CHAPTER 12
The First Five Literary Books
During 30 years of collecting Oregon books I have not found a copy of Ruth Rover or a first edition of Prairie Flower, but I have picked up three copies of Captain Gray's Company.
FREDERICK W. SKIFF.
The novel and short story stage of Oregon literature was reached much sooner than the same stage in American Literature as it developed on the Atlantic coast. Productivity got started more quickly in Oregon in reference to the progress of American Literature than American Literature had in reference to the progress of English Literature. Fortunately, writers on the Atlantic coast had finally reached the point where they chose local themes before settlement began in the Oregon Territory. The literary immigrants brought this point of view across the plains with them; they did not wait a long period of years before giving up treatment of home scenes for new scenes; accordingly, a native literature sprang up without the long delay that characterized the parent literature.
The first story writer, the first novelist, the first satirist, developed in Oregon with a rapidity in marked contrast to the tardiness of the development of a Charles Brockden Brown, a James Fenimore Cooper, a Washington Irving and an Edgar Allen Poe among men of letters of our Republic on the east coast.
The earliest Oregon novel was published in 1849. The next novel was published ten years later, in 1859, in Oregon itself. In the meantime a local satire had been published in 1852 and a moralistic work of fiction by an early Oregon school ma'am in 1854. And during the fifties, one of the famous Applegate brothers
