Alfred Powers

“ Here we were beside an object that had been visible to us at least a hundred miles distant; an object of interest, for we knew that beyond it was our new home—the country of our adoption, and that when we reached it, our long and wearisome journey would be, comparatively speaking, at an end. We were but seven souls, deep in the heart of the great wilderness, far from kindred and friends, and the enjoyments of civilized life, yet we had an unshaken confidence in that protecting Power in the hollow of whose hand we stood. ”

“ In all her unhappy actions and public display of her troubles she was a person of three conflicting moods: a wife out of favor; a tender and unselfish woman truly wishing her husband to be one of the great poets of the world; a poet herself, with a feeling of harsh frustration that her almost equal talents should be choked and smothered by uncontrollable circumstances, while his through ruthless doffing of responsibility should flower and grow. ”

“ Many of these ghost cities today are but memories, while in others a few grey-bearded pioneers still linger to dream of the glory that once was theirs. For more than 40 years I have rambled over the west on horseback or afoot, by stage and river steamer, by train and by auto, visiting the sites of the cities that once were, and interviewing the men and women who helped make history in the long-gone days. ”

“ McMinnville College, our dear old college, We'll work and live and fight for you. To you we give our heart, for you we'll do our part, To you we're always true. McMinnville College, McMinnville College, Three rousing rah, rah, rah's for you! Hail, hail to dear Old Mac! To you we're always true. With courage brave as ocean breeze that sweeps across the plain, With motive clean as summer sun that shines down thru the rain, The bow of promise paints thy sky with glories yet to be ”

“ The crossing of the Rocky Mountains, the Bear River range, and the "big hill" of the "Burlies," with the Blue Mountains, was insignificant in comparison to the passage of the "Cascades." Here is no natural pass—you breast the lofty hills and climb them—there is no way around them—no avoiding them, and each succeeding one you fancy is the dividing ridge of the range. How profound is the solitude of those old and far surrounding woods, which is only invaded by the dash of the mountain torrent, as it plunges downward to its more tranquil course in the distant valley. ”

“ At Lyle, in the days of his joyous paganism, when he worked and read and wrote, when with happy zeal he collected the lore of the Indians, his life was given an additional zest and grace by the love of Genevra Whitcomb, daughter of a pioneer neighbor. She possessed a provocative wit, which he practiced in himself and liked in others. Besides the fresh but aesthetic beauty that characterized so many girlhoods of early Oregon, with a culture that blossomed and developed without the help of schools, she had this penchant for bright remarks and discomfiting sallies. ”

“ Men of other achievements might live on in biography and history long after what served as the basis of their fame has perished; but the literary man is quick or dead with his works.
Seeing what his writings could do and did do every day, he did not perceive that one small book of essays, written in the fullness of his great capacity, in the spirit of literature and not of journalism, might have brought him into warm fraternity with the future much more than all this power he possessed and exercised for 45 years. His standards in many ways were the standards of literature. ”

“ In winter, they burned our lodge... night; they killed our relations; they treated our wives and daughters like dogs, and left us either to die from cold or starvation, or become their slaves.
They were numerous and powerful; we were few, and weak. Our hearts were as the hearts of little children: we could not fight like warriors, and were driven like deer about the plains. When the thunders rolled, and the rains poured, we had no spot in which we could seek a shelter; no place, save the rocks, whereon we could lay our heads. ”

“ Before a tent near the river a violin makes lively music, and some youths and maidens have improvised a dance upon the green; in another quarter a flute gives its mellow and melancholy notes to the still night air, which, as they float away over the quiet river, seem a lament for the past rather than a hope for the future....But time passes; the watch is set for the night; the council of old men has broken up, and each has returned to his own quarter; the flute has whispered its last lament to the deepening night; the violin is silent, and the dancers have dispersed;... ”

“ Sometimes in our journeyings today, transporting ourselves back in association with certain spots of historic geography, we like to fancy how it was in Oregon before the white man left his traces upon the country. The old discoverers and explorers, the first white men, satisfy this mood of retrospection, satisfy it in the way of literature, if we read that they said first-hand and in detail and not what has been said about them by historians. ”

“ From the Repository of the Falls Association “Upon Mount Hood I stand, And with rapt gaze explore The valley, and that patriot band Upon Columbia's shore. If the contemplation of ruins of former greatness, with the long grass o'ertopping the mouldering walls, gives rise to melancholy reflections and sombre thoughts, how opposite and exceedingly delightful, are the feelings engendered and excited by a meditative view of scenes, just bursting from torpitude and insignificance, into life and animated import ance—a sterile and savage wilderness just budding into a fertile and civilized region ”

