Page:Emergence of Frances Fuller Victor-Historian.djvu/16

 summer. One evening at sunset she crept out on a mass of rock which overhung the lake to see better the exquisite reflection in the deep blue water. This place later was officially named Victor Rock; today it is the site of the Sinnott Memorial.

While living again in Portland during the winter of 1873-74, Mrs. Victor gathered material for a general history of the Indian wars of Oregon which she had decided to write instead of a history of the Modoc War alone. General Jefferson C. Davis provided her with an office at his headquarters and gave her access to all of the military documents. As she made notes from them questions constantly rose in her mind which made her wish for Oliver Applegate. "This is the military side of the subject alone," she wrote him, "and I must needs get at the other to become a faithful historian." Then she asked him for many facts and explanations which reveal her critical ability and her insight into the problem of obtaining the information necessary to illuminate the intricate Indian question.

Mrs. Victor also consulted many others at this time for their experiences and observations on the Indian wars. To Captain J. M. McCall of Ashland, for example, she wrote:

"Mr. Waymire instructs me to call upon you to relate the incidents of the campaign of 1864, in the Snake country; and to describe a battle, in which Lieutenant Watson was killed. I know there is some labor in this demand: but then consider the importance to history of a correct view of the facts! Your labor will have no reward but itself (like virtue) but so, I apprehend, will mine; and as mine is the greatest, without even the privilege of figuring in my own pages as a hero, I find myself growing in confidence to ask enormous favors of those who are to be immortalized."

After all of her exertions to collect all possible material Mrs. Victor never published her projected history of the Indian wars. But she gained excellent training and back ground for her work on the Bancroft histories and for the later writing of her own Early Indian Wars of Oregon.

Hubert Howe Bancroft in his Literary Industries tells of his travels through the Pacific Northwest in May and June