Frances Fuller Victor

• Name — Frances Fuller Victor • Birth Name — Frances Auretta Fuller • Born — May 23, 1826 • Birthplace — Rome, New York • Died — 14 November 1902 • Place of death — Portland, Oregon • Occupation — Writer • Genre — History • Notable Works — History of Oregon • Spouse — Jackson Barritt Henry Clay Victor

She was born as Frances Auretta Fuller in Rome, New York, on May 23, 1826, the eldest of five sisters. She was a "close relative" of judge Reuben H. Walworth. Frances Fuller was educated in a ladies' seminary in Wooster, Ohio. She and her sister Metta Victoria Fuller became widely known for their writing while growing up in Ohio and Pennsylvania. The sisters both published stories and poems in the Home Journal, published by Morris & Willis. In 1848 the sisters moved together to New York City.

In 1851, Frances moved to St. Clair, Michigan, north of Detroit, to help care for her mother and younger sisters. She 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. There she published several of the first dime novels with Beadle & Adams. In May 1862, she married Henry Clay Victor, a naval engineer and brother of Metta's husband, in Philadelphia. The couple moved to San Francisco the year they were married and then to Oregon in 1864. They settled in Portland. • Illustration — Fuller 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 such as Joseph Meek, Oliver Applegate, and Matthew Deady. Her diligent studies informed both her fiction and her historical writing, contributing to her success as a writer. Her fiction in this period was considered to accurately capture the spirit of western expansion and the notion of Manifest Destiny. She also continued to write about women's rights. Among the publications she wrote for was Abigail Scott Duniway's The New Northwest. She was a member of the Pacific Coast Women's Press Association. Henry C. Victor died on November 4, 1875, in the wreck of the steamship Pacific off Cape Flattery. In need of money, Fuller Victor moved back to San Francisco to accept a 10-year contract offered by historian Hubert Howe Bancroft. The terms of the contract required her to turn over to him her extensive collections and research. She contributed major portions of Bancroft's monumental work, The History of the West, though Bancroft published her work under his own name. Fuller Victor returned to Oregon in 1886. 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. To cover her living expenses, she also sold face cream and other articles door-to-door. She was granted a pension in April 1902. In regards to surnames and personal identity, she said, "What an awkward thing it is for literary women to be deprived of their own names! I furnished my biography to an encyclopedia the other day under the F for Fuller heading, believing that Fuller is my rightful name."

Fuller Victor published some works under the name Florence Fane. • Anizetta, the Guajira; or, The Creole of Cuba (1848) • East and West; or, The Beauty of Willard's Mill (1862) • The Land Claim: A Tale of the Upper Missouri (1862) • "Manifest Destiny in the West" in the Overland Monthly (1869) • The River of the West: The Adventures of Joe Meek (1870) • All Over Oregon and Washington (1872) • social columns for San Francisco's Daily Morning Call, written under the penname Dorothy D (mid-1870s) • "The Literature of Oregon." The West Shore 1 (1876) • The New Penelope: And Other Stories and Poems (1877) • Eleven Years in the Rocky Mountains and a Life on the Frontier (1877) (an edited version of River of the West) • Under contract with Hubert Howe Bancroft: • Several volumes of the series History of the Pacific states of North America, inaccurately attributed to Bancroft. • Atlantis Arisen: or, Talks of a Tourist about Oregon and Washington (1891) (an edited version of All Over Oregon… • The Early Indian Wars of Oregon (1894) • Autobiographical Sketch (1895) • Poems (1900)