“ Stephen Maybelle married the daughter of a woman who conducted one of the well-known dance halls of that time. He later moved to San Francisco and was connected with labor agitations in that city. Behind the pines had sunk the sun, And darkness hung o'er Oregon, When on the banks o' Willamette A youth was seen to set and set, And set and sing unto the moon A wild, yet sweet, pathetic tune— "They're going to build, I feel it, yet, A bridge across the Willamette." ”

“ They were two widely different men of Portland: one magnetic and light-hearted, with money and social position, who accomplished things dashingly and easily by instinctive genius; the other of ungregarious personality and touched by the contagion of Oregon somberness, with scant earnings and without social status, who put into his thick book the most work that has ever gone into an Oregon volume; one with clubs named after him in many cities and looked upon by the foreign nation he died for in somewhat the same way as Byron in Greece and Lafayette in America ”

“ FREDERIC HOMER BALCH We now know that the native tribes of Oregon had a rich and eloquent literature—poetry and songs, Greek-like harangues before a battle, beautiful geographic names, tales and legends, myths and dreams.
The Western Oregon Indians were particularly affected by dreams. The vividness and verisimilitude of these images of the night, and the way they clung to the imagination in daylight hours, justify their inclusion as an important form of literature. ”

“ Whenever a rumor reached him that an old Indian might be found in some far distant tepee, no matter how isolated the village might be from civilization, he spared no effort to locate him and gather all that lingered in the old man's memory. No endeavor was too hard if at the end of the trail he found a representative of some old tribe, who remembered fragments of talks before the campfires, fantastic legends told by his forefathers, tales of old kings and councilors, mighty warriors and their conquests, that still burned as memories of the time when he was a youthful warrior. ”

“ Thus spoke Jesus to them.
Jesus was aware that all the nations of the world had no knowledge of the Gospel. They knew nothing of the happy home in heaven. They knew nothing of the Devil's home in the great fire. Jesus knew that the soul of a man is truly precious; that it is more precious than all the money and everything else in the world. So He wished His people, His missionaries, to go everywhere, and to help all the people to leave the Devil's way, and to find the way of Jesus. ”

“ The fairly good of the old must be thrown out to make room for the fairly good of the new, but neither the limitations of our enjoyment nor the wealth of our creative talent will justify treating with prodigality such gifts as Sounds by the Western Sea. In reference to that little pamphlet there was in the Oregon public, ordinarily so sure and warmly quick, a curious embargo of the appreciative senses—eyes closed to the gleam shining through the small type and poor format, ears unresponsive to its cadences, imagination unquickened by the sweep and compass of its connotations. ”

“ When we read the dying expression of Stonewall Jackson—"Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees"—we realize what a beautiful language English is, when kept beautiful in its simplicity. So when Chief Qualchien in a quarter of an hour's time faced dark extinction, he cried out in Chinook jargon a plea that reverberated in the recollection of an American soldier all his life as having the profoundest pathos of any sounds he ever heard. ”

“ We could hear the deer walking down the trails and splashing in the pools, but to aim was impossible. Just what time in the night it was, none of the frightened boys could ever say, but suddenly the cry of a hunting cougar sounded so clear and loud that it seemed right in the party. No one who hears that cry in the woods ever forgets it. Even old hunters do not like the devil- ish wildcat scream that has in it a note as of a woman or child in extremity. ”

“ It has long been hoped that there might rise, among us, a mind combining enthusiasm for Oregon and its history with the insight of literary art and the gift of dramatic portrayal, and that these powers might be devoted to preservation, in the forms of historic or romantic fiction, the tone, color, sentiment and spirit of the older Oregon, now passing away. ”

“ She kept at a thing until she got what she wanted. She was strong-willed. I think she wrote poetry in that spirit, because she was going to write poetry and nothing could hinder her. She got everything because of her insistent persistence. Her tactics, however, were different from those of Mrs. Duniway who would fight with a sledge hammer, if need be, and act like a hurricane and a typhoon. In spite of all she did and tried to do against heavy odds, Belle W. Cooke seemed to me to be shadowed by the nemesis of a stunted life—a life that reached no full expression. ”

“ I am an Anarchist. That is my ideal! [Great applause and yells] . I believe in the Anarchist theory that land should be held only by those who possess and use it. [Applause] . So I work with the single-taxers."
The Colonel—such he is sometimes called—is lithe in adjusting himself to the varying degrees of wealth and social status.
As attorney for one of the biggest land monopolies in the West—a wagon road company in Eastern Oregon—he stands champion of a land system far more monopolistic than that which he denounced amid cheers last Sunday. ”