ness of modern affairs, has had a vigorous and sustained importance.
Oregon history has been and is being written mainly by six groups: 1, by the pioneers themselves; 2, imaginatively by the fiction writers and poets; 3, by college and university students, particularly those working for advanced degrees in the history departments; 4, by professional people who write it on the side, mostly in their own fields, and by gifted amateurs who study and write it for recreation; 5, by professional historians, graduate students, journalists and an occasional fiction writer in other states; 6, and by the especially important group described in this chapter.
An extended reference has been made in an earlier part of this book to the pioneers as prolific recorders of the history they made, while they were making it or in retrospect afterwards. In Bancroft's History of Oregon there is the following statement about them:
That there was rather more than a usual tendency to authorship among the early settlers and visitors to this portion of the Pacific Coast is true only because of the great number of unusual circumstances attending the immigration, the length of the journey, the variety of scenery, and the political situation of the country, which gave them so much to write about that almost without intention they appeared as authors, writers of newspaper letters, pamphleteers, publishers of journals, petitioners to congress, and recorders of current events.
Oregon history, attractively garmented with fiction
and poetry, has reached thousands of people through
the novels about Oregon, notably those of Sidney Walter Moss, Abigail Scott Duniway, Frederic Homer
