022.34, nearly all of which was bequeathed to Mary Ashe Miller, "a friend for a score of years". To his parents he gave his personal belongings, including his library. Nothing went to his divorced wife, "the reason given being that a property settlement had been made prior to the drawing up of the will."
That settlement she had and, much more than that, the recollection of several happy years, happy for him as well as for her. She married him when he was 30, five years after Joe Levinson had printed his first story in the Oregonian. Together they had worked in the editorial rooms of the Pacific Monthly, and she had pictured Lincoln County so seductively that he wished to go there, eager only to write and wanting only her companionship. She has testified to the gladness of those days and he has left the following testimony in the Foreword to The Land Claimers:
Foreword: To My Wife
We've emerged from the old Ellsworth Trail upon the windy uplands of the Coast for the last time. The forest has closed over the life that we used to know along the Siletz, and our friends have all "packed out". But from the Atlantic to the Pacific, the Land Claimers—scattered forever—remember the days when the pack trains made the trail from the Agency to Otter Rock, when the settler's ax echoed down the canyons. Now the forest ranger, from the high ridges, looks down on deserted cabins and shrinking clearings, and knows each place by its old name, but does not know, nor care, where the settler has gone. So I have brought some of us back, once more, in this book, to live over again for a little the life we knew along the Siletz River.
SAN FRANCISCO, JULY 1, 1910.
