Kelso's literary lioness -- Pioneer descendant Margaret Wallace never forgot her roots
Sunday, May 28, 2006 12:12 AM PDT
By Leslie Slape
Printable version
E-mail this articleNew York City captured Margaret Wallace's imagination, but Kelso never released her heart.
Wallace, 20, and her shockingly short bob arrived in New York in 1926. Like her grandfather, Kelso pioneer Victor Wallace --- "a born genius of diversified talent" --- Margaret Wallace was brilliant, fearless and strong. Shortly after earning her doctorate at Columbia University, she began a successful career as a freelance writer.
In 1943 Wallace returned to Kelso, remaining here until her death in 1978.
Most of her large body of work, written on fragile newsprint for the throwaway medium of newspapers and magazines, has been lost. A few surviving samples show the literary world was richer for her presence.
Her life story shows Kelso was enriched as well.
"She had a very clear sense of Kelso, and appreciated the people who were helping to make it a very real place," said Judith Irwin, who met Wallace in the 1960s when she and her late husband, Richard, moved here to teach at Lower Columbia College.
"She knew the people, she knew the proprietors, she knew who owned what," Irwin said. "She had a sense of rootedness, and that rootedness was something I valued a great deal."
Granddaughter of pioneers
"Margaret was so, so proud of her family," said Jack Arnold of Kelso, who met Wallace when he was young and acquired many of her possessions after she died. He said Wallace loved to tell stories of the area's history.
In "Cabin on the Cowlitz," written in 1968 for the Cowlitz Historical Quarterly and reprinted in 1978, she told the saga of her Scottish grandparents, Victor and Isabella Wallace. They traveled by ox team over the Oregon Trail in 1847.
Isabella Wallace told her children of the six-month trek, "I walked up every hill between here and Missouri carrying one baby in my arms and leading another by the hand."
Along the way the Wallaces met fellow Scotsman Peter Crawford. The Wallaces stayed in Oregon City, while Crawford went north and staked a claim along the Cowlitz River.
The Wallaces were barely settled when Victor joined the California gold rush. He panned $2,000 in gold in three months. Crawford got gold fever, too, and hooked up with Wallace in California. Crawford sang the praises of the Cowlitz until he persuaded Victor to take a look.
Margaret Wallace painted a word-picture of the land that greeted the settlers:
"The banks of the Cowlitz were so heavily wooded, thick with great trees and dense with undergrowth, that it was impossible to get an outlook anywhere, either upstream or down. The men who traveled the river (it was the only way they could travel) called the place Snake Hollow, because there were more garter snakes than anyone could have believed possible. The river itself was beautiful, and the Hudson's Bay Company maintained a little trading post near its mouth at Monticello."
Snakes notwithstanding, Victor Wallace staked a claim in 1850 immediately south of Crawford's claim. Present-day Mill Street in South Kelso marks the border.
Wallace Elementary School, built on the old Wallace claim, was named for Victor.
Late-in-life child
In February 1905, Leander "Lee" Wallace, the fourth of eight children born to Victor and Isabella Wallace, married Caroline "Carrie" Naylor.
Their only child, Margaret, was born Dec. 30, 1905, when Lee was 56 and Carrie 39.
Lee was a prominent Kelso dairy farmer and lived on the original Wallace claim. Two years after his marriage, he sold the land to be developed as city property and invested $50,000 in the new Kelso First National Bank, of which he became the first director and vice president.
Margaret's grandparents had died years before she was born, but her father regaled his little girl with vivid stories of her grandfather's inventions, the trek West and the growth of Kelso. Most of these recollections found their way into "Cabin on the Cowlitz."
Margaret's childhood home, which still stands at 900 S. Pacific Ave., was close to the Cowlitz River, and she spent hours exploring the countryside. The Wallace family also took excursions to the beach, the mountains and the Columbia River. A 1913 photo shows Margaret, 7, her hair in long ringlets, digging for clams at Long Beach.
"She enjoyed being out in the country ... she relished it, its streams, its rocks, its land and its vistas," said Irwin, who went rockhounding with the Wallaces. "She was a poet ... an admirer of scenery, but most particularly ... a person who belongs to that place and can speak to and about it with intelligence, heart and a devotion that not too many people have anymore. So at the core, she was a native --- and she tells it like that."
Finding herself
In 1922, Lee Wallace enrolled his daughter at Reed College in Portland, at the time possibly the most prestigious school in the Northwest.
At Reed, Margaret chopped her hair as short as a boy's and began wearing pants, a rarity for women in those days (when Greta Garbo donned trousers in 1929, she made headlines). Her scandalized father removed her to the University of Washington for her final year, but Margaret always considered herself "educated at Reed."
