Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 4.djvu/328

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
318
William Alfred Morris.

History of the Early Indian Wars of Oregon, a volume which was published by the State Printer the following year. She continued to write for the Oregon Historical Quarterly up to the time of her death. Her last published work was a small volume of poems printed in 1900, and selected from the many metrical compositions which she had written for newspapers and magazines through a period of sixty years. She was an able writer of essay, and possessed an insight into the evolution of civilization and government rare, not only for an author of her sex, but for any author. Combining the qualities of poet, essayist and historian, she occupied a position without a peer in the annals of Western literature. She died at Portland, Oregon, November 14, 1902).

Data on Alaska and the Russian Colony at Fort Ross, California, were being collected and translated during these years by Ivan Petroff, a highly educated Russian some time resident at Cook's Inlet. Material from Russia was furnished by the savant M. Pinart who had made a special study of Alaska, and Petroff prepared translations. In 1878 he visited Alaska in search of more material, and spent the year 1879 and part of 1880 in Washington extracting matter from papers, the existence of which he had discovered on the northern trip; (Lit. Ind., 551-561.) Petroff had begun the writing of this material and had done part of the Alaska volume when he left the library to become supervisor of the census of 1880 in the Northern Territory, leaving Mr. Bancroft and others to bring this part of the work to completion.

(The main facts of Petroff's life which had been a very eventful one are here taken from Bancroft's Literary Industries, 270-272. He was born at St. Petersburg in 1842, his father being a soldier. His mother died in his infancy, and at the age of five, he was placed in the military academy of the first corps of cadets at St. Peters-