Poet Sam Simpson's drunken quest for lost-cabin gold: Part 2 of 2

By 1899, when Samuel L. Simpson’s drinking problem finally got around to killing him, he was essentially Oregon’s poet laureate — the Stewart Holbrook of the 1800s. But thirty years earlier, he was just another fresh-faced lawyer, just out of Willamette University’s law school. He’d moved to Portland to open his practice, and now he was sitting at his desk in his brand-new office in Portland, sipping a glass of rye and waiting for his first client to walk in the door. No one did. There were just too many lawyers in Portland in 1868. Fresh out of law school, with no social connections, Sam just didn’t have a chance. But finally the door did open, and somebody stepped inside. It wasn’t a client, though. It was one of the other residents in the boardinghouse he was staying in, a greenhorn from Chicago named Ted Harper. And Harper had a proposition: He wanted Sam to close up his law office and come to Southern Oregon with him. They would spend the summer hunting for a certain ruined cabin with an immense hoard of gold buried inside, deep in the wilderness south of Jacksonville, in a hidden valley boxed in by steep cliffs. Only problem was, Harper didn’t know exactly where the valley was. It was possible that they’d search all summer and get nothing for their pains. But Harper did have a letter giving partial directions to the cabin, which his cousin — who'd built the cabin and buried the gold — had dropped dead in the middle of writing. Simpson agreed to the scheme. He was brand new in the law business, had no clients and very few prospects; a summer in the woods, a possible fortune – sure, why not? (Siskiyou Mountains, Josephine County; 1860s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/20-05b.sam-simpson-lost-cabin-gold.html)