Hubert Howe Bancroft (1832-1918) was massing in San
Francisco at his own expense the greatest assemblage of
historical documents any one individual ever assembled. While
his interviewers and note-takers sorted down tons of
manuscript, he was employing a corps of historians to write
what,
at first designed as a history of the Pacific states, grew in
twenty-eight volumes to embrace also Alaska, British Columbia,
Texas, Mexico, and Central America, aside from five
volumes on the Native Races and six volumes of essays.
Meantime he was printing these volumes in sets of thousands
and
selling them through an army of agents that covered America.
Collis P. Huntington (1821-1900) was building the
Southern Pacific Railroad into a network, interlocked with
other systems and steamship lines, not only enveloping
California land but also the whole economic and political life
of
that and other states, with headquarters in the U.S. Congress.
Then his nephew, Henry E. Huntington (1850-1927), taking over
his wealth and power, was building gardens at San Marino,
California, collecting art, books, and manuscripts to
make, without benefit of any institution of learning and in
defiance of all the slow processes of tradition found at
Oxford and Harvard, a Huntington Library and a Huntington Art
Gallery that, set down amid the most costly botanical
profusion imaginable, now rival the world's finest.
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