County at Cincinnati, later called Eola. Then she married,
lived for four years on a Clackamas County donation claim,
and five years on a Yamhill County farm, where between
times of the drudgeries she referred to in her preface,
she wrote Captain Gray's Company. It was opportunely
finished, for the small amount of leisure she had somehow
found and had so profitably used, was soon to be taken from
her with a completeness beyond her gallant energies to con
trol. The farm was lost, her husband was crippled in an
accident; she had him and her children to support. She
taught school and kept boarders at Lafayette. Later at Al
bany she taught school for a year and then ran a millinery
store for six years.
In the meantime she had become active for woman's suf
frage in Oregon. She bought a printing plant in Portland,
and, in May, 1871, started the New Northwest, a weekly
journal, which she continued for 16 years. It was a vigorous
champion of woman's rights, but was also an able and im
portant literary paper. She was a friend of Belle W. Cooke,
the Salem poet, and sided with Minnie Myrtle Miller in
the public airing of her shattered romance with Joaquin. To
the civic and cultural development of Oregon her contribu
tions were great and her leadership extended without fatigue
over a long period of time. She was the mother of six chil
dren. One of her sons was state printer of Oregon and one
was president of the University of Montana. She died in
Portland on October 11, 1915, at the age of 81.
Mrs. Frances Fuller Victor said of Captain Gray's Com
pany that the incidents of the book "showed little imagina
tion and a too literal observation of camp life in crossing the
plains. Mrs. Duniway did better work later, although her
abilities lie rather with solid prose than fiction." In addition
to numerous addresses and articles, her later books were
My Musings, 1875; David and Anna Mats on, 1876; From
the West to the West, 1905; and Pathbreaking: An Autobi
ographical History of the Equal Suffrage Movement in Pa
cific Coast States, 1914.
