in a recent interview. "It was rank presumption that induced me to write it. I was an illiterate border child- wife, the overworked mother of little children, surrounded by the crudest possible pioneer conditions, through which I began grasping blindly at unknown literary straws. I outgrew the work long before it reached the public eye and would have supressed it in its infancy if I could; but it went rapidly through two editions before it was allowed to die. It builded for me better than I knew, however, since it helped to open many devious ways to opportunities for education and advancement through which I have struggled upward for more than half a century."
After leaving the Yamhill county ranch, now the famous apple orchard founded by Millard Lownsdale, Mrs. Duniway began teaching a private school in the village of La Fayette, but its patronage being insufficient for the support of her invalid husband and growing family, she prepared a dormitory in her home and readily filled it with young lady boarders. In order to properly feed and care for these boarders and her own household, in a community where hired domestic help was not attainable, Mrs. Duniway would arise regularly at four o'clock A. M. in winter and at three o'clock in summer to complete her work in the home before nine o'clock and school time.
Selling out her school in La Fayette, we next find Mrs. Duniway teaching a private school in Linn county, in the town of Albany, from which she emerged into the millinery business, which she managed successfully for six years. Then, selling out at a profit, she startled the country by moving to Portland, where, in the spring of 1871, she bought a printing office and established a weekly newspaper—The New Northwest, which at once attracted many readers. The country was new, the people were liberal and prosperous; and her advocacy of equal political rights for women meeting with unexpected favor in Oregon, Washington and Idaho, she soon found herself regularly employed in the lecture field, where she has ranked for forty years among the most able women speakers of the world.
"I ought to have been among the richest women of America," she remarked reflectively, "but my husband, having once pauperized himself by becoming surety for an ambitious friend, went to the other extreme and refused to put his signature to my papers; and I, being his wife, was legally dead and couldn't buy property in Portland while it was cheap. But its all right," she added, with a smile. "If I had accumulated riches I might have been an anti-suffragist."
Her address before the constitutional convention in Boise, Idaho, July 16, 1889, was a masterly analyzation of the prohibition problem and resulted in securing a pledge from the leading state officials and other business men of Idaho to submit the question of equal suffrage to a vote at the first election following the territory's admission to statehood, and was an important factor in making Idaho women free.
The celebration of Oregon's fortieth year of admission to statehood was held on the 14th of February, 1899, in the house of representatives at Salem, where, before the joint assembly of the state legislature and a vast audience of visitors, among the most famous speakers of the state, Mrs. Duniway was accorded the valedictory, or place of honor on the programme, and achieved high distinction.
One of her most logical speeches on the progress of all women toward ultimate equality of rights was made at the unveiling of the statue of Sacajawea at the Lewis and Clarke Exposition in the summer of 1905 and was followed by the extension of an invitation to her from President H. W. Goode, to accept the date of October 6th as Abigail Scott Duniway Day—the first reception of its kind ever extended to any woman outside of royalty by the official head of any international fair.
In January of 1910, Mrs. Duniway was made a duly accredited delegate by Governor F. W. Benson, of Oregon, to the Conservation Congress of Governers, held in Washington, D. C, where she made an impassioned plea for national recognition of equal rights for women and was accorded much consideration by
