Frederic Balch's dreamy mythology came to define wilderness Oregon

Here is a pop quiz for Oregon history enthusiasts, and yes, it’s a trick question! But, humor me: What comes to your mind when I mention the name “Balch”?

For most of us, it’s the sordid, nasty tale of Danford Balch, the first Portland resident to be hanged for murder, a fate he earned in 1858 by reacting to his stepdaughter’s elopement by chasing the young couple down with a shotgun and murdering his new son-in-law on the Stark Street Ferry.

And yeah, that’s one way to make it into the history books!

Half a century ago, though, most Oregonians would instantly recognize the Balch name from a more benign, and certainly a more important, historical character, who probably was distantly related to Danford — Frederic H. Balch, the author of what may actually be the most important and influential work of literature in Oregon history: a misty, mythical novel titled The Bridge of the Gods: A Romance of Indian Oregon, published in 1890.

In part, the reason Frederic’s name is so seldom recognized today is that he died young. The Bridge of the Gods was supposed to be Volume One of a six-part saga telling the story of the Oregon country. But tuberculosis claimed him when he was just 29 years old, leaving the great work unfinished.

Balch was born in 1861 in Lebanon. His father, James A. Balch, was a lawyer by training, and had a law degree from Wabash College in Indiana; so, it being the 1860s in a frontier state where schools were few and basic, he home-schooled the youngster. His mother, Harriet Maria Snider Balch, was a devoted and fundamentalist Methodist, and the family was brought up in a classic Great Awakening style, with most of its entertainment coming in the form of periodical tent revivals.

When Frederic was 10, the family moved to what today is Goldendale, up in the Washington Territory. They ended up settling in the town of Lyle, Washington, and that is more or less where Frederic spent his teenage years.

In the late 1870s, James had a nervous breakdown, abandoned his family, and moved back to Indiana to live with his sister. Young Frederic was forced to pitch in and support his family, which he did working as a laborer on the railroad projects of Henry Villard’s Oregon Railway and Navigation Company. He’d work a 10-hour shift, row home, and put in another five or six hours writing and studying.

From nearly the moment he was able to hold a pen, Frederic was driven to write. He packed a lot of action into his short life, and wore a number of different hats; but he never stopped writing. At one point, he told his sister Gertrude that his North Star was a goal to do for Oregon what Sir Walter Scott had done for Scotland — to, as he put it in one of his letters, “make the splendid scenery of the Willamette the background for romance full of passion and grandeur.”

He endured at least one setback to this goal when, in 1882, he converted to Christianity, following the hard-shell Methodist tradition of his mother. Before that date, he’d been a confirmed agnostic, tagging along with all the camp revivals out of family obligation but not taking them too seriously.

After his conversion experience, full of enthusiasm, he seized his latest draft of his first novel — which at the time was named Wallula, although later he’d rename it The Bridge of the Gods — and burned it, before the horrified eyes of his mother and sister.

Luckily, he soon came to his senses, no doubt reasoning that the Lord would not have given him such literary abilities if employing them was a sin; and so, over the following years, in between the work he had to do to support his family, he finished a fresh draft and published it.

At the same time, he transitioned into the ministry, becoming in 1887 an ordained Congregational minister and developing a sort of kinder, gentler style of Protestant Christianity that was a lot easier for a sensitive spirit like Frederic to live with.

Gertrude, Frederic’s sister, said he had been fascinated by Indian life and legends since early boyhood. Their father, James, had been in the Indian Wars in the 1850s and encouraged this. In between all the other obligations of his life, the lad journeyed extensively up and down the Columbia, tracking down elderly Indians and interviewing them.

No village, Gertrude said, was too remote for him to take the time to journey there, if “at the end of the trail he found a representative of some old tribe, who remembered ... legends told by his forefathers.”

Also, Frederic’s respect and reverence for the Indian cultures was very unusual for his time, and his friend and fellow Congregationalist George Himes confirms this. This sympathy for the Indians and reverence for their traditions actually may have caused some hard feelings among the neighbors. A case in point might be Frederic’s childhood crush, Genevra Whitcomb, a neighbor’s daughter in Lyle.

