Hubert Howe Bancroft was an American historian. He was the first major collector of American documentary materials and the first historian of the Far W.
Background
Hubert Howe Bancroft was born on May 5, 1832, in Granville, Ohio, United States, to Azariah Ashley Bancroft and Lucy Howe Bancroft.
Bancroft came from a poor and modest background, even though he was to acquire great wealth and achieve amazing success during his life. He had a New England heritage with a farmer for a father and a schoolteacher mother.
Education
Bancroft was a very intelligent child and could read at the age of three, but he suffered from extreme shyness and eventually, his mother took him out of Doane Academy, in Granville, and taught him at home.
Although he never graduated from college, in 1875, Bancroft was awarded an honorary Master of Arts degree from Yale in recognition of his massive historical work on Native Races of the Pacific States.
Career
At the age of sixteen, Bancroft planned to attend college but quickly realized that the family could not afford the financial strain. Luckily, his brother-in-law, George Derby, gave him a job in his bookstore. Bancroft was delighted since he had become an avid reader. The young man started first in the bindery department and later moved to bookkeeping. Unfortunately, he was fired after six miserable months, but Derby gave him a second chance, and he returned to Ohio with a consignment of books.
As a bookseller, Bancroft flourished, and after selling off all the books returned once again to Buffalo where Derby hired him as a clerk. During this time, the California gold rush was at its height and Bancroft’s father, as well as other relatives, left for the West coast. Derby took the opportunity to send them books to sell, and because of their success, the nineteen-year-old Bancroft was soon sent with a large shipment of books valued at five thousand dollars. The elder Bancroft had begun a gold mining business, and the young man worked for his father for six months until they admitted defeat. When Bancroft returned to Sacramento. Derby had died, and he soon realized he would have a difficult time finding another book dealer who would entrust him with such responsibilities at his young age.
He moved on to Crescent City and had a bit more luck, but eventually the company he was working for went bankrupt, and he returned to San Francisco. In 1855, Bancroft went back East to visit his family, and while there his newly widowed sister insisted on giving him most of her savings to start his own business in California. With this money, as well as by establishing a line of long-term credit, he opened up his firm H. H. Bancroft and Company in December 1856. By 1857, he managed in just one short year to acquire most of the business trade in San Francisco. He once again returned to New York to order more supplies.
Bancroft’s business continued to flourish during the Civil War years, and he expanded within the building as well as opening up another store. In 1869, he began work on a five story brick and wood building, which opened for business the following year.
With this new store, H. H. Bancroft & Company became the largest book and stationery firm west of Chicago. Bancroft yearned for something more besides being financially successful, so the book dealer began collecting books in 1859.
Bancroft’s interest in acquiring books on the Pacific Coast and California came about through an employee of his who was assembling material to write a handbook on the area. From this humble collection of fifty to seventy-five books, Bancroft ended up with sixty thousand on the subject. Bancroft was extremely thorough with his search and would go into every bookstore he encountered in the United States and Europe, as well as going to estate auctions, agents, newspapers, and any other source he could think of or had access to.
As his collection grew his ambition to write grew accordingly. In early 1871, he made his first attempt but suffered a nervous breakdown. After he recovered, he embarked on a still more ambitious project: a massive, multi-volume history of Western North America. Two obstacles stood in his way, though: first, there were no precedents to the history of this area, and therefore no guidelines or any hypotheses to go by, and second, Bancroft’s massive collection was not organized yet to be used efficiently for such research. Determined to begin the project anyway, Bancroft employed a staff of assistants as well as a head librarian to begin cataloguing and help in the writing of the volumes. At the time no standard library cataloguing system existed; this proved to be another challenge to the historian. It became a larger project than expected, and Bancroft ended up spending $35,000 even before a single line was written.
The project lasted for two decades, and Bancroft wrote, edited, and supervised it as well as hiring six hundred assistants in order to finally complete it. The individual books making up the encyclopedia were published between 1874 and 1890, beginning with the five-volume Native Races of the Pacific States in 1874 to 1876. These books were a study of the Indians of Western North America, with three volumes devoted to the Indians of Mexico and Central America. After this initial series came out, seven years passed until the next book, but then between 1882 and 1890, the remaining volumes were released - most notably, six volumes dedicated to the history of Mexico, three to Central America and seven to California.
Bancroft continued writing, and after finishing the encyclopedia he released the autobiographical Literary Industries in 1890 about the Mexican president Porfirio Diaz, as well as publishing five volumes of essays and other miscellaneous writings.
Bancroft early on recognized the importance of the Spanish influence on the American West, even before it had become an academic topic. Even though Bancroft’s encyclopedia was a great achievement at the time, it also had many critics. A large part of the criticism was mostly aimed at the fact that Bancroft had refused to give any of the assistants credit for co-authorship, though many insisted that they deserved the credit for writing large portions of the volumes. This controversy attracted even more attention after William A. Morris published an article addressing this particular topic called “The Origin and Authorship of the Bancroft Pacific States Publications: A History of a History.”
Membership
In 1875, Bancroft was also elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society.
American Historical Association
Personality
Although during his lifetime Bancroft failed to achieve the literary fame he desired, his strong contribution of being the first to write the history of the American West as a whole has earned him a well-established place in history. Bancroft's unique treatment of the topics he wrote about, especially his understanding and sympathy towards Spