Edwin Markham
Published: 2015-06-25
Total Pages: 482
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Excerpt from California the Wonderful California is well-nigh as familiar to me as my garden paths: I spent forty years and more within her boundaries. I was there as a barefoot boy, picking wild strawberries in the fields near Vacaville, herding sheep on the Suisun Hills, plowing the little valleys between the ridges for wheat and barley, and following the thrashing machine in the time of the harvesting. There also I made my way through school and college, and spent my after years in the service of education and literature. My traditions are all of the Far West. In April, 1847, my parents, with all their worldly goods loaded on an ox-team, crept out of Michigan, headed for Independence, Missouri, where they joined an ox-train that was going overland to Oregon. After many adventures in the wilderness, they trailed down the Columbia River in October, and found their way into the Willamette Valley. My first home was in Oregon City, in a huge brown house under the great bluff. My eye has a keen memory of the white rush of the Falls, and my ear has a clear memory of their eternal thunder. I have also an early and vivid recollection of having been lifted up in the sanctuary of a church in that city and of looking down on the dead face of the famous Dr. John McLoughlin, "the Father of Oregon." I can never forget the hush and the solemn pomp: it was my first sense of the dark mystery of death. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.