Eva Emery Dye was the first Oregon novelist to capture national attention. Her career as a western novelist began with McLoughlin and Old Oregon (1900), and she went on to enjoy widespread notice of her writings in the 20th century. Dye was a talented historical novelist working well within the romantic tradition of American literature inherited from the early 1800s. In addition, Dye was an energetic cultural activist. She not only spoke for women’s suffrage, but also, with the support of her husband, helped launch the important Chautauqua movement in the Oregon City area.

Born in Illinois in 1855, Eva gained a college degree at Oberlin and early on exhibited a strong interest in creative writing. She married Charles Dye in 1882, and the couple moved to Oregon City in 1890, where Charles established a successful business and law practice. Eva kept busy raising four children and participating in sociocultural activities.  

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Over the years, Eva Dye also saved time for extensive writing. As a teenager and college student, she wrote a few poems and read widely in the works of English and American Romantic writers. In 1900, her novel McLoughlin and Old Oregon appeared. The work about Dr. John McLoughlin, the so-called “father of Oregon,” exhibited the familiar strengths of historical fiction: solid research in history married to imagined events and conversations. Dye’s initial success and her capturing and retaining a panoply of readers encouraged her to continue writing historical novels.

Dye’s career hit an early, lasting apex with her next novel, The Conquest: The True Story of Lewis and Clark (1902). The contributions of this long work of fiction solidified Dye’s growing reputation as a historical novelist in the early 20th century. Although the work focuses on the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804-06), it also treats, generally, the years stretching from the American Revolution to the first overlanders up the trail to Oregon.  

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The novel’s main characters are the famous explorer William Clark, his older brother George Rogers Clark, and Meriwether Lewis; but Thomas Jefferson, Daniel Boone, several Indian leaders, and numerous frontier sites also gain thorough attention. Dye was intrigued with the complexities of American history, particularly pioneer experiences on a series of frontiers moving west.

About half — the middle half — of The Conquest is devoted to the monumental Lewis and Clark Expedition to explore the Pacific Northwest. Fascinated with George Rogers Clark, Dye devotes substantial attention to the Clark home and how those experiences prepared William Clark for his expedition leadership, as well as his many decades of helping Indian leaders and tribes to face and deal with the expansion of white settlers into their Native lands.

Less extensive is the coverage of Meriwether Lewis, but Dye does treat Lewis’ close friendship with President Jefferson and his intellectual leadership on the famous trip. Tragically, under the increasing stress of decision-making and rising debts, Lewis’ life ended in 1809. Was it suicide or murder? Like most other historians, biographers, and novelists, Dye leaves that traumatic question unanswered.

But the figure in the novel that generated the most interest, by far, was Sacagawea, the Indian teenager, a wife and new mother. She, along with her French husband Toussaint Charbonneau, accompanied the expedition from the Mandan villages of the Dakota region to the West Coast, then back to the Mandans in 1806. Not much was known specifically about Sacagawea nearly a century after the famed exploration. But Dye chose to greatly expand on what was known, adding much to the young woman’s leadership, geographical knowledge, and importance to the explorers that could not be proven.

Many readers bought into Dye’s enlarged image of Sacagawea (spelled Sacajawea by Dye). So did women’s rights organizations. During the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition in 1905, Sacagawea was memorialized, and the National American Woman Suffrage Association adopted her as a symbol of women’s worth in history. In her romanticized portrait of Sacagawea, Dye prepared the way for a greatly enlarged view of the young Indian woman.

Viewed via 125 years of hindsight, The Conquest remains an important Oregon historical novel. It drew attention to Dye’s artistic talents, to the importance of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, and especially to the significant roles of William Clark and Sacagawea.

The successful sales and expansive readership of Dye’s second novel encouraged her to keep at her scribbling. She published McDonald of Oregon: A Tale of Two Shores (1906) and The Soul of America: An Oregon Iliad (1934).

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At her death in 1947 — and in the years immediately following — Eva Emery Dye was lionized as a superb historical novelist known for her diligent research in numerous, varied historical sources. But as literary realism invaded the scene in the 20th century, some critics increasingly dismissed Dye as too romantic, too tied to dramatic narratives. A balanced view of Dye can accept these possible shortcomings and still point to her as an important figure in the development of Oregon literary history.