Frances Fuller Victor

Frances Fuller Victor
Born May 23, 1826
Rome, New York
Died November 14, 1902(1902-11-14) (aged 76)
Portland, Oregon
Occupation Writer
Genre History
Notable works History of Oregon
Spouse Jackson Barritt; Henry Clay Victor
Literature portal

Frances Auretta Fuller (Barritt) Victor (pen names: Florence Fane,[1] Dorothy D.) (May 23, 1826 – November 14, 1902)[1] was an American historian and historical novelist. She has been described as "the first Oregon historian to gain regional and national attention."[2]

Life

Fuller Victor was born in Rome, New York, and was the eldest of five sisters.[3] She was a "close relative" of judge Reuben H. Walworth.[4] She and her sister Metta Victoria Fuller Victor became widely known for their writing while growing up in Ohio and Pennsylvania.[1][5] She was educated in a ladies' seminary in Wooster, Ohio.[4] The sisters both published stories and poems in the Morris & Willis Home Journal, and in 1848 they moved to New York together.[1]

Frances moved to St. Clair, Michigan in 1851 to help care for her mother and younger sisters. She first married Jackson Barritt in 1853, and she and her husband homesteaded near Omaha, Nebraska Territory. She left Barritt, however, returning to live with Metta in New York,[1] where she published several of the first dime novels with Beadle & Adams.[6] She married Henry C. Victor, a naval engineer[7] and brother of Metta's husband, in 1862.[1]

The couple moved to San Francisco the year they were married and then to Oregon in 1864, settling in Portland.[5][7]

Victor in 1878, as photographed by I. W. Taber.

Following the move to Oregon, Fuller Victor's writing shifted from fiction and feature articles to book-length regional histories. Over the next 13 years, she compiled first-hand accounts of the history of Oregon from territorial leaders like Joseph Meek, Oliver Applegate, and Matthew Deady.[5] Her diligent studies informed both her fiction and her historical writing, contributing to her success as a writer.[5] Her fiction in this period was considered to accurately capture the spirit of western expansion and the notion of Manifest Destiny.[8] She also continued to write about women's rights, and among the publications she wrote for was Abigail Scott Duniway's The New Northwest.[9]

Henry C. Victor died in the wreck of the steamship Pacific off Cape Flattery on November 4, 1875.[10] In need of money, Fuller Victor moved back to San Francisco[11] to accept a 10-year contract offered by historian Hubert Howe Bancroft. The terms of the contract required her to turn over her extensive collections and research.[7] She contributed major portions of Bancroft's monumental work, The History of the West,[7] though Bancroft published her work under his own name.[12]

After she left Bancroft's company, Fuller Victor returned to Oregon, where she was commissioned by the Oregon Legislative Assembly to write a history of the Anglo-Indian wars, which was titled The Early Indian Wars of Oregon.[13][5] To cover her living expenses, she also sold face cream and other articles door-to-door.[7] She was granted a pension in April 1902.[14]

Legacy

Victor View, a viewpoint at Crater Lake, was formally named in 1945. Victor visited Crater Lake in 1872.

Fuller Victor was buried at River View Cemetery in Portland.[15] The initial grave marker was made of wood, and did not last long. In 1947, the Daughters of the American Revolution supplied a permanent grave marker. Victor's name was included among the names of significant Oregonians on the walls of the Oregon State Capitol, which was completed in 1938.[16] Crater Lake National Park formalized the name of "Victor View," a viewpoint on the rim of the park, in her honor in 1945.[17][18] In many respects, her legacy continued to be overshadowed by that of Hubert Howe Bancroft.[16] Victor's legacy was invoked in a speech by scholar Terrence O'Donnell at the inaugural Oregon Book Award event in 1987, which also marked the beginning of the annual Frances Fuller Victor Award for Creative Nonfiction.[19] In 2005, the Oregon Cultural Heritage Commission selected The River of the West as one of the 100 books that best define the state and its people.[20]

Beginning in 1951, Randall Mills began researching Victor's life and work. He enlisted the help of Hazel Emery Mills, his wife; the work became her lifelong passion following Randall's death shortly after the project commenced. With assistance and encouragement over the years from Thomas Vaughan of the Oregon Historical Society, Constance Bordwell of the University of Oregon, and (after Mills' death in 1999) Bordwell's assistants Priscilla Knuth and Bruce Taylor Hamilton and Vaughan's associate Marguerite Wright, a biography was finally published by the OHS Press in 2003.[16] It was called Frances Fuller Victor: The Witness to America's Westerings.