Frederic proposed to Genevra, and she turned him down but they decided to remain friends. After that, he seems to have been well on his way to getting over it, but then she got pneumonia and died; and he, as the only lay preacher in town, was more or less forced to officiate at her funeral.

Gertrude said the funeral traumatized him badly, and blighted all his prospects of future happiness. His natural sadness at the death of a friend was transformed into something much more intense by the sight of her pale, cold face.

“(He) was absolutely sincere when he said he no longer loved Genevra and she meant no more to him than any other of his friends,” Gertrude wrote, in a letter in 1949. “I am positive if he had not been compelled, as it were, to officiate at her funeral, and to look upon her dead face, that the remainder of his life would have been a far different story and a much happier one.”

Genevra’s family, interviewed years later after Frederic was famous (and long since dead), spoke about him with a strange bitterness. Interviewed by biographer Wiley in 1945, Genevra’s sister Elizabeth said he was lazy and a lousy preacher, adding that the whole Balch family was “mentally affected.”

“The world would be better off without people like that,” she added, to Wiley’s apparent astonishment; it’s certainly in questionable taste to say such things about the dead, and Wiley noted that “No other person of the many I interviewed made any disparaging comments about the Balches.”

The book itself was influential in ways that still resonate in Columbia River culture to this day. It’s more or less a pseudomythology story of a proud Cascade prince named Wy’East and a Klickitat maiden named Loowit, who are in a sort of Romeo-and-Juliet relationship as members of warring tribes. Set in the 1600s, it includes Indian gods that walk the Earth, crossing from one side of the river to the other across the Bridge of the Gods, which Balch envisioned as a great stone archway, and a Calvinist minister in New England who is summoned to Oregon by a vision.

The book sort of opened up a new genre of romantic fiction around the intersection of Indian culture, frontier European-American culture, and the spiritual aspects of the magnificent scenery and sublime forces drenching the Columbia River Gorge. In a real sense, it set the tone of what home looked and felt like for new generation of Oregonians.

After his death in 1891, some of Balch’s other works got published, including a novel titled Genevieve: A Tale of Oregon and a short story, “How a Camas Prairie Girl Saw the World.”

“Although he did not live to see his 30th birthday, Frederic Balch was a major regional writer who contributed significantly to Oregon’s sense of itself,” historian Stephen Harris writes.

He also was the first Northwest writer to take Indians and their legends seriously and cast Indians as major characters in a novel.

One of the most interesting things about the life of Frederic Balch is the dilemma historian Harris identifies: He was a sensitive, gifted writer placed in a region of sublime natural beauty that would have drenched him in spiritual food, and yet there was bread that had to be earned and chores that had to be done, and no way to access the kind of culture that Eastern writers like Hawthorne and Poe (or even Southern authors like Mark Twain) could take for granted. It was a bit like being chained to an oar in a Roman galley gliding majestically past the Amalfi Coast, unable to fully appreciate or enjoy the intellectual opportunities of the setting.

“The splendid wilderness that inspires the creative impulse also inhibits its fulfillment,” Harris writes. “Cultural isolation, poverty, hard physical labor, and a dearth of educational opportunities made the 19th-century frontier a harsh and unforgiving environment, to which the Muse was typically a stranger.”

Frederic Balch was able to overcome these headwinds by, basically, working himself to death to make of himself a rare exception to that iron rule. In doing so, he gave us an emotional snapshot of Oregon as it was in the age when everyone spoke Chinuk and the rivers flowed wild and free swarming with salmon.

He deserves a better fate from history than to be remembered as a guy with the same surname as a drunk shotgun-wielding Portland murderer.

(Sources: “Frederic Homer Balch and the romance of Oregon history,” an article by Stephen L. Harris published in the Winter 1996 issue of Oregon Historical Quarterly; The Granite Boulder, a book by Leonard Wiley published in 1970 by the author)

Finn J.D. John teaches at Oregon State University and writes about odd tidbits of Oregon history. His most recent book, Bad Ideas and Horrible People of Old Oregon, published by Ouragan House last year. To contact him or suggest a topic: [email protected] or 541-357-2222.