in the Whitman legend when in December I900 she wrote the American Historical Association offering them an article on Whitman for the American Historical Review. She was rather upset to learn that Bourne was reading a paper on the Whitman legend at the meeting of the American Historical Association that month and that it would later be published in the Review. Historian Franklin Jameson, the managing editor, assured her, however, that she would be pleased with Bourne's article since "he speaks of your labors in the most handsome way and agrees with you substantially in the main contention."[1]
In the January 1901 issue of the American Historical Review Mrs. Victor found a tribute to her work in a footnote of Bourne's article:
As the avowed author of Bancroft's Oregon, working under his editorial supervision, every student of Oregon history is under obligations to her for her scholarly and honest presentations of the facts derived from the unparalleled collection of materials gathered by Mr. Bancroft.... It is a rare experience in a critical examination of sources to find in any general history so faithful and trustworthy a presentation of the contents of those sources as in the parts of the first volume of Bancroft's Oregon that I have subjected to this test.[2]
Mrs. Victor was concerned about Bourne's publications on the Whitman myth because in 1900 she was still trying to find a publisher for a book she had written on the subject in 1898. Elliott Coues, who Mrs. Victor once said was as kind to her as a brother, read and praised the manuscript and was attempting to have it published when he died in December 1899. She rewrote the book after Bourne's article appeared, completing it in March 1902.[3] The fate of the manuscript remains unknown as does that of her revision of The River of the West.
Thus Mrs. Victor after her return to Oregon in June I900 experienced some disappointments and frustrations as well as recognition of her work as an historian, maintaining to the end her intense interest in history despite her pathetic
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