Separately, and without any awareness of the ongoing Mills–Bordwell project, Jim Martin, a legislative assistant with a background in journalism, took an interest in Victor in 1976, having noticed her name on the Capitol's wall. He researched her work for eight years, and after searching for a publisher for five years, finally published A Bit of Blue: The Life and Work of Frances Fuller Victor under his own Deep Well Publishing imprint.[16]

Works by Frances Fuller Victor

Further reading

  • Martin, Jim (1992). A Bit of A Blue: The Life and Work of Frances Fuller Victor. Salem, Oregon: Deep Well. ISBN 978-0-9632066-0-2.
  • Mills, Hazel; Bordwell, Constance (2002). Vaughan, Thomas; Wright, Marguerite, eds. Frances Fuller Victor: the witness to America's westerings. Portland, Or.: Peregrine Productions for the Oregon Historical Society Press. ISBN 0972694803.
  • Barritt, Mrs. Frances F. from the Beadle and Adams Dime Novel Digitization Project

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Frances Auretta Fuller Victor. Encyclopædia Britannica. 2009. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. July 10, 2009.
  2. ↑ Etulain, Richard (September 4, 2011). "A brief history of Oregon historians". The Oregonian.
  3. ↑ Martin, Jim (2004). "Frances Fuller Victor: Oregon's First Woman of Letters" (PDF). Oregon Cultural Heritage Commission.
  4. 1 2 Morris, William A. (December 1, 1902). "Historian of the Northwest. A Woman Who Loved Oregon: Frances Fuller Victor". The Quarterly of the Oregon Historical Society. 3 (No. 4).
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 Frances-Fuller Victor, City of Portland
  6. ↑ http://www.womenhistoryblog.com/2016/10/frances-fuller-victor.html
  7. 1 2 3 4 5 Curtis, Walt (1995). "Frances Fuller Victor (1826–1902)". Oregon Cultural Heritage Commission.
  8. ↑ Sheri Bartlett Browne. "Frances Fuller Victor". The Oregon Encyclopedia.
  9. ↑ "19th Century Women Writers in Corvallis, Oregon". Corvalliscommunitypages.com. Archived from the original on 2011-09-28. Retrieved 2011-09-03.
  10. ↑ "The Steamship Pacific," The Oregonian, November 9, 1875, page 3
  11. ↑
    • Martin, Jim (1992). A Bit of A Blue: The Life and Work of Frances Fuller Victor. Salem, Oregon: Deep Well. ISBN 978-0-9632066-0-2.
  12. ↑ Johnson Bube, June (1997). "Prefiguring the new woman: Frances Fuller Victor's refashioning of women and marriage in "The New Penelope"". Frontiers.
  13. ↑ "The Woman Historian: Interesting Passages in the Life of Frances Fuller Victor". The San Francisco Call. July 7, 1895.
  14. ↑ https://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=SFC19020425.2.21&srpos=4&e=-------en--20--1--txt-txIN-%22Frances+Fuller+Victor%22-------1
  15. ↑ River View Cemetery. Find A Grave. Retrieved on March 12, 2008.
  16. 1 2 3 4 TERRY, JOHN (January 26, 2003). "OREGON'S TRAILS: A Slide into Obscurity, and Then Recognition". The Oregonian.
  17. ↑ http://www.craterlakeinstitute.com/online-library/nature-notes/vol29-victor-rock-victor-view.htm
  18. ↑ Juillerat, Lee (April 26, 2004). "Postcards from the Rim". Klamath Falls Herald and News.
  19. ↑ Pintarich, Paul (October 3, 1987). "BOOK AWARDS EVENT AT ARTS CENTER HONORS OREGON WRITERS". The Oregonian.
  20. ↑ "OREGON LIT: 200 YEARS, 100 BOOKS". The Oregonian. February 20, 2005.
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