Page:Emergence of Frances Fuller Victor-Historian.djvu/4

 studied The River of the West and praised it as a book that "will always stand, not only as a pioneer, but as one of the ablest examples in historical work of the fur trading era." He also acknowledged her aid in his preface to The American Fur Trade in the Far West.

Chittenden's book may well have stimulated in Mrs. Victor's mind recollections of her first exhilarating year in Oregon. She had left her beloved San Francisco reluctantly, for there as Florence Fane she had won a literary reputation in 1863-64 by her gay witty columns in the Golden Era. Christmas Day 1864 had found her aboard the Brother Jonathan in a terrifying storm as the laboring steamship fought through high seas from the Strait of Juan de Fuca to the Columbia. And dismal indeed was her first view of Portland at 5 a.m. the following morning as she disembarked in a torrential rain. In the San Francisco Evening Bulletin she quipped in a Florence Fanish manner that Portland was "the Monumental City of the Pacific Coast" and that its monuments were very tall and very black.

Henry Clay Victor, full of enthusiasm for Oregon and its future, was on hand to greet his wife. Moving to Oregon was mainly his idea. He had come to Portland in the fall and established himself as an engineer with the newly-founded Oregon Iron Works owned by Addison C. Gibbs. So it happened that the first Oregonian Mrs. Victor met formally was Gibbs, then governor of the state. During their conversation she laughingly confessed her general ignorance of the true nature of Oregon. Whereupon the governor gallantly suggested that she should write a book to correct the false impressions of Oregon current in the East.