed treasures commemorating the brave deeds of Oregon’s early heroes.