Bancroft’s thirty-nine-volume history is the most ambitious publishing project ever undertaken in the western United States. His seven-volume History of California for the years its covers (1542-1890) is still the foundation study, the first source for any serious research. Legendary in their length, the footnotes alone make his history worth its weight in factual and bibliographic gold, and his list of over one thousand “Authorities Quoted” is an invaluable aid. Bancroft saw in his publication a great western epic comparing himself to Homer with one notable exception: “Homer dealt in myth,” he wrote, “I should deal in facts; Homer’s were the writings of poetical genius, mine of plodding prose.”
          Coming to San Francisco in 1852, it did not take long for the young enterprising native of Ohio to establish a flourishing bookstore, and in the 1860s he began assembling a great library for the purpose of documenting the history of his adopted state and the entire Pacific Slope from Alaska to Central America. Taking sixteen years to complete, the publication of Bancroft’s Works is a marvel of research and publishing organization. It is no accident that he called his venture “The History Company.” Working out of the Bancroft Building, he hired a team of researchers and writers to organize, catalog, index, and transform an ocean of primary source material into narrative history. Bancroft quickly realized he could not do all the writing. Henry L. Oak, his trusted librarian, wrote the first five volumes on California and the text for the histories of New Mexico and Arizona. Frances Fuller Victor produced the volumes on the other western states and territories. Bancroft himself wrote most of the topical volumes including the wonderful account of pre-American life and culture, California Pastoral, and the fascinating summary of his grand endeavor, Literary Industries.
          While the history factory churned out the prose, Bancroft simultaneously directed an aggressive advertising campaign, selling the set by subscription. He offered customers the following binding options: $4.50 “bound in extra English cloth”; $5.50 “bound in fine leather, library style”; $8.00 “bound in half calf, half Russia or half morocco”; and $10.00 “bound in Russian leather, or tree calf.” Full sets ranged in price from $175.50 to $390. His army of agents sold over 6,000 sets or about 234,000 volumes. What an incredible feat. Kevin Starr drew an apt comparison: “The Big Four built railroads. Bancroft built history.”
          Over the years, Bancroft’s detailed histories have, not surprisingly, produced their critics and champions. The failure to formally acknowledge the contributions of Oak, Victor, and others caused the greatest controversy, branding him as “a purloiner of other people’s brains.” The coverage in the last volume of the History of California is weak compared to the previous six. Others challenged his biases and stance on controversial subjects, but as Bernard De Voto wrote, “His prejudices are open, well known, and easily adjustable.” Franklin Walker summed it up best: “One would not go far wrong in asserting that Hubert Howe Bancroft accomplished the greatest feat of historiography since Thucydides.”
          In 1963 Wallace Hebberd published a facsimile edition of the History of California with an introduction by Governor Edmund G. Brown. The usefulness of the seven volumes was greatly enhanced by the Zamorano Club’s The Zamorano Index to History of California by Hubert Howe Bancroft, 2 vols., edited by Everett Gordon Hager and Anna Marie Hager (Los Angeles: University of Southern California, 1985).

——Gary F. Kurutz

Additional sources consulted: John Walton Caughey, Hubert Howe Bancroft, Historian of the West (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1946); Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 115-19; Franklin Walker, San Francisco’s Literary Frontier (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1939), pp. 302-315.