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W.S. Walker (ND-ND) http://tinyurl.com/WWalker

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Our Redwood Cabin

From Glimpses of Hungryland, or California Sketches, 1880. Read Online

Reader: Daniel Maloney

It's only human to color our memories with sentiment, especially when those memories are set within the sylvan glades of California's redwood country.

Unsatisfied with life in the midwest, W. S. Walker left Illinois for California in 1864 and eventually spent time in the redwood forests near the Russian River, the setting for Walker's anabashedly sentimental poem, "Our Redwood Cabin."

How brightly it gleams, that scene in the forest,
As old recollections float up from the past;
The tall forest trees standing thick all around it,
Whose shadows all day were over us cast.
The Kanion below, and the brook that wound through it,
Its clear waters serving in place of a well,
And close by the stream, to the right as you'd view it
Was our cabin of Redwood that stood in the dell.
The old wagon road that wound through the deep valley—
The young evergreens springing up by the way,
Have left in my heart a lasting impression
That shines from the past like a bright summer day.
The bridge made of bark, and the old tree so near it,
Uprooted by storms—lying just as it fell,
Yet dearer than all, I shall ever revere it,
Is the old Redwood cabin that stood in the dell.

W. S. Walker's "Our Redwood Cabin," patterned after "The Old Oaken Bucket," was included in his 1880 memoir, Glimpses of Hungryland.