CHAPTER 25
Quickens with old delights:
Balm-shaken fragrance of the rain,
Blue gentian days
And emerald ways
And red-rose nights.
The music of Willamette's falls.
That, lost, still pleads and calls;
The song a thrush left on the hill;
Thro' fir-arcaded silences
The lyric laughter of a rill.
It is said that there was scratched on the metal of Joe
Meek's rifle barrel his name and an encompassing address: "Joe Meek, Rocky Mountains." All the territory claimed by the old trapper and sheriff as his post-office does not belong to Ella Higginson, but a large sector of it does. She belongs intimately to a geographical portion of it, 500 miles north and south and 350 miles east and west, with Alaska thrown in for good measure. She is the poet of the Pacific Coast north of the Siskiyous. She claims two states and is claimed by them—Oregon and Washington.
Oregon has never lost its attitude of possessiveness, though she has lived at Bellingham for 47 years, and she has expressed as follows her own warm acknowledgment of still belonging to the state where she spent her girlhood and young womanhood and where she was married and did her first writing:
I love the twin states of the Northwest next to God and
my country; and if either should cease to claim me as one of her writers my heart would be broken. I lived in Oregon—in the exquisite Grand Ronde Valley, in Portland, on a lovely farm on the Willamette and at Oregon City—from infancy until 1888. I believe that my childhood and girlhood in Oregon influenced my work more than anything
