CHAPTER 20
Edwin Markham
But because our favored city, while 'twas just a frontier town,
Was the place our God selected when He thought to send you down
To live on earth.
F. W. PARKER OF OREGON CITY.
Edwin Markham is not in the true sense an Oregon poet. Some citizens of the state have dramatically claimed him at various times, and he seems to have been pleased that the claim was made, particularly that in 1921 it was made to the extent of crowning him poet laureate. His poems have not been about Oregon, and he left the state permanently at the age of five, his Oregon City birth and residence up to that age having a limited chance to influence him.
Oregon, however, has undoubtedly contributed a flavor to him beyond what would be expected of a place where he merely spent his first five years of existence. Possibly it can be accounted for by the fact that he was a precociously impressionable child, but it is more likely that Oregon seeped into him vicariously through his mother. She spent ten years in Oregon, from 1847 to 1857, and that frontier decade must have been the most vivid period of her life. The reasonable explanation is that her Oregon experiences became his with great verisimilitude, all the more so because she was poetic herself and he was an imaginative, poetic boy.
In any case, Oregon City takes much pride in having been his birthplace. An erroneous report was circulated in the early part of 1935 that he was born on a farm on Abiqua Creek, which caused the Oregon
