Page:The Poets and Poetry of the West.djvu/256

 CHAELES D. DRAKE. Charles D. Drake was bom at Cincinnati, on the eleventh day of April, 1811. His father, Daniel Drake, a pioneer physician and a pioneer author of Oiiio, will long be remembered in the West, for oi-iginal labors well calculated to make known the inviting characteristics of the Mississippi Valley, as well as for important services in the furtherance of measures by which the weightiest impediments to its development have been removed. He was the first student of medicine in Cincinnati ; he pub- lished the first books* by which the topography, productions, climate and resources of the Ohio basin were adequately advertised ; and he was active for material enter- prises, as well as for literary and social culture and professional education, from the time when he first became a citizen of Cincinnati (1800), till the last year of his life (1852). He was prominently connected Avith the earliest Medical Colleges and earliest medical journals of the West, and, in 1827, projected a work on the diseases of the Mississippi Valley ,t to which he devoted the best thoughts of all the time he could spare from professional obligations, during thirty years. Charles D. was a midshipman in the United States Navy from April, 1827, to January, 1830. Havmg determined to qualify himself for the practice of law, he entei'ed the office of a prominent attorney, in Cincinnati, immediately after he resigned his place in the navy, and was admitted to the bar of Hamilton county, Ohio, in May, 1833. During the earlier years of his professional life, Mr. Drake contributed, both prose and poetry, to the journals of Cincinnati, and was regarded as a writer who gave promise of marked success; but he removed to St. Louis in 1834, and, rising rapidly at the bar of that city, permitted the engrossing cares of his business to frighten the " gentle nine " almost beyond recall. He has rarely engaged in metrical composition since 1840. In 1836 he wrote a series of articles on the "Legal Relations of Husband and Wife," for the Cincinnati 3Iirror, and in 1854 pub- lished a volume " On the Law of Suits by Attachment in the United States," which has given him honored rank among the American writers on legal questions. Mr. Drake was, in 1860, a prominent member of the General Assembly of Mis- souri, from St. Louis county. He is a pleasing and forcible speakei", and wields wide political as well as personal and professional influence. illustrated by Maps. Cincinnati : Looker and Wallace, 1815. 12mo, pp. 250. t Principal Di.seases of the Interior Valley of North America, as they appear in the Caucasian, African, Indian, and Esquimaux Varieties of its Population. 2 vols. 8vo. Cincinnati: Winthrop B. Smith & Co., 1850. (240>
 * " Notices of Cincinnati,'" 1810. — " Natui-al and Statistical View or Picture of Cincinnati and the Miami Country,"