S CLARK.
Forty years later, in July, 1901, in a letter to the Ore-
ganion, his daughter wrote again abou...
,
more fully and
more convincingly...
.
From earliest childhood
I
have heard the facts in connection
with the writing of this pioneer book...
.
My father —in 1842 —be
gan The Prairie Flower, incorporating int...
many descriptions
of actual scenes along the way (to Oregon). The real heroine of the
story, as
I
have always heard, was
a
beautiful girl of that migration.
Her real name
I
never knew or have forgotten. My mother described
her as being very graceful and pretty. A well-known spot on the bluff
above the Willamette Falls, called in the book "The Lover's Re
treat", was often pointed out to me as the place where the heroine
and her family camped on their arrival at Oregon City. The tale
was completed here in Oregon, and parts o...
were read at the old
Lyceum in the winters of 1842 and 1843. When the Spectator
was started and the Argus, later, my father was an occasional
contributor, and some of these early effusions are still in his scrap-
book.
My father built the first hotel in Oregon, the Main Street Hous...
Oregon City, and among the many guests came eventually William
Johnson, an old friend of my father's first wife...
.
On account of
the old association, my father always had
a
high regard for Mr.
Johnson, and when, finally, Mr. Johnson decided to return to the
states, he entrusted to Johnson the manuscript of The Prairie
Flower, to do wit...
what he would or could. Mr. Johnson handed
the manuscript to Emerson Bennett, who in his preface does not
claim to have writte...
,
but gives
a
fanciful sketch of the mysterious
stranger who placed the document in his hands, unexpectedly.
The book became
a
great success, but my father never received
a
cent of pay or credit. Oregon was far away then, out of the world,
so to speak, and hard to reach or hear from. As
a
little child
I
heard
all this discussed in the family, but nothing was ever done about it.
In the meantime the book went through several editions, amountin...
all, s...
i
s
claimed, to 100,000 copies, and out o...
,
Bennett won
fame and fortune. No one arising to contest his claim...
always went
under his name, and he added t...
a
weak and inconsequential sequel
(Lent Leoti.)
I
have often heard pioneers sa...
was the reading of
that story that first influenced their fancy for Oregon. Boys, sitting
on the old ox-wagon tongues, rea...
i
n
Missouri, away back in the
fifties, before starting out "across the plains". My fathe...
now in his
ninety-second year and his memory, of course...
failing, but
I
speak
of matters known in our family for years.
The final document in the cas...
what Sidney
