The great mass of California matter, at first so voluminous as to be appalling, was now in hand, and in 1878 Mr. Bancroft turned his attention to the Northwest. Upon a visit to British Columbia in that year, he obtained access to the official records of the province, took the reminiscences of many old fur traders, secured the papers of others, and had help from several who had undertaken to write a history of the country: (Lit. Ind., 534; Hist. N. W. Coast, preface, viii). It was from this data that Mr. Bancroft in the years immediately following wrote, with the aid of some other writers, the History of the Northwest Coast, and the History of British Columbia, volumes constituting the great part of the work of which he can claim the actual authorship: (See Lit. Ind., 549.) The history seeker had already secured the writings of Gov. Elwood Evans of Washington Territory. Crossing the straits from Victoria, he made some collections about Puget Sound, and then went to Portland and Salem, accompanied by Amos Bowman, a stenographer who subsequently became one of the writers in the library and prepared some manuscript for the History of British Columbia. (Bowman was a Canadian with some experience in government surveys and mining explorations. Before joining Mr. Bancroft on this expedition, he was located at Anacortes, Washington.) The Oregon Pioneer Association was then in session at Salem, and a number of its members furnished dictations. The secretary, J. Henry Brown, was engaged to copy documents in the state archives (Lit. Ind., 540-546). He subsequently made this matter the basis of a book which he himself published on Oregon history. After dictations had been secured in passing through Southern Oregon, the Oregon material at Mr. Bancroft's disposal was further increased on his return to San Francisco by the employment of Frances Fuller Victor, a writer of experience and author of several books on Oregon, who, during a residence of more than ten years in the state, had collected data with the intention of herself writing and publishing its history. As by her researches she had become familiar with the history of the entire northwestern part of the United States, the working up of this field was assigned her just as the southwest had been assigned to Oak. (Frances Fuller was born in the township of Rome, New York, May 23, 1826. She was a near relation of Judge Reuben H. Walworth, Chancellor of the State of New York, and through her ancestor, Lucy Walworth, wife of Veach Williams, who lived at Lebanon, Connecticut, in the early part of the eighteenth century, claimed descent from Egbert, the first king of England. Veach Williams himself was descended from Robert Williams, who came over from England in 1637, and settled at Roxbury, Massachusetts.