Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 4.djvu/351

Rh the world that manuscripts turned out by other persons were his writing.

Not only was the myth of Mr. Bancroft's authorship repeated on the title page of each volume of the history, and in the reviews which built upon the prestige gained by him as supposed author of the Native Races, but not a word was printed to show that any one else wrote the least part of the work. When asked to indicate in the preface the part done by each person, according to the evidence of a number of his writers, he always declared that this was just the one thing he wished to avoid. The only approach to an acknowledgment is the statement in the preface in words which apparently refer only to indexers and note-takers, that he has been "able to utilize the labors of others," among whom as the most faithful and efficient he mentions Oak, Nemos, Savage, Petroff, and Mrs. Victor. (History of Central America, I, preface viii). The promise is made that he will speak of these and others at length elsewhere, and this promise is redeemed by the printing of their biographies in the Literary Industries without indicating who was engaged in writing and who in purely routine work connected with the library, much less designating what parts of the work each had done. From a popular edition of this volume subsequently issued for wider circulation, even these were stricken out.

While the real authors of the history never agreed to keep silence concerning their right to recognition, it was very well understood that they would remain in Mr. Bancroft's employ only so long as they acquiesced in his claiming the work as solely his own and made no individual claims for themselves. This bread and butter argument for silence proved effective in all cases. An example of the method in meeting claims made for any of the library writers occurs in connection with the pub-