

Frederic Homer Balch lived a brief life (1861-1891) rife with challenging decisions. Would he live in Oregon or Washington? Would he be a preacher or writer? Would he support or criticize American Indians? Would these hesitations lead to failures, or could he move beyond the barriers that confronted him and find success?
Fortunately for Balch, despite these vexing questions, he was able to live a back-and-forth, but memorable, short life. Most importantly, he wrote the noteworthy novel The Bridge of the Gods (1890), which early on attracted attention and remained in print for more than a century. Some literary historians consider it the most important novel of the Pacific Northwest written during the 19th century.
BOOKS OF THE WEST
Although Balch spent his first years in rural Oregon, his parents moved the family to south-central Washington during his preteen years, retreated to Oregon, then returned to Washington, where Balch lived into his 20s. While losing his father to dementia, young Balch worked hard as a farmer and on a railroad to support his family — on both sides of the Columbia River.
Most of all, however, Balch dreamed of becoming a writer and began to draft a work of fiction. But conversion at a revival meeting led to his quick conviction that he had to abandon writing and become a minister. Balch concluded that a minister could not be an author of fiction and threw his manuscript into fire. A few years later, he realized he could both pastor and write. He drafted another novel, allowed it to rest, and moved on to still another project.
After these years of ups and downs in his writing and his inability to complete a manuscript, Balch, in the late 1880s, finally began what became The Bridge of the Gods. The novel proved to be an illuminating product of earlier influences shaping Balch. Here was a work of fiction illustrating his long interest in history and historical fiction. Plus, the novel showcased Balch’s interests in the romantic writings of earlier British and American authors. The book also revealed how much Balch had studied the cultural life of Indigenous Americans in the Pacific Northwest.
The novel’s plot is organized around the life of a New England minister feeling called to be a missionary to tribes in Oregon and Washington. The central line of action brings Cecil Grey, the pastor, to the tribes scattered through western Washington and along the Columbia. Soon after moving to Washington, Balch became fascinated with American Indian culture and began to interview dozens of Native Americans living nearby. He learned a good deal about their history, culture, and lore, including the belief in the previous existence of a huge land bridge over the Columbia River near modern-day Cascade Locks. This was “the bridge of the Gods,” which made it into the title and pages of Balch’s novel.
Balch unifies Christian and Native cultures by depicting Pastor Grey falling in love with Wallulah, the daughter of Chief Multnomah of the Willamette tribe. This romance brings into the novel page-after-page of Indigenous gatherings, festivities, and beliefs. Because Wallulah has an Indian father and an Asian mother, racial themes play a significant role in Balch’s story.
Even though Balch wrote his novel during the rise of American literary realism — seen, for example, in the writings of William Dean Howells and Henry James — his approach drew on the work of romantic writers such as the British Sir Walter Scott and the American Nathaniel Hawthorne. Writers in the Pacific Northwest, including Balch, were slow to adopt the new American realism, staying instead linked to earlier 19th-century stylistic approaches.
As Balch was completing The Bridge of the Gods, he decided, as a pastor, he needed more theological training and went to California to study at Pacific Theological Seminary (later renamed Pacific School of Religion). While at seminary he was finally able, after several rejections, to get the small Chicago firm of A.C. McClurg to publish his novel in late 1890. Balch suffered from tuberculosis, and just weeks after the book appeared, his health crumbled. He returned to his home, was taken to a hospital in Portland, and died on June 3, 1891.

Balch’s new novel attracted considerable attention and did well with reviewers, especially from the 1890s into the 1920s. Leonard Wiley, the author of The Granite Boulder (1970), the only book-length biography of Balch, called the work “the greatest novel that has been written in the Pacific Northwest.” Earlier in the 1930s, Alfred Powers, the leading literary historian of the Pacific Northwest, declared The Bridge of the Gods “the most important Oregon novel in 90 years of Oregon novel writing.” Those who followed these extraordinarily high praises established something of a “Balch myth,” which extended well past World War II. Not until the end of the 20th century did Balch’s novel virtually disappear from the Northwest literary scene.
Although The Bridge of the Gods has not attracted much attention in the past half-century, it is an important work for understanding the development of regional literary history. First, it was the first Northwest fictional work to deal extensively with Indigenous Americans. Second, Balch’s romantic approach represents the ongoing influence of that literary path past 1900 and into the 20th-century Northwest. Finally, Balch’s novel received more attention in the 19th century than any other fictional work in the Northwest.
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