—passed a night at the Baileys, "in the delightful society of my worthy host and his amiable wife...."
The latter had come from the States, a member of the Methodist Episcopal mission, and had consented to share the bliss and ills of life with the adventurous Gael ; and a happy little family they were. The next day Mrs. Bailey kindly undertook to make me a blanket coat by the time I should return, and the mission doctor and myself started for the mission.
Her husband, Dr. William J. Bailey, was of good parent age but had been wild in his youth. After an Indian attack on the Rogue River, he made his way to the Willamette Mission more dead than alive. He completed his medical studies under Dr. Elijah White, married her, and became a prominent citizen of the Champoeg district. Whether she was not so happy with him as she seemed to outsiders, or whether it was the general loneliness of French Prairie with its squaw wives that caused her to take up literature as a means of escape, or whether she just liked to write, we find her contributing to the Oregon Spectator almost as soon as it furnished an outlet for local compositions. The poem "May Morning in Oregon", signed m. j. b. and quoted in the chapter "The First Periodical Literature", was by her.
Although she was thus not without experience, Ruth Rover was a good deal of a jump from the short things she had done. Its 96 double-column pages in the small type of the period would be equivalent to a two-hundred-page book of today. Her labor had cruel rewards —completely lost now, even as a literary curiosity, and receiving at the time the uncomplimentary and unchivalrous review of "Squills" in the Oregonian:
This work does great credit to the printers, Messrs. Carter & Austin, the typography being very clear and the cover being neat and immaculate in tint. We seldom read books of feminine production, believing their (the females') province to be darning stockings, pap and gruel, children, cook-stoves, and the sundry little affairs that make life comparatively comfortable and makes them, what Providence designed them, "Help-meets."
But affliction will come upon us, even here in Oregon, where we
are castigated with so many already. It is bad enough to have unjust
