"Winthrop's death was as great a loss to American letters as was that of John Keats to English poetry. He was far ahead of his time in thinking continentally. Cut off before his prime, his books, brilliant as they are, are the books of a young man. But he had vision and power, and had he lived to improve his art, I have always believed that he might have become the strongest, because the most truly American, of our writers." Readers of Books of Old Oregon are all familiar with the early "Canoe and Saddle." It was the only work in lighter vein descriptive of conditions on the ultimate frontier, when we had here a white population vastly outnumbered by the Indians. The new volume will appeal to surviving pioneers, to Native Sons and Daughters, and to all who are genuinely interested in Northwestern history. The original "Canoe and Saddle" tells only of its author's last days in Washington Territory. It recounts his swift trip by boat, with the celebrated Clallam chief, the "Duke of York," from Port Townsend to Fort Nisqually, and thence under other Indian guidance across Naches Pass to The Dalles. For the second part of his journey he had as his guide a treacherous young Indian whom he calls "Loolowcan the Frowsy," but who was in real life, as Mr. Williams discovered from an entry in the old "Journal of Events" kept by the Hudson's Bay Company at Nisqually, no less notorious a character than Qualchen, son of the chief Owhi. Both of these Klickitats, father and son, are remembered as trouble-makers in our territorial history, and both paid with their lives for the parts they took in the great Indian war of 1855-7. The role played by Qualchen in murdering the Indian agent, A. J. Bolon, and thus starting that war, is now well known. It is proof of Winthrop's nerve that even after he saw the shifty nature of his guide, he refused to heed the warnings of Allen and his fellow road-builders, whom he met in the Cascades, but pushed ahead with him over the mountains to the Yakima country, where white men were scarcer even than on the Sound. Later, he may have realized that but for the presence of McClellan's soldiers on the Naches, and for the long arm of the Hudson's Bay Company, which had outfitted him for his trip, he probably would have anticipated the fate of Bolon. But he tells of his adventure as gaily as if he had felt no danger, and with a zest that make his own enjoyment of its incidents contagious. "The Canoe and the Saddle" was the first book to put our Northwestern scenery into literature. Its account of Puget Sound, of the Cascades with their forests, canyons, ranges and snow-peaks, and of the Columbia basin, stamps Winthrop as a true poet and lover of nature. No better descriptive writing has yet been inspired by the Northwest.