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In 1919, the California State Legislature recognized Ella Cummins
as the first “Historian of Literary California.” The Story of the Files,
her major work, is the first serious attempt at a survey history
of California journalism and literature, and preserves much information
that would otherwise have been lost because of the cataclysmic 1906 San
Francisco Earthquake and Fire. Her documentation of forty years of literary
development served as a foundation for such later works as Franklin Walker’s
San Francisco’s Literary Frontier. While modern scholarship
has superceded much of her research, The Story of the Files is packed
with still-useful information, is beautifully written, and reflects the
opinions of someone who lived the times.
Ella Cummins was indeed well qualified for the task. In the
prelude to her book she wrote, “But the writer, who was born in the mines,
cradled in a gold-rocker, and grew up in a quartz-mill, knew many of these
shadows [meaning writers] as living realities, from her childhood, and
honored and adored them. Thus it has become a labor of love.” An accomplished
journalist, she began work on what eventually became The Story of the
Files when writing for the San Francisco Wasp in 1891. During
the course of time, she corresponded with and interviewed scores of California
authors, gathering the raw data for her articles. As she revealed, she
yielded to the gentle pressure to assemble her research into book form
as part of the California exhibit at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exhibition.
In so doing, she covered just about every figure and literary event in
the state’s post–Gold Rush history beginning with that pioneer publication,
The Golden Era.
She centered her study of the publications themselves with
chapters, for example, entitled the “Overland [Monthly] School,” “Writers
of the Sage Brush School,” and “The Argonaut School.” For each topic,
she included short, useful profiles of the various writers. Her book included
excellent summaries of the early magazines and newspapers that made California
such a remarkable land of letters. She devoted entire chapters to such
giants of the California scene as H. H Bancroft, Henry George, Ambrose
Bierce, and “the incomparable three”: Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and Joaquin
Miller. Importantly, her profiles recorded the contributions of dozens
of now minor short story writers, novelists, poets, and journalists. As
a woman laboring in a restrictive nineteenth-century man’s world, she
was keenly aware of the limitations put on her gender and emphasized the
role of women throughout her text. She even added a chapter called “Literature
as a Profession for Women.” Taking advantage of the new technology of
her times, her book was amply illustrated with over one hundred halftone
photographs of her subjects.
In addition to compiling and writing this work of reference,
Cummins (later married to Henry H. Mighels), wrote six other books, including
two novels; an anthology, Literary California (1918); and an autobiography,
Life and Letters of a Forty-Niner’s Daughter (1929); and edited
her father’s Gold Rush diary, How Many Miles to St. Jo? (1929).
The Story of the Files originally sold
for $2.00 a copy in a leatherette binding with a California poppy decoration
on the front cover and was marketed to libraries. In 1982 Yosemite Collections
of San Leandro published a facsimile edition of 500 copies with an introduction
by Oscar Lewis.
——Gary F. Kurutz
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