Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/246

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HISTORY OF ORGEON LITERATURE

County at Cincinnati, later called Eola. Then she married, lived for four years on a Clackamas County donation claim, and five years on a Yamhill County farm, where between times of the drudgeries she referred to in her preface, she wrote Captain Gray's Company. It was opportunely finished, for the small amount of leisure she had somehow found and had so profitably used, was soon to be taken from her with a completeness beyond her gallant energies to control. The farm was lost, her husband was crippled in an accident; she had him and her children to support. She taught school and kept boarders at Lafayette. Later at Albany she taught school for a year and then ran a millinery store for six years.

In the meantime she had become active for woman's suffrage in Oregon. She bought a printing plant in Portland, and, in May, 1871, started the New Northwest, a weekly journal, which she continued for 16 years. It was a vigorous champion of woman's rights, but was also an able and important literary paper. She was a friend of Belle W. Cooke, the Salem poet, and sided with Minnie Myrtle Miller in the public airing of her shattered romance with Joaquin. To the civic and cultural development of Oregon her contributions were great and her leadership extended without fatigue over a long period of time. She was the mother of six children. One of her sons was state printer of Oregon and one was president of the University of Montana. She died in Portland on October 11, 1915, at the age of 81.

Mrs. Frances Fuller Victor said of Captain Gray's Company that the incidents of the book "showed little imagination and a too literal observation of camp life in crossing the plains. Mrs. Duniway did better work later, although her abilities lie rather with solid prose than fiction." In addition to numerous addresses and articles, her later books were My Musings, 1875; David and Anna Matson, 1876; From the West to the West, 1905; and Pathbreaking: An Autobiographical History of the Equal Suffrage Movement in Pacific Coast States, 1914.