01Biography
Abigail Scott was 17 when her family set out from Illinois for Oregon in 1852, and she was given the job of keeping the family's daily journal. In June her mother died of cholera in what is now Wyoming, and her youngest brother, Willie, died later on the road.
She married Benjamin Duniway in 1853. After he was badly hurt in a runaway-team accident in 1862, she supported the family by teaching school and running a millinery shop. Her first novel, Captain Gray's Company (1859), was based on the journey. In 1871 the Duniways moved to Portland, where she started a weekly paper, The New Northwest. She spent more than forty years working for women's rights, above all the right to vote.
02Why they matter
She kept her family's 1852 trail journal and turned the crossing into Captain Gray's Company, the first novel commercially published in Oregon.
03How they died
In 1912, when Oregon men voted to give women the ballot, Governor Oswald West asked her to write and sign the state's equal suffrage proclamation. She died in a Portland hospital on October 11, 1915, aged 80.
04Legacy
Oregon remembers her as its Mother of Equal Suffrage, and Portland named Duniway Park for her in 1918.