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All, all in vain
Sweet day, do I entreat
To stay thy winged feet;
The gloom, the cold, the pain,
Gather me back as thou dost pale and fade;
Yet in my heart I make
A chamber for thy sake,
And keep thy picture in warm color laid:
Thy memory, happy day,
Thou can'st not take away.
St. Helens, Or., 1868.
THE POPPIES OF WA-II-LAT-PU.[1]
Between the zones of ice and sun,
Between the east seas and the west,
Where boundless prairies stretch, where run
Great rivers, born about the crest
Of heaven-piercing mountains, hoar
With centuries of unguessed time,
Within whose murky gorges roar
Vast cataracts, whose awful chime
Shakes the tall spires of rock o'erhead,
Where pines hang shivering with dread:
- ↑ Note.—The first white women to cross the continent and settle in Oregon territory were Mrs. Narcissa Prentiss Whitman and Mrs. Eliza Hart Spalding, who with their husbands, Dr. Marcus Whitman and Rev. H. H. Spalding, founded the missions of Waiilatpu and Lapwai, in 1836. Dr. and Mrs. Whitman, with eleven others, fell victims to the fury of the Cayuse Indians of the Umatilla valley in November, 1847. The Protestant missions east of the Cascade mountains were broken up by this tragedy, and never resumed. Various theories of the cause of the massacre are entertained, but my subject deals only with poetical incidents, and is designed as a slight tribute to tthe memory of a heroic woman, whose name must go down in history as the pioneer of women pioneers in the territory north of the Columbia river.
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