History of Oregon Literature/Chapter 24
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 was that one. Mr. Dye had got a foothold in the practice of the law before the first year was up, so I resigned my position as teacher and went back to my first love-writing.
The rearing of four children, all of whom, like herself, became college graduates, caused little serious drawback to her writing of books. Far from dramatizing the difficulties of a regular practice of literary composition along with the duties of motherhood, she has explained in various interviews how simple it was:
When my children were in sight, I always wrote better. If I didn't know where they were I simply couldn't do anything, and it is a singular fact that some of my best work has been done when there was considerable noise around me. They never caused me much trouble, and, besides, I usually had a girl to help me. Of course, all four of them were not young at once. Ten years separated the first two from the last two. When I had to make a trip to the East—and I had to four times—Mr. Dye's sister always stayed with the family.
Mrs. Dye is small, with thick hair which is now gray, and with keen brown eyes. Her great energy and high spirits are apparent in her quick movements and rapid speech. Her sunny temperament and strong nerves, have kept her from being irritated, as Joaquin Miller was, by the innocent importunities of children, and have allowed her to carry on creative work in the midst of noise or interruptions or any sort of bother. For most, such an environment would have first meant effort with futility; then a short protest of ambition, during which it would have been tough on both the writing and the children; and, finally, resignation, with the customary reminiscent remark on occasions: "I would have been a writer—if." Mrs. Dye, on the other hand, is the author of a few poems, a quantity of miscellaneous articles, a school reader, three novels and a delightful potpourri of historical sketches.
The yellow frame house, with the chocolate-colored trimming, on the northeast corner of Ninth and Jefferson Streets, in Oregon City, is Mrs. Dye's home. In this and for a time in an earlier residence a few blocks further up the hill at about J. Q. Adams Street, she has lived during a period of 45 years, ever since she came to Oregon with her husband in 1890. To find this dwelling the pedestrian may make the first and steepest part of the climb in Oregon City's famous municipal elevator. The route then continues up the hill, through the grounds and by the old home of Dr. McLoughlin. It leads around another small hill, over a little freshet hurrying down to the Willamette, and across two of the streets of the presidents to a third. That is Jefferson Street. And there is her home. It is built on a slight slope and overlooks the town of Oregon City. On each side of the residence are cherry trees recurrently proclaiming spring with their bloom. In season two rows of daffodils nod in the front yard.
That house was the birthplace of the Gladstone Park Chautauqua, which for many years played an important part in the cultural life of Oregon. "A group of eager young people met there and formed the first Oregon City Chautauqua reading circle, which grew a year later into the summer assembly."
Mrs. Dye's accomplishments, in conjunction with household cares, are all the more impressive because her novels are not of a nature that could merely be imagined, lock, stock and barrel, out of her head. They are historical romances which required a vast amount of research. Of her method of writing and of her need of a factual basis, she has said:
Writing is like any other business. I don't need any inspiration to write. If I have the facts I can write—I just have to have something to say. I never write far into the night like some writers when they are "in the mood," because, if I do, I am all worn out the next day. Yet, when I read back over some of the writings of my earlier years, I feel that I must have been almost inspired. I do not understand how I could write so well.
More than 2500 letters have been accumulated by her "through her investigation into sources for her various books." These have been well received nationally as well as locally, their total sales running into many thousands of copies. Dr. George Rebec, dean of the graduate division of the State System of Higher Education, says that her books were an influence in bringing him from Michigan to Oregon.
She herself came to the state while it still retained many pioneer aspects and still had a numerous pioneer population in whose retrospect were the oxen and alkali of the Oregon Trail. Still living contemporaneously with her in Oregon City were those who had known the great figures of the very beginnings of the Oregon Country—John McLoughlin, Peter Skene Ogden, Peter Burnett, Jesse Applegate, Joe Meek and Jason Lee, their very names onomatopoetic of wilderness deeds.
She came to a town in which Harriet Prescott Spofford and Edwin Markham had been born; from which Ella Higginson had but recently moved away; upon the streets of which the author of The Prairie Flower was still a familiar figure. Her neighbors had recollections such as Hubert Howe Bancroft came all the way from San Francisco with an amanuensis to get; the history of a frontier conquest was in their memories and upon their tongues; and biography, rich, intimate and of varying mood, was among them a common topic: the pretensions of black Anderson Winslow or Winslow Anderson, the come-hither look of Solomon Smith's magnetic squaw, the sad declining years of the imperious McLoughlin, spent as by a sleepwalker—"a mighty somnambulist in a vanished dream."
This was all about her, in all its color and stimulus, with clues of more to be had elsewhere by one trained in the finding of facts. She had her husband, and to her two children two more in time were added, but she had a master's degree and she had always wanted to write. The affirmatives in the situation were indeed dominant. So, as clients came to her husband's law office, she resigned her place at the Barclay School and began to write. Her subject was Oregon and in all her books it has never been anything else.
That pathos in the idiom that told about McLoughlin's final days, his gold-headed cane no longer a scepter, first touched her interest and her sympathy, and first caused her to recognize that here ready for art to mold into form was the raw material of literature.
