Frances Fuller Victor, Mother of Oregon History
Part I of a short series for International Women’s Day 2018: Oregon’s rich history of women in leadership
Oregon is largely defined as a place settled by pioneers.
There are, of course, many shameful aspects of our history, perhaps most significantly in the theft of land and natural resources from the natives of the region; the state’s avoidance of the slavery question by simply denying access to African Americans (see, e.g., the misanthropic “Free State Letter” of Judge George H. Williams in 1857); the mistreatment of Chinese laborers in railroad construction; the incarceration of Japanese Americans like Min Yasui during World War II, and the anti-gay efforts of the Oregon Citizens Alliance in the 1990s.
But alongside our legacy of social injustices, we also have a strong legacy of women in leadership. For International Women’s Day, I’d like to highlight a few of the women I’ve come to know through my efforts as a volunteer (and amateur!) Wikipedia writer in the last decade. Along the way, I’ll also try to illustrate how Wikipedia work can play an important role in the public’s access to information about such women.
The Mother of Oregon History
Perhaps my favorite figure in Oregon history is Frances Fuller Victor, a prolific novelist and historian of the late 19th century. Born in New York, Victor had made her mark as a pioneer of the “dime novel” genre long before she arrived in Oregon. But as she got to know the Pacific Northwest, largely through her acquaintance with mountain man and politician Joe Meek, Victor came to realize that the region’s history had not been properly documented. So she set about making a serious study of Oregon history, earning the interest of San Francisco historian Hubert Howe Bancroft, who hired her after her husband’s death to write many of the 39 volumes he envisioned for a series on the history of the Pacific Coast.
Victor, along with Bancroft’s other “assistants,” was not properly credited for her work — which was generally published under Bancroft’s own name. This slight was acknowledged in her lifetime, but even so, it surely contributed to her financial difficulties later in life. The Oregon Legislature later commissioned her to to write a history of the Indian Wars, and the nascent Oregon Historical Society paid for her contributions in the first years of its Quarterly, which was apparently uncommon.
I have enjoyed learning about Victor through writing her Wikipedia biography in recent years, which has brought me to read some of her work, and dig up some interesting coverage of her life and work. I am pleased to have found (and republished) several portraits of her buried in scans published by the Internet Archive, which require a bit of dedication to extract at full resolution.
I’ve also republished much of her work on Wikisource. While much of her work is available at the Internet Archive and via Google Books, Wikisource transcriptions are more useful and accessible in a variety of ways. The Wikisource versions are plain web pages, fully proofread (containing fewer errors than machine-transcribed works), and more accessible to web search and reuse than PDF files. Wikisource also permits downloading in the popular ePub format, making the books and articles easier to read on tablets and e-readers.
My own life has a similarity to Victor’s: I was born on the east coast, moved to Oregon, and then spent some years in San Francisco before returning. The passion Victor had for recording Oregon’s history still resonates for me today; California, a far more populous state with a massive economy, has received a great deal more attention from historians than Oregon has. I like to believe that our work on Wikipedia honors her legacy, even if none of us working on it can hope to match her prolific and expert contributions. And of course, the Historical Society and Quarterly she played such a strong role in launching do last to this day, and have produced the Oregon Encyclopedia, a valuable resource for anyone interested in the state’s rich history.
I hope you share my interest in this important historian of the Northwest, and take the opportunity to explore some of her work.
