Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 25.djvu/325

Rh part of historical study. They are more or less imaginative, attractive to the popular taste for adventure and heroism. The literal historian lives very much to himself, with scant money return. His one source of gratification is truth for truth's sake, and the virtue of truth is his one reward. He may not expect his work to be widely read, nor eagerly bought.

Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,

And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

However, he may enjoy the thought that later generations will not be compelled to unscramble imaginative fibs from his batter of historical facts.

In surveying the bibliography of Oregon, we naturally group the authors according to subjects. Logical classifications include those of exploration and discovery, Oregon question, fur trade, Indian races and their ethnology and wars, Oregon trail and migration, pioneer records, missionaries and churches, provisional government, governmental reports, gold activities, transportation, current publications, including newspapers and magazines, botany, geology, agriculture, lumbering, etc. Writers frequently treat many of these subjects, and these need to be included in one classification. A useful book list of this kind, not too far spun out in detail, compiled by Eleanor Ruth Rockwood, Reference Librarian, Portland library, was published in the year 1923, entitled, "Books on the Pacific Northwest for Small Libraries." This list contains the book titles of some 200 authors. A more extensive "check list," as it is called by the compiler, Charles W. Smith, Associate Librarian, University of Washington Library, published in 1921, catalogs 4501 books and pamphlets under the title "Pacific Northwest Americana." An earlier list of government documents, compiled by Katherine Berry Judson and published in 1913, affords an index to a variety of subjects. Frederick Jackson Turner has compiled a list of references on history of the West