Book Description

Frances Fuller Victor (1826-1902) was an American historian and historical novelist known for her books about the West and especially Oregon history. Both she and her sister Metta Victoria Fuller became well-known for their writing, publishing stories and poems in the Home Journal from an early age, and later progressing to dime novels while living in New York. Following her second marriage, Fuller settled in Portland, Oregon in 1864, where her writing shifted from fiction to regional histories. Over the next 13 years she compiled first-hand accounts of the history of Oregon from territorial leaders such as Joseph Meek, Oliver Applegate and Matthew Deady. When her husband died in 1875 Fuller found herself in financial need and returned to San Francisco to accept a 10-year contract offered by historian Hubert Howe Bancroft, contributing major portions of Bancroft's monumental work, The History of the West, which were, however, published under his name. In 1886 she returned to Oregon where she was commissioned to write a history of the Indian wars entitled The Early Indian Wars of Oregon. This biography of Joseph Meek (1810-75), the trapper, pioneer, mountain man, law enforcement official, and politician in the Oregon Country and later Oregon Territory of the United States, was published in 1877 and also includes A History of the Sioux War, and a Life of Gen. George A. Custer with a Full Account of His Last Battle, with illustrations throughout.