In this way it happened that her first book was about McLoughlin. It was completed four years after she reached Oregon City but was not published until ten years after she reached it.
It was called McLoughlin and Old Oregon. A Chronicle. It was a book of 43 chapters and 381 pages, and was finally published in 1900 by A. C. McClurg & Company of Chicago. Some man on the editorial staff of that firm possessed a surer judgment of manuscripts than most editors of his time. Except for him, two of Oregon's most popular novels might never have been published: this book of Mrs. Dye's and The Bridge of the Gods. How it came to be written, how she toiled over it, its long wait, and her discouragement, have been described by her:
Old Dr. McLoughlin was one of the first pioneers I heard of when I came to Oregon and his life seemed so interesting to me that I began to study him. There were old ladies in Oregon City who had known him and I talked with them. I got all the books I could find with anything about him. I did not hurry, but kept up my work, tracing down every new fact I could hear about him.
After I had gathered all my material I wove romance into the stirring events of the early days. I selected my hero and my heroine and then set about writing the book. It was my first experience. Month by month I wrote, rewrote, revised, corrected and thought. I finally completed the book and sent it to Harper's.
Harper's wrote me a very kind letter and said they would publish the book in their magazine if I would cut it up for publication in serial form. Well, I worried and fumed over that for weeks. I just couldn't cut it up. It seemed to me like my whole life was wrapped in those pages. . . .
Finally I took the manuscript and threw it into a bureau drawer and forgot about it.
I said, "What's the use writing, anyway? It isn't appreciated."
I was completely discouraged. For six years my book remained in that bureau drawer.
It happened at the end of six years that an old classmate of mine came out from the East to visit with me and my husband and almost the first thing he said to me was, "I thought you were going to write books?"
I told him I had written a book and had cast it away in the bureau drawer. He asked to see it and I dug it out for him.
He read it over and said he could get a publisher for me, so I told him to take it along. He left here in January, and in June my book was out. You can imagine my gratitude and happiness.
Her second book, Stories of Oregon, was published the same year by The Whitaker and Ray Company of San Francisco as Volume 7 in their Western Series of Readers. Of this and the hard luck that attended it, Mrs. Dye said: Three editions were printed and a fourth was just ready for delivery when the famous earthquake and fire in that city wiped out books, plates, and all. It was a dreadful catastrophe. An order for 600 copies came the very day that we heard of the fire! ... I have always expected to revise and republish this book but I have never gotten around to it.
Two years later A. C. McClurg & Company published The Conquest. The True Story of Lewis and Clark.
She divided its 443 pages into 82 chapters and three books—Book 1, "When Red Men Ruled"} Book 2, "Into the West"; Book 3, "The Red Head Chief." Through the influence of this novel the women of the Northwest erected statues of Lewis and Clark, and Sacajawea. Mrs. Dye has also given an account of this book in her own words:
My thoughts were turned to that memorable Lewis and Clark expedition and I was persuaded by my publishers to weave a story about that. I mixed straining research with family cares in collecting material and getting ready. ... I struggled along as best I could with the information I could get, trying to find a heroine. The publishers wanted the story hurried. I had the dry old Biddle edition, with its skeletons of dry facts concerning the expedition, and worked and worked trying to secure the things necessary for my story. I traced down every old book and scrap of paper, but still was without a real heroine. Finally, I came upon the name of Sacajawea and I screamed, "I have found my heroine."
Then I had Judith, the girl Clark left behind him when he went on the expedition. I then hunted up every fact I could find about Sacajawea. Out of a few dry bones I found in the old tales of the trip I created Sacajawea and made her a real living entity. For months I dug and scraped for accurate information about this wonderful Indian maid. This gave me my heroes and my heroine and after much work and four trips across the continent in search of facts, and information in many of the principal libraries, I set to work. . . .
When I got my manuscript all written I sent it to the publishers and it appeared in an attractive cover. The world snatched at my heroine, Sacajawea. Judith apparently was overlooked. The beauty of that faithful Indian woman with her baby on her back, leading those stalwart mountaineers and explorers through the strange land, appealed to the world.
Her fourth book was McDonald of Oregon. A Tale of Two Shores. This was brought out by A. C. McClurg & Company in 1906. Of this book and her research in connection with it she tells the most interesting story of all:
I turned my attention to another interesting feature of early Oregon. When I was writing on my other books I had occasion often to talk to the old Hudson's Bay men and they would often say, "You ought to see McDonald about that." They said he was at old Fort Colville on the Columbia river. I became interested in this man and I wrote to him, telling him that I planned calling one of my books The King of the Columbia. He wrote back and indignantly informed me that he was the king of the Columbia. And when I heard his story I admitted that he was right.
In one of many letters I received from him he informed me that he had written a journal of his life and experiences and had sent it to a friend in Canada who intended to write a book on it, but apparently had done nothing with it. McDonald said he was coming down to Portland. He died before making the journey. He had told me where the journal was and I set out to try to find it. It was ten years afterwards that I finally got a copy of it and was able to go ahead with my book, McDonald of Oregon.
