Page:Scrapbook of a Historian - Frances Fuller Victor.djvu/6

330 the humor and insulting ones when he is out, and I've no liking for being petted and abused in turn, so I too had made up my mind to wait for ample apologies before recognizing him. But I cannot help feeling sorry for his sad old age, even while I do not acknowledge his right on account of his age to be a discourteous tyrant. ..

In her Salem Statesman article in 1895 she said some frank things of Joe Meek, about whom she had written her book The River of the West:

"It was during my first year in Oregon that I met Joseph L. Meek. I think it was Judge Deady who brought about the meeting, and Meek sent me a batch of notes in pencil every little while for a year or more. On one occasion he came to town to have a photograph taken by Mr. Joseph Buchtel, from which an engraving was to be made, but did not come near me. By chance I met him as he came down the stairs from Buchtel's, and he was looking dissipated enough—limp and white from drinking. When he recognized me the gentleman in him asserted itself, and he said with a deeply apologetic air: "Punish me any way you please, Mrs. Victor. I know I am unworthy to speak to you; and I promise on my sacred honor not to be seen by you in this condition again." Nor did I ever see him really intoxicated afterwards-perhaps because when he came to town he usually reported to me, and I took measures to prevent him from meeting too many of his acquaintances on the street. For this and because he was made the hero of The River of the West, he entertained for me a profound respect and affection, as refined and loyal as one could wish from the most cultured of men."

Several clippings in the scrapbook tell about the hot water she got into by her treatment of the Whitman myth. She wrote The Early Indian Wars of Oregon for the State. It was published in 1894.

Tardily in 1897 H. S. Lyman sent from Astoria a long communication to the Oregonian, in which he said:

"Mrs. Victor's estimate of Dr. Whitman will not be generally accepted. The impression given in her writings is of an inflexible, but designing and narrow-minded man, whose aims were largely personal. She says of him and his associates that, instead of spiritualizing the Indians, they became themselves unspiritualized. She makes the astonishing assertion that, upon setting out upon his winter trip to Washington City, in 1842, he threatened his Indians that he was going to bring many white men to chastise them. What proof she has for a declaration so little accordant with Whitman's character, and so unnecessary and foolish, she does not give, relying apparently upon the rumors around the Hudson's Bay trading post."