Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/444

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CHAPTER 24

Eva Emery Dye

Sacajawea, the heroine of this book, was hailed as a second Pocahontas, and the foremost sculptors of America have vied in chiseling statues in her honor. First, Bruno Louis Zimm . . . was commissioned to prepare a statue for the St. Louis Fair in 1904. . .. A second statue, cast in bronze, by Alice Cooper . . . was unveiled at the Lewis and Clark Fair in July, 1905.... A third statue, to which the legislature of North Dakota appropriated $15,000 , was modeled by Leonard Crunelle, and unveiled in May, 1910 ... at Bismarck.

JOSEPH GASTON.


From the publication of her first book in 1900 to the publication of her latest in 1934, when she was 79, Mrs. Eva Emery Dye of Oregon City has made notable contributions to Oregon literature.

Her writings have consisted of poetry, songs and history but mostly of historical novels.

She was born in Illinois on July 17, 1855. In 1882 she was graduated from Oberlin College and soon afterwards married a classmate, Charles Henry Dye. Later she resumed her studies in the same school, where, in 1889, the same year her husband was admitted to the bar, she received her master's degree. Greek was her major study and the reading of the old classics one of her chiefest delights.

In 1890 they removed to Oregon, two children having been born during the eight years of their marriage. They located at Oregon City where he began the practice of law and where, pending the appearance of clients, she taught in the old Barclay School. How badly their family budget required her to teach she herself has told in vivid remembrance of it:

I secured a position as teacher, and I don't mind telling you that the last dollar of our carefully hoarded savings was gone before I received my first check as teacher. Never before or since in our experience was a check so welcome as