sent all the most difficult work to her desk. However, Ban croft did persuade her to remain long enough to write several of the most important biographies and most of the history of railroads in the transportation volumes of The Chronicles of the Builders.[1]
Mrs. Victor resigned from the History Company in May 1889, and soon returned to Oregon. She published Atlantis Arisen in 1891, and in 1892 was commissioned by the Secretary of State or Oregon to write the history of the early Indian wars in Oregon, which had been authorized by the Legislative Assembly.[2] However, she found it increasingly difficult to earn a living as a free-lance writer, which may have been one reason why after her resignation she began to present her claim in newspaper articles to the authorship of the volumes of Bancroft's Works that she had written. Also in 1893 when asked to exhibit her works as a California author at the Mechanics Fair in San Francisco, and later that same year as a New York author at the Chicago World's Fair, she included with her own works the four complete volumes of Bancroft's Works she claimed to have written, placing her name along with Bancroft's on the title page and spine of each volume with a special preface in each to explain her action.[3]
While this claim of authorship increased Mrs. Victor's reputation as an historian, probably her participation in the bitter Whitman controversy brought even more attention from historians in the East. The chief points in the long drawn out dispute over the validity of the so-called Whitman legend are well outlined in Clifford M. Drury's biography of
- ↑ Among the manuscripts of Bancroft's Works in Bancroft Library at the University of California at Berkeley is a manuscript of over 400 pages on the history of railways in Mrs. Victor's handwriting which with relatively minor editing by Bancroft was published in The Chronicles of the Builders as Chapters 8 and 9 of Volume V and Chapters 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 14 of Volume VI.
- ↑ Oregon Secretary of State, Biennial Report, 1891-92 (Salem, 1893), xxiv. A record of the appropriation and payments of warrants to Mrs. Victor appears in the Legislative Appropriations ledgers of the Secretary of State for 1891/92 and 1893/94, in the Oregon State Archives, Salem.
- ↑ H. L. Oak, "Literary Industries" in a New Light, 37-38.
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