In 1868, a San Francisco book dealer named Hubert Howe Bancroft (1832-1918) set out to write the history of the Pacific slope,[1] from Alaska to the Isthmus of Panama. It was a project on a heroic scale.

Bancroft did not write all the books himself, even though he was the only author listed. In fact, he didn’t even wrote most of them. He shaped a master narrative, then set up a team of some 600 writers, researchers, and historians to work with and for him. He assembled a collection of more than 60,000 volumes related to the subjects. He bought private collections of primary sources, When buying collections proved impossible, he hired copyists to work in archives in California, Mexico, and Spain. He also hired bright young men to travel through the west, taking down hundreds of oral histories[2], what he called “dictations,” from surviving pioneers of the American West. (To my surprise, some of these dictations were taken from Native Americans.)

Bancroft made a fortune with his “history factory[3],“ and earned a reputation for unscrupulous practices in the process. The books were sold by subscription.  Many subscribers were surprised to learn that they had committed to buying thirty-nine volumes. (Leland Stanford, in particular, protested loudly . He had ordered forty sets, under the impression that the series would run to five or six volumes. Ooops!)

Thanks to Bancroft, our knowledge of the history of the American West is greater than it might otherwise be. He collected material at a time when few were interested in doing so, before the people who were capable of giving first hand accounts of America’s westward expansion were gone. In 1905, the University of California at Berkeley bought his collected sources for $250,000[4] for what is now the, ahem, Bancroft Library.

[1] I looked it up so you didn’t have to: the Pacific slope is the technical name for the geographic region in the Americans that are west of the continental divide. I love words with this type of specificity.

[2] Bancroft was ahead of his time. Oral history as a technique for preserving individual stories for academic use, as opposed to oral tradition, is generally considered to be a creation of the early twentieth century.

[3] Something that is hard for this modern writer of popular history to imagine.

[4] Roughly 9.5 million dollars today.