Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/245

 the West to the West, Mrs. Abigail Scott Duniway spoke reminiscently of her first literary effort.

"Fifty years ago, as an illiterate, inexperienced settler, a busy overworked child-mother and housewife, an impulse to write was born within me, inherited from my Scottish ancestry, which no lack of an education or opportunity could allay. So I wrote a little book which I called “Captain Gray's Company, or Crossing the Plains and Living in Oregon”."

She had forgotten the conventional punctuation for such double titles. It was correctly Captain Gray’s Company; or, Crossing the Plains and Living in Oregon. Portland, Oregon: Printed and Published by S. J. McCormick, 1859. The caustic “Squibbs” said of Ruth Rover that the style was “as usual apologized for in the preface.” The hard-hearted rascal indeed knew the habits of the “authoresses” of the 50’s in such matters, to which Mrs. Duniway was no exception. When she sent her book out into the world from “Sunny Hill Side, Oregon,” a farm in Yamhill County, she gave the reader many reasons for his indulgence:

"A sensible and popular lady writer has remarked that want of time should be no apology for defects of authorship. I heartily agree with that lady's views, but when a frontier farmer's wife undertakes to write a book, who has to be lady, nurse, laundress, seamstress, cook, and dairy-woman by turns, and who attends to all these duties, unaided, save by the occasional assistance of an indulgent husband who has cares enough of his own, in such a case—and this is not an exaggerated one, as many who know me can testify—“want of time”—is a necessary, unavoidable excuse for fault of style or discrepancy in composition. Youth and inexperience, also, are other excuses, which, though I am not exactly ashamed of, especially the former, must, in justice to myself, be hinted at, in this my first literary effort of magnitude."

At the time her book was published she was twenty-five years old and had been married for about six years to Ben C. Duniway, a young farmer of Clackamas County. “Such learning as she received consisted chiefly of a five-months term in an academy ... in Illinois.” She was the sister of Harvey W. Scott and had come to Oregon in 1852. After spending the winter at Lafayette, she was a teacher in Polk