Abigail Scott Duniway may have been the most significant woman in Oregon history during the half century stretching from the 1860s to nearly 1920. She gained a national reputation as an extraordinary advocate of women’s voting rights and became a well-known editor of Oregon newspapers.  Less well-recognized was Duniway’s important role as a novelist.  Beginning in 1859 and in several decades thereafter, Duniway authored more than 20 novels and became known as a writer of fiction in Oregon and the Pacific Northwest.

Born in 1834 in Illinois, Abigail Scott came up the Oregon Trail with her family in 1852. The next year in Oregon she married Benjamin Duniway and transitioned into a diligent, hard-working farmer’s wife.  Unfortunately, her husband was seriously injured on a farm, and the Duniways, losing their lands, moved to Portland.  There, Abigail became a writer, both a novelist and journalist.

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Duniway launched her authorial career with her first novel, Captain Gray’s Company; or, Crossing the Plains and Living in Oregon (1859).  The 340-page work is divided into three parts: the days in Illinois before the trip west, the journey up the Oregon Trail, and the first years living in Oregon.  The longest section deals with roughly a decade spent in Oregon.

Duniway’s novel focuses largely on families, especially on women’s rather than men’s activities.  Chapter after chapter treat women’s roles as wives, mothers, and homemakers.  We learn about cooking, dress styles, and preferred ways of reacting to husbands and rearing children.  But the author is also fascinated with religious life, showing how traditional Christianity, in the shape of Biblical quotes and vague theological beliefs, sustains so many women.

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The novel treats a handful of families in their years of transition from the Midwest to Oregon.  Disappointments, illness and death, as well as vivacious personalities and major successes, are opposing segments in nearly all these family stories.  Duniway also stresses the personality conflicts between husbands and wives and the challenges parents face in trying to raise children during years of transitions. In fact, at the center of the novel are the two ends of marriage: at one end, the romantic steps of young people on their paths to marriage; at the other, the solidarities and conflicts of long-married couples.

Emotions — and actions resulting from those feelings — are the major emphasis in the novel.  Duniway especially centers on the emotions of women and their attitudes about living as wives, daughters, and sisters.  The apt descriptions of feelings and events following those emotions are a major strength of the work.

Unfortunately, Duniway has difficulty telling her story in a well-organized fashion. Covering the diverse tales of several people, moving back and forth among these characters, and showing changes over time — these authorial techniques undermine the unity of the author’s larger story.  Diverse, engrossing stories, yes; but also too much disunity in shifts back and forth within those stories.

Other of Duniway’s artistic strategies undercut the coherence of her novel.  For instance, too often she upsets her narrative approach by entering the narrative to address “the Reader.”  Those intrusions are off-putting.  Plus, Duniway inserts too many poems, diary entries, and extensive letters into her story; these additions, too, disrupt her plot. 

Critics and reviewers jumped on what they thought were shortcomings in Duniway’s novel.  One critic denounced the novel as a fouled reservoir of “bad taste” and “slang.” Another accused Duniway of authorial “radicalism.” Perhaps the most significant criticism came from widely known historian Frances Fuller Victor,  who thought the work “showed little imagination.” Duniway herself became unhappy about the novel and reactions to it. More than 40 years later, she virtually rewrote Captain Gray’s Company as From the West to the West (1905). In redoing the novel, Duniway stated that her first book was written by “an illiterate, inexperienced settler.”  Increasingly upset with reviewers, whom she often dismissed as “prudes,” she even tried to withdraw the book from selling in stores.

But the reservations of reviewers and Duniway herself about her novel (which is available here, in pdf form) should not blind present-day readers to the novel’s major contributions. It is, first of all, a revealing work about pioneer women.  Here we see their never-stop work as wives on the trail and on Oregon farms. Their lives appear in developing segments: little girls growing up, teenagers becoming sweethearts, newly married young women, new moms, and maturing wives and mothers. The novel overflows with women’s work habits, the demands of housekeeping, and health challenges because of overwork. Seen whole, this is a revealing, valuable portrait of pioneer women, particularly their lives in Oregon.        

In 1871, the Duniway family moved to Portland and launched The New Northwest newspaper. For nearly 30 years, Abigail edited the journal, increasingly turning it into an outlet stressing women’s rights.  She also serialized many of her subsequent novels in it.  The publication, in addition, served as something of an answer to her brother Harvey Scott‘s newspaper, The Oregonian, which opposed women’s suffrage.

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Over the years, disappointments and disruptions never seemed to throw Abigail Scott Duniway off-track — at least not for more than a brief period.  She was an ambitious, nonstop woman, perhaps even driven. Alongside the writing and editing duties, she began pushing for women’s voting rights.  She became increasingly involved in these activities as she grew older, gaining increasing attention in Oregon, the Pacific Northwest, and even national circles. The publication of her memoir, Path Breaking (1914), served as the capstone of her writing career.