1
Prairie Flower by Sidney Walter Moss of Oregon City
The First Work of Fiction Written in Oregon
The following brief description of the first Oregon novel is contained in Bancroft's History of Oregon, written by Mrs. Frances Fuller Victor:
In point of time, the first work of fiction written in Oregon was The Prairie Flower, by S. W. Moss of Oregon City. It was sent east to be published, and appeared with some slight alterations as one of a series of western stories by Emerson Bennett of Cincinnati. One of the foremost characters was modelled after George W. Ebberts of Tualatin Plains, or the Black Squire, as he was called among mountain men. Two of the women in the story were meant to resemble the wife and mother-in-law of Medorem Crawford.
There are two copies of the later 1881 edition of the book in the libraries of Portland and a considerable amount of information about it, so that a rather full account of this first Oregon fiction story can be given.
There are historical references to its having been read by the author in manuscript at meetings of a literary society in Oregon City in 1843.
Sidney Walter Moss, who came out with the Hastings party in 1842, said he wrote the story and gave it to Overton Johnson, who went back in 1844, but that Bennett got hold of it and published it as his own.
Emerson Bennett had it published by Stratton & Barnard in 1849 at Cincinnati. Its full title was The Prairie Flower; or, Adventures in the Far West.
Charles L. Camp says that that the S. and A. Allen is pencilled on the title page of the Bancroft Library copy, in place of the printed name of Bennett. There was a Samuel Allen in Oregon in 1847, and thus the plot thickens, with three contenders for the authorship of the same book.
Of the real author, Sidney Walter Moss, we know that he was born in Kentucky in 1810 and was therefore thirty-