I wrote and wrote to the man in Canada who had the journal, but could never so much as get a reply. Finally a British official became interested and he told me he'd try to get it. Sometime afterwards I received a message from him that he had secured the book and I told him I would go to Vancouver, B. C, for it. When I got there he refused to let me take the book away, but offered to let me read it.
I knew there was no use in causing trouble, so I sat down to try to copy it off. It was a hopeless task. While I was at work a thought struck me. In the next room was a public stenographer. Perhaps I could engage her to make a copy. I rushed in and she accepted the work and got another girl to help her. We flew to the work. I read the pages over and had the girls copy. Their fingers flew over the typewriter keys for days during all their spare time. The man who had the book knew nothing of my operations, being busy in a session of the Parliament.
Finally I got the copy made and paid the girls a large sum for their services. I then rushed back to Portland, got together my facts and set to the task of writing my book.
The Soul of America. An Oregon Iliad is her latest book. She stoutly denies, though she was 79 when it appeared, that it will be her last. She intends, she says, to continue writing until the end of her life. It was published in 1934 by The Press of the Pioneers, New York. Thirty-four years after her first book was published and 40 years after it was written, she gave the public this one, which has so much freshness and originality that it was received not only as an unusual work to be written by a woman almost 80 but as intrinsically so. It has been already referred to as a delightful potpourri of historical sketches, and that briefly describes it. Her own statements, in each case, have been given in regard to all her other books, and the following is her comment, at less length, on An Oregon Iliad:
This is an Oregon story, but it is much more than that. It reaches back into the origins of Oregonians, and the spirit that brought them here. It is not adventure merely: it is history and it is life.
There was one other book of hers which has never been published. She visited Father Duncan of Metlakahtla, Alaska, and had proceeded far along in a book on him when Arctander's The Apostle of Alaska appeared in 1909. She had no knowledge whatever that this was being written, but even greater than her unexpectedness that anything of the sort should come out by another hand was her surprise at its title, given by a man who also knew nothing of her manuscript. She meant to call hers The Apostle of Alaska!
These books represent the significant and quantitative portion of her literary work, although she has written a few poems, only two of which have become well known: "The Oregon Skylark," and "The Oregon Grape," that was set to music by A. M. Sanders. There is also a pamphlet, now very rare, that she prepared for the University of Oregon Bulletin series—Semi-Centennial History of Oregon, 1896.
Reference to the Macedonian Cry of the Nez Perce's was made in the chapter "Writings of the Missionaries," where it was stated that Willis T. Hawley and George Charles Kastner have written poetical accounts of it. The following selection from The Conquest gives Mrs. Dye's fictionized version of it in prose:
Four Indian Ambassadors
Clark was busily making contracts for saw-mills and cornmills on the Platte and Kansas . . . when one day four strange Indians, worn and bewildered, arrived at St. Louis, out of that West. Some kind hand guided them to the Indian office.
That tunic, that bandeau of fox skins,—Clark recalled it as the tribal dress of a nation beyond the Rocky Mountains. With an expression of exquisite joy, old Tunnachemootoolt, for it was he, the Black Eagle, recognised the Red Head of a quarter of a century before. Clark could scarcely believe that those Indians had traveled on foot nearly two thousand miles to see him at St. Louis. . . .
It did not take long to discover their story. Some winters before an American trapper (in Oregon tradition reputed to have been Jedediah Smith), watched the Nez Perce's dance around the sun-pole on the present site of Walla Walla. "It is not good," said the trapper, "such worship is not acceptable to the Great Spirit. You should get the white man's Book of Heaven."
Voyageurs and Iroquois trappers from the Jesuit schools of Canada said the same. Then Elice, a chief's son, came back from the Red River country whither the Hudson's Bay Company had sent him to be educated. From several sources at once they learned that the white men had a Book that taught of God.
"If this be true it is certainly high time that we had the Book." The chiefs called a national council. "If our mode of worship is wrong we must lay it aside. We must know about this. It cannot be put off." . . .
And so, four chiefs were deputed for that wonderful journey, two old men who had known Lewis and Clark,—Black Eagle and the Man-of-the-Morning, whose mother was a Flathead,—and two young men,—Rabbit-Skin-Leggings of the White Bird band on Salmon River, Black Eagle's brother's son, and No-Horns-On-His-Head, a young brave of twenty, who was a doubter of the old beliefs. . . .
One day they reached St. Louis and inquired for the Red Head Chief.
Very well Governor Clark remembered his Nez Perce-Flathead friends. His silver locks were shaken by roars of laughter at their reminders of his youth, the bear hunts, the sale of buttons for camas and for kouse. . . .
Black Eagle insisted on an early council. "We have heard of the Book. We have come for the Book."
"What you have heard is true," answered Clark, puzzled and sensible of his responsibility. Then in simple language, that they might understand, he related the Bible stories of the Creation, of the commandments, of the advent of Christ and his crucifixion.
"Yes," answered Clark to their interrogatories, "a teacher shall be sent with the Book."