CHAPTER 18
Frances Fuller Victor
For there is a perennial nobleness, and even sacredness, in Work. . . . Work . . . is in communication with Nature; the real desire to get Work done will itself lead one more and more to truth, to Nature's appointments and regulations, which are truth.
THOMAS CARLYLE.
For all our changing philosophy in regard to work, it will still establish a fellow-feeling more surely than any of the other shining virtues. It is a magnet to sympathy; it is excelled only by death in its power to disarm criticism. By some mysterious, mesmeric kinship, we are drawn towards the toiler.
In Oregon literature the one who worked the hardest, who labored the longest without ease, was a woman. Mrs. Frances Fuller Victor, who has been often quoted in this book, wrote about the Pacific Coast and Oregon for 39 years, from the time she began in San Francisco in 1863 until she died in a Yamhill Street boarding house in Portland in 1902.
Her industry was accompanied by commensurate ability but did not have commensurate rewards. She was poor and widowed and childless and kinless in the state to which she devoted her abundant energy, to which she gave the first rounded consciousness of its own cultural depth and richness. She who has left recollections of Oregon men and women by the hundred, is herself personally recollected hardly at all in Portland today, and remembrances of her are seldom found in the writings of her contemporaries. She who more than any other one person spent an arduous life gathering and recording the history of Oregon, has herself been neglected by history. In the volumes of
