fifty-four pages, bound in paper, and entitled Specimens.
The poet disappeared as quickly as he came, returning to
his mountain home in Canyon City, Grant County, of which
he was the first County Judge.
A year later he emerged once more from his mountain
fastness, came to Portland the second time with a roll of
manuscript, formidable in size and style of writing. This
time he was more ambitious and apparently had an idea that
there would be a demand for his verses. Hence he sought
advice from the principal bookseller of this embryo city
amid the logs and stumps. The locality where we are now
assembled was famous then as a hunting ground and
abounded in game, such as deer, ducks, geese, swans, grouse
and pheasants.
The publisher was S. J. McCormick, and he and Miller
called upon me. An agreement as to style and price being
effected, I finished the volume, setting the type and doing
the press work alone. Thus the poet's second little volume,
entitled Joaquin, Et ...
,
was born. Five hundred copies were
issued and the selling price was one dollar...
the publication
was the source of any income to the author
1
am unable to
say, but
I
do know that
I
was paid for the printing and that
satisfied me that the work possessed merit —
a
poor criterion
to judge by perhaps but one apt to be taken into very serious
consideration by the printer wh...
struggling to establish
a
successful business. The poet did not get
a
very cordial re
ception at the hands of the newspaper critics of the early
days, at least in this part of the country.
Hence, in the early seventies h...
foun...
London,
where...
I
mistake not, his third volume, Song...
the Si
erras, was issued. This work struck
a
popular accord and the
reviewers gave
a
kind mention for the most part, and in this
way our author came to have
a
reputation as
a
true poet
from the "Far West." He had to go to the "Far East"
—
to
go to the literary center of the earth before he was discov
ered. The utterances of that man who spake as never man
spake before, who said nearly two thousand years ago that
