nearly all alive, and facts concerning the beginnings of the common wealth were well known to them, and had it not been for Mrs. Victor, would have been lost to posterity.
The question of the authorship of Bancroft's Works has been ably considered by Dr. John Caughey in his Hubert Howe Bancroft, Historian of the West.[1] The question is a most complicated one, for though Bancroft's assistants did write all but about ten volumes of the Works, they owed so much to the Bancroft Library, the organization of its materials for their use, and to Bancroft's master plan for the enterprise and his editorial supervision that is is difficult to claim without qualification the authorship of individual volumes for the staff members.
Bancroft himself never properly acknowledged which portions of his Works were written by his staff. The case for the staff members was well stated by Henry L. Oak, who claimed ten volumes, in his "Literary Industries" in a New Light issued in 1893 to correct Bancroft's account of the writing of the Works.[2] Oak's statements about Mrs. Victor's work largely substantiate her claims made during her lifetime which were set forth at length after her death by William A. Morris in the December 1903 Quarterly of the Oregon Historical Society.
Morris' article, "The Origin and Authorship of the Bancroft Pacific States Publications," apparently created quite a stir in historical circles of the day. Later a history professor at the University of California, Morris was at this time a young high school teacher in Portland where he lived in the same boardinghouse as Mrs. Victor and became her friend and champion. She mentions him in several letters to Professor Young, and they held many discussions on historical matters. Morris' article on Bancroft and his Works is based on these discussions, the notes Mrs. Victor had made on the authorship of the histories, on her correspondence with Bancroft and others regarding her work, and her
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