who tell about the old Oregon Trail with its long segments in several states, and who give Oregon consideration in accounts of the general westward movement.
The members of the sixth group are presented individually in this chapter, with biographical notes and selections from their writings.
Oregon historians have not been wholly dispassionate either in the way they have handled history in their works or in their personal attitude towards the events and actors of history. The past, to one who delves in it steadily, becomes a vivid world and its characters stimulate strong likes and dislikes through the close association with them that research affords. Those who have taken sides, sometimes with a good deal of emotion, would make a long list. The poets have been a loving brotherhood compared with the historians. Frederick V. Holman, now dead, author of Dr. John McLoughlin, the Father of Oregon and at one time president of the Oregon Historical Society, was a fulsome admirer of the old fur king and contributed to the Oregonian a savage attack on R. C. Clark when the latter presented some facts that he had very definitely found. Other chroniclers have been at outs with each other on the subject of Jason Lee, and several of them have engaged in a regular melee over the Whitman myth. Frances Fuller Victor and W. H. Gray did not like each other, and Mrs. Victor and Hubert Howe Bancroft, after she had worked for him a dozen years, ended up in a newspaper controversy over who wrote several of the Bancroft histories.
