Alfred Powers

“ For a period of about 11 years it was a thriving business place, being the rendezvous of packers who carried the supplies of all southern Oregon and northern California, then actually engaged in mining, over the mountains on mules. Thousands of mules were kept here for this service, the goods being brought by vessels from San Francisco into the Umpqua river, and hence taken to the interior. ”

“ Some of the matter that appeared under his name was accurate, but the fiction is so much in evidence that the whole work has been rendered valueless. Much of the honest writing in these volumes was done by Mrs. Frances Fuller Victor, a gentlewoman who declined to lie for profit.
In one of her own statements in the scrapbook, Mrs. Victor does not go so far:
The second volume on Oregon was made up more from matter in the Bancroft library and newspaper files, and is not quite the perfect work I would have made it if I had prepared for it as I did for the first volume. ”

“ But 12 years before, on August 21, 1883, she had written the following letter to Judge Deady:
. . . Yes, Mr. Applegate is certainly very trying to his friends. I regret his barbarous ways, for I am inclined to like him in spite of them. I should enjoy his friendship if he would give it to me—or perhaps I ought to say if he had it to give. But there is always a difficulty about the friendship of a man for a woman—he wants her love in payment for his friendship, and the bargain is unequal and consequently a failure. I, at all events, do not feel bound to humor all Mr. ”

“ 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.
A few days later, John Minto wrote to the Oregonian from Salem, mildly not agreeing with Mrs. ”