Margaret Jewett Smith Bailey (1812?–1882) was an American author from Oregon.^[1]

Bailey, using the pen name Ruth Rover, wrote one of the earliest literary works published in Oregon, The Grains, or, Passages in the Life of Ruth Rover, with Occasional Pictures of Oregon, Natural and Moral.^[1] According to historian Edwin Bingham in the foreword to the 1986 edition, Grains is "part autobiography, part religious testimonial, part history and travelogue", but "by stretching the definition, The Grains may be called a novel, the first novel written and published on the Pacific coast."^[1][2]

Early life

Margaret Jewett Smith was born in Saugus, Massachusetts in about 1812. She converted to Methodism when she was 17 at a camp meeting.^[3] She attended the Methodist Episcopal Wesleyan Academy in Wilbraham over the objections of her family, especially her father, who wished for her to care for him in his old age and who threatened to disown her.^[3] She hoped she could become a missionary teacher among the Native Americans.^[3]

Move to Oregon Country

Smith came to the Oregon Country to join the Methodist Mission in September 1837 with the Reverend David Leslie, his wife Mary, their children, and the Reverend H. K. W. Perkins.^[4][5] Smith, who worked as a teacher, was the only unmarried white woman at the mission, thus the mission authorities pressured her to marry.^[1] She was courted by William H. Willson and was engaged to him for a time, but she refused to marry him after learning he had also written to another woman asking her to come to Oregon to become his wife.^[3] Smith insisted on waiting to marry Willson until it was known if the other woman was coming to Oregon.^[3] Willson became impatient and asked Smith to falsely confess that they had fornicated so that they would be allowed to marry immediately.^[3] Smith refused, but Willson told the other members of the mission that they had sinned together.^[3] Smith, unable to prove her innocence, left the mission.^[3]

Smith married William J. Bailey, a man from outside the mission, in 1839.^[1][5] Willson married Chloe Aurelia Clark the following year.^[6] Smith lived with Bailey on their farm in French Prairie and became a regular contributor of prose and poetry to the Oregon Spectator beginning in 1846.^[1][5] On April 12, 1854, Margaret divorced William because of his drinking and abuse.^[7]

The Grains

The Grains was intended to be published in monthly installments, but only two volumes were issued, in August and September 1854 by Carter & Austin in Portland, Oregon.^[8][9] Bailey was known to some Oregon readers by the time The Grains was published because of her work in the Spectator (signed "MJB"), and letters in church publications as early as 1838.^[1] Immediately after her divorce, Bailey edited six columns of the "Ladies Department" for the Spectator.^[1] Although she wished to edit a paper of her own for women, because she was a divorced woman of questionable reputation, she did not publish any writing after Grains.^[1]

The Grains, published two years before Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, is like that work a social protest, which criticizes Jason Lee and the mission community, as well as the mission's failure to convert the local Native Americans, and discrimination against women.^[10]

The Grains, which was considered a "lost" work, was republished in a single volume by the Oregon State University Press in 1986 and was produced by combining the last three copies in existence with a separately published story.^[11]

Later life

Bailey married Francis Waddle in Polk County in 1855 and they divorced in 1858.^[1] Bailey later moved to the Washington Territory and married a man named Crane.^[1] Bailey died in poverty in Seattle on May 17, 1882, as Margaret J. Crane.^[1][10]

See also

• 1854 in literature
• Oregon Mission
• Oregon missionaries
• Frances Fuller Victor, another early Oregon writer

Notes

References

External links

• Full text of The Grains from Indiana University Digital Library Program

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