Page:Emergence of Frances Fuller Victor-Historian.djvu/7

 Ever a journalist, preferably a traveling correspondent, Mrs. Victor seized eagerly upon the governor's suggestion. Since as a journalist she had come to believe that "it is always interesting to know even a little about the origin of things," she began to read avidly all she could find on Oregon's early history. Judge Matthew P. Deady became a helpful friend and opened his library to her. Also available was the collection of the embryo Library Association of Portland where Harvey W. Scott was librarian that winter. She was already familiar with some works on Oregon, for she later wrote in the "Introduction" to The River of the West that when she had read Astoria and Bonneville in the quiet of her New York study (1859-62) she felt no intimations of her future personal acquaintance with the scenes and even some of the characters in those books.

In the spring of 1865 Mrs. Victor boarded a Willamette steamboat on the first of her innumerable journeys to observe Oregon for herself. On the way upriver she stopped over in Oregon City, Salem, Albany and Corvallis meeting some of the oldest settlers in each town and listening with sympathetic interest to their stories of pioneer life. Just ten years before she herself had been living under pioneer conditions on the frontier between the Missouri and Platte rivers north west of the new village of Omaha. Here she and her first husband, Jackson Barritt, staked out a land claim shortly after Nebraska Territory was created, and for three years they struggled with the land. While there she had some times ridden out over the prairie along the fabled Oregon Trail; now she was actually hearing Oregonians themselves tell of their adventures on the trip across the plains. Thus Frances Fuller Victor began to record the reminiscences of Oregon pioneers and incidentally to collect any historical material they were willing to give to her.