Oregon: Her history, her great men, her literature/Eva Emery Dye
Many a splendid historic fact has been recorded by the swift-flowing pen of Mrs. Eva Emery Dye, of Oregon City, who has undertaken for Oregon the kind of literary service that Sir Walter Scott performed for his own loved Caledonia. She has preserved much of the early folk lore of the Northwest in her four books—"The Stories of Oregon" published by Whitaker and Ray in 1900 (the plates of which were destroyed in the San Francisco earthquake and fire); "McLoughlin ond Old Oregon," in 1900; "The Conquest, the Story of Lewis and Clark," in 1902; "McDonald of Oregon," in 1906; all of which were published by A. C. McClurg and Company, of Chicago. These books were at once taken into the great libraries of the country where they drew attention to the Northwest.
Like Ruth of old, Mrs. Dye is a busy gleaner, quick to perceive golden grains in the great outlying fields of fact and fiction; and her work proves that if ever a history of the world could be correctly written, much of it would be the story of what noble women have accomplished.
Not the least of her heroines was Sacajawea, the Indian girl guide of Lewis and Clark, whose name, first popularized in "The Conquest," is now as well known throughout the Northwest as that of Pocahontas. Statues have been erected to the memory of the Shoshone maiden, and tablets wherever she trod; and no one has risen to question the story of her exploits.
Mrs. Dye chose to record the things that appertain to the adventures of the first white people who came to Oregon; and she has interpreted the romantic life of the whites and the Indians of those times so picturesquely that her fame as an author is permanent.