Ella Higginson

She was influential for the ways her writing drew international attention to the then little-known Pacific Northwest region of the United States. She served as an officer of the Pacific Coast Women's Press Association.

The recorded working language is English. The field of work recorded is poetry, fiction and travel literature. Residence is recorded at Grande Ronde Valley and Portland. Employment is recorded with Frances Cleveland Axtell. Work by Ella Higginson is recorded in the collections of Oregon Poetry Collection.

Ella Rhoads was born in Council Grove, Kansas, to Charles Reeve Rhoads and Mary A. Rhoads. She was the youngest of six children. In 1863, the family traveled by wagon train from Kansas to Oregon and first settled in Eastern Oregon's Grande Ronde Valley. They later moved to Portland, then to a farm near Milwaukie, then to Oregon City. Ella was privately tutored and also attended public school. At age 23, she married Russell Carden Higginson, age 33, a druggist from the Northeastern United States. He was a distant cousin of New England writer and abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson. In 1888, Ella and Russell Higginson moved to New Whatcom (later Bellingham), Washington where they would live out their lives. Higginson traveled to Alaska for four summers as part of the research for her travel book. In 1892, the Higginson house, known as Clover Hill, in Bellingham was built. On May 14, 1909, Russell Higginson, age 57, died after a short illness. Higginson also helped establish the first public reading room and library in Bellingham, Washington, and for a long time was a board member there. During World War I, Ella Higginson ceased writing and volunteered full-time for the American Red Cross. She died on December 27, 1940, at age 78, having been ill most of the year. She left an estate of about $60,000. She is buried in Bayview Cemetery, Bellingham, Washington beneath a self-designed granite monument adorned with four-leaf clovers, a reference to her best-known poem (Koert, 1985: 7).

Ella Rhoads began writing as a child. Her first published work was the poem, "Dreams of the Past," which appeared in The Oregon City newspaper in 1875 when she was age 14. At this time, she also began sending out her short fiction for publication, much of it anonymously or under various pseudonyms (such as "Ann Lester," "Ethelind Ray," and "Enid"). After her marriage, she began to publish under her own name (Koert, 1985: 22). On March 8, 1890, an article by Higginson appeared in Portland, Oregon's West Shore, a literary magazine. The article's controversial topic was divorce. In the article, Higginson argued that early marriage was more of a problem for women than divorce. Her recommendation that women would be wise to marry no earlier than age 30 garnered Higginson national notice (Koert, 1985: 52). That same year what would become her best-known poem, "Four-Leaf Clover," was published. In 1893, Higginson's story "The Mother of ‘Pills’" won McClure’s magazine award for best story. The following year Higginson won McClure’s magazine short fiction contest, with a prize of $500, for "The Takin’ In of Ol’ Mis’ Lane." McClure’s printed 80,000 copies of the issue in anticipation of high demand. In 1897, the Macmillan company became Higginson's main publisher. They published most of her subsequent books and heavily promoted her writing. In 1902, when Higginson’s only novel, Mariella, of Out West, was published, reviewers compared it to novels by Jane Austen, Leo Tolstoy, and Émile Zola. Alaska, the Great Country, an account of Higginson's travels in Alaska as well as a history of Alaska, was published in 1908 and subsequently went through several editions (Murray, 1990: 132). In 1914, Higginson’s story "The Message of Ann Laura Sweet" was named Collier’s magazine prize story and awarded a prize of $500 by a panel consisting of former US President Theodore Roosevelt and investigative journalists Mark Sullivan and Ida Tarbell. With these publications and awards, Higginson became known as the most popular writer of the Pacific Northwest (Baym, 2011: 55–56; Ward and Maveety, 1995: 57–59).

In 1911, Edward Mylius was jailed in England for libel after publishing a report that King George V was a bigamist. Higginson had also written about the King's rumoured earlier marriage, in Alaska: The Great Country. She applied some poetic licence to the story of royal scandal, writing that when the young prince had to renounce that marriage, his beloved was given the royallest of exiles: near the City of Vancouver "in the western solitude, lived for several years -- the veriest remittance woman -- the girl who should now, by the right of love and honor, be the Princess of Wales, and whose infant daughter should have been the heir to the throne." The International Socialist newspaper of Sydney, Australia, offered a new twist on this. Higginson's book in which this story of pathos appears had been acquired by the city's library in 1910. The newspaper mischievously opined that Lord Mayor Allen Taylor, as head of the City Council and thus responsible for its library, was as guilty as Mylius in publishing "the same statement with a cheerful disregard for the possibility of things", informing its readers that "the issuing of [a library book] constitutes publication under the law": • Mylius's libel wasn't any stronger, and this paper declares that what is sauce for the Mylius goose should also be sauce for the Lord Mayor gander, and it is hereby demanded that the Lord Mayor and the City Librarian and various other persons be prosecuted for 'libelling the king,' and that they each be given one year's hard labor, and taken to Goulburn Jail in leg-irons. • It is needless to say that 'Alaska' will be withdrawn from the Free Library immediately after this article appears; therefore, those who wish to get the book and verify the libel for themselves will have to call early to avoid the crush.

Higginson started her lifelong editorial work at age 15 when she began work at the newspaper office of The Oregon City Enterprise, learning typesetting and editorial writing. In later years, she served as editor of the "Fact and Fancy for Women" department for Portland, Oregon's West Shore, a literary magazine; as associate editor of The Pacific magazine in Seattle; and as associate editor for the Seattle magazine, The Westerner (Koert, 1985: 89).

In 1912, Higginson served as campaign manager for Washington State Republican candidate Frances C. Axtell, cousin of United States President Grover Cleveland. Axtell became the first female member of the Washington State Legislature (Koert, 1985: 118–119). Although Higginson was not a political activist, she did voice support for women's rights and animal rights. Higginson wrote a screenplay in 1914 for a silent film entitled Just Like the Men, which follows two women running for office in Washington State facing opposition from male politicians, based upon her time managing Axtell's campaign. Higginson wanted Mary Pickford, one of the most famous American silent film actresses of the time, to star in the film, but Pickford declined. The screenplay was rediscovered in 2012 by Laura Laffrado, a literature professor at Western Washington University. The original draft of the screenplay is among the materials of the Ella Higginson Papers collection housed at the Center for Pacific Northwest Studies at Western Washington University. Talking to Crows, a women-led film production company based in the Pacific Northwest, adapted the screenplay into a film which was released for online-streaming in 2020.