Novels
FOREWORD TO TALL BRIGADE
Copyright, 1956, by Binfords & Mort
The Tall Brigade is a fictional biography based on many of the events in the life of a trapper and guide, the step-son of John McLoughlin, who once ruled in Oregon like a king.
The Cherokees have a legend of tall people, the Nicotani, which great chiefs of the West all knew. Medicine men fostered many of their secrets. The passwords which saved Tom McKay have doubtless saved many lives in their time. I have tried to imagine after reading old letters and aged copies of the Oregon Spectator and while I walked through the lanes of Scappoose, what Tom's friends thought about life and religion at that period.
Mr. Watt, of Scappoose, a notary public who could remember some of Tom's friends, told me that Tom McKay has been his hero for thirty years. Mrs. Watt says that the marks of the McKay brigade riding out to recover Jedediah Smith's stolen furs are still there. Myra Helm, whose mother, a Sager, survived the Whitman massacre, was a friend of Doctor William McKay, Tom's son and Timmee's.
Strange to hold John Sager's bullet pouch while reading the beaded letters, remembering how much the boy had needed the denied bullets . . . and then to see Narcissa Whitman's tiny brown-gold braid under glass at the Civic Auditorium Museum in Portland.
It is said that Tom McKay's body lies in an unmarked grave at Scappoose where the traveler may find a statue erected in his honor, but in the minds of many Oregonians who remember tales of his strength, his daring and his skill with the "gingerbread gun," he will continue to live for a long time.
HERMIA FRASER
Printed and bound in the United States of America,
by The Metropolitan Press, Portland, Oregon
FOREWORD TO ONE TOUCH OF MURDER
The little town of Caselton was a quiet metropolis, in which the latest gossip about a new hat or a new beau held a larger place in the public interest than government policy or international affairs. As was appropriate, the public library was the quietest place in town. So it was not only shocking but incongruous that the drab, middle-aged spinster, Isabelle Waldron, should be found dead in the stacks.
If young Sue Sloan, who worked in a hat shop and lived in Mrs. Bromley's boarding-house, hadn't been on the trail of the same book for which Miss Waldron was looking, she wouldn't have been the one to find the dead woman and, by that fact, have become a murder suspect. Nor would Sue have had a better education in rare poisons and secret motives than could have been acquired by a star pupil in a post-graduate course in homicide.
Copyright 1953 by Arcadia House
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 53-8557
Printed in the United States of America