Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 4.djvu/336

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326
William Alfred Morris.

reference to this he says, "I am told that there is no file of the Rocky Mountain News, or any other early paper I can get. Possibly I may obtain access to one. Still I think we will have stuff enough, all there will be room for. I will then go to Cheyenne to get what I can on Wyoming, and that will finish up the business of gathering for that volume, or any other volume except what the canvassers bring in."

He calls attention to the fact that in the Colorado dictations there is frequently material on Montana, and in the Utah dictations, material on Idaho and Nevada. The reason for this he gives in the typical Bancroft sentence:

"If I strike a man here, as I frequently do, who has been to these other places in early times I follow him up there for all it is worth of course, the same as here."

At Colorado Springs Mrs. Helen Hunt Jackson, author of a Century of Dishonor, asked Mr. Bancroft to adopt her views on the Colorado Indian wars. With reference to this matter, he wrote on October 13th, the day of his departure for Denver, as follows:

"She wishing a thing done would be the very reason I would not do it if I could help it. I speak of it that you may get the work and use the information. I do not care about mentioning her name one way or another in the whole work. She has been polite enough here, although she has a broken leg, but I don't care for her politeness. I should have had fair recognition for the service I did her in the matter of her California articles in the Century which I never got."

Writing subsequently from Denver on November 2d, he says: "Everybody in Colorado, nearly, is against Mrs. Jackson on what some call the Chevington massacre. That side don't call it a massacre, but a fight. I should give their side in full, then say some few took exception