The Emergence of Frances Fuller Victor—Historian
Hazel Emery Mills
Mrs. Mills has been working for several years on a biography of Mrs. Victor which she first began as a joint project with her husband, the late Randall V. Mills.
In 1901 Frances Fuller Victor, in frail health at seventy-five, was living in a Portland boarding house at 624 Salmon Street. Illness and poverty had prevented her return to California from a visit she made to Oregon in June, 1900 after an absence of six years in San Francisco. Her chief possessions now were forty acres of hill land in Columbia County, Oregon, a few manuscripts, and a mass of historical documents and correspondence intensively collected since 1865. Her friends in both California and Oregon were helping in various ways to supplement the meagre income she earned by her writing, some purely out of friendship, some in recognition of her services to Oregon history. For thirty-five years research and historical writing on Oregon and the Pacific Northwest had been the driving interest in Mrs. Victor's life. She was in fact a part of Far Western history. The press referred to her as the "Mother of Oregon History" and the "Historian of the Northwest"; and in spite of her physical infirmities and the necessity of doing "pot-boiler" writing she still devoted much time to working on a revision of The River of the West, a book on Marcus Whitman, and articles for publication in the Oregon Historical Society's Quarterly.
Mrs. Victor's visit to Oregon in 1900 apparently had been inspired largely by her interest in the Oregon Historical Society and its newly-launched Quarterly. Since 1897 Professor Frederic G. Young of the University of Oregon had been corresponding with her regarding the documents he was editing and his hopes for the Society, of which he was secretary. In August 1899 he proposed her name for honorary
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