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Guides / Women in Oregon / Books by Abigail Scott Duniway
Captain Gray's Company, 1859
Books by Abigail Scott Duniway
Captain Gray's Company, 1859

View the all three parts of Captain Gray's Company at: http://digitalcollections.lclark.edu/items/browse?collection=22

Abigail Scott Duniway’s first novel was Captain Gray’s Company, a romance with multiple female heroines based on her own experience traveling the Oregon Trail. The book published in April of 1859 by Samuel J. McCormick, a Portland printer and stationer, was the first commercially printed novel published in Oregon. According to Duniway’s biographer, Ruth Barnes Moynihan, “The book focuses on two women, one gradually replacing the other in importance, each representing aspects of the author’s own personality.” Although the book does not articulate equal rights for women, it does depict women as central figures not dependent on the support of men. The book was universally panned for its artificial plot and its poor grammar. Duniway was embarrassed by the book. She apologized for it throughout her life, and even re-wrote it as From the West of the West (1905).