"I say, then, without unpardonable boasting, that in my opinion there never in the history of literature was performed so consummate a feat as the gathering, abstracting, and arranging of the material for this History of the Pacific States": (Bancroft's Literary Industries, 581).
The history of no American locality would be considered without some account of its aborigines. The result, then, of this Bancroft plan has been the writing of the History of the Pacific slope of the continent from Bering Sea to Darien, with a History of the Native Races in five volumes as an introduction, and a half dozen volumes of sketches and essays by way of conclusion, in all thirty-nine octavo volumes.
But this work, the greatest of the kind, few if any of whose separate divisions have been superseded by later works has suffered greatly in the estimation of historians because they do not know who is authority for the statements contained in them. Justice to the people of any state or territory whose history appears in this series demands that they should know in whose words it is related. A compliance with the reasonable expectations of the pioneers who contributed books, narrations, and documents to aid in the preparation of a standard history of their respective states calls for a public knowledge of the identity of the writer to the end that the volume in which their chief interest centers be not stigmatized as anonymous. And above all, a conformity with usage, not to mention an observance of the principles of right, requires that the author of finished work published in this series, or any other, should receive public acknowledgment of his labors and whatever of praise or blame is his due.
Ten years ago it was shown in the California press that the Bancroft histories are not the works of the man who claims to be their author. But to say that "The