And she retained her mannish hairstyle and clothing to the end of her life.
Wallace went from the UW to Columbia University, where she obtained her master's degree in comparative literature in 1928. She immediately began freelancing book reviews for several New York newspapers.
Irwin, aware of Wallace's respect for her family, said she believed Wallace lived in New York in part because she was expanding creatively and personally in ways that didn't mesh with the Wallace image --- or with small-town society's expectations of women.
"In New York she could find herself as a creative person, as an independent woman, make her money, support herself and try her skills," Irwin said. "She could have flowered in New York."
In 1929, the year her father died, Margaret had a steady job as a literary critic with the New York Times and produced at least one review a week until the mid-1940s.
She also served as manuscript reader for various book publishers and wrote free-lance articles for the Bookman and Yachting magazines,
On top of all that, she wrote fiction --- romances, confessions and sports stories --- for several pulp magazines, which is how she met her longtime companion, writer/editor Jane Littell.
Wallace "was very well-known" among literati of her day, Dr. Thais Lindstrum, a friend from her New York years, told The Daily News in 1979.
"New York was full of experimentation back then. The arts, theater, literature were all very lively," she recalled. "Margaret's life in New York was mostly professional. She'd entertain frequently at her apartment. We met at one of those parties. But she was usually very busy.
"The Times would give her a book one week, and the review would be due the next. She would plunge into it for three or four days and wouldn't be seen until the review was done."
Return to Kelso
In 1943, Wallace returned to Kelso to care for her ailing mother, who died that October. Wallace actively took up mushroom hunting, jewelry making, history and antique collecting. Like-minded folks found her stimulating.
"She loved ideas," the late Valentine Holden, Kelso librarian, told The Daily News in 1979. "And not just the ideas of today that won't hold water in a few years, but real information."
"She just reeked with knowledge," said Jack Arnold, who said Wallace wrote a large reference book on mushrooms.
"She was very easy to get to know, if you had interests like hers," said Judith Irwin, who shared Wallace's love of poetry, history and rockhounding.
"We would go out rockhounding in the Kalama hills and streams, looking for carnelians," she said. "We'd look for arrowheads along the Columbia, when you could still get to the river from the highway."
Once in Wahkiakum County, when they were looking for a certain kind of agate, they hiked three to five miles in rough country to a remote area by the river. Suddenly the tide came in, cutting off their exit.
"We had no option but to climb the mountain that was behind us," Irwin recalled. "She was a very good climber. We made the rocks and we both were just exhausted. She was physically enormously strong, considering her age." (Wallace was in her mid-50s when Irwin met her.)
She described Wallace as "very muscular. I didn't ever see flab on her. ... She was built like a boy, to be quite frank."
Wallace loved to discuss ideas and had strong opinions, Irwin said.
"She was not demure, and she didn't ... try to get in anybody's face," Irwin said. "She was quietly, very strongly present. She didn't take herself seriously, and she had kind of a quirky sense of humor, so she could see the inconsistences in life and human affairs."
The Irwins often visited the Wallace-Littell home on North Pacific Avenue.
"Jane was just a very strong figure," Irwin said. Born in Ohio, Littell was 17 years older than Wallace and wrote several novels and screenplays in addition to writing and editing romance stories.
"Jane was a very independent person, too, and Margaret respected that in her," Irwin said. "Their love for each other clearly was an admiration for each other."
Final years
Littell died Dec. 23, 1966, at age 78. Wallace, who believed that immortality existed in the way the dead are remembered, treasured many of the things Littell made for her --- dandelion wine, cakes of soap, knitted sweaters.
In 1974, Wallace suffered a stroke, and in the fall of 1978 more seizures came.
Wallace knew that her grandmother had been blind a full decade before her death in 1899. Both her parents were ailing a long time before they died. Now 72, Wallace had no close relatives.
Realizing that her next stroke might debilitate her, and refusing to be forced into a nursing home, Wallace made a decision she foreshadowed 40 years earlier.
In the 1938 story "Beautiful and Bad," the hero tries to explain the philosophy behind euthanasia, saying people misunderstand when they call it "mercy killing."
"It isn't killing!" he says. "Euthanasia is simply mercy, nothing more or less, when a competent doctor finds an extreme case of hopeless suffering where it's brutal to keep the patient living on."
On Oct. 6, 1978, Margaret Wallace wrote a brief obituary, set out her will, dressed carefully in a gray sweater Littell knitted for her, and got in her pickup with a vacuum cleaner hose attached to the exhaust pipe. Then she turned the key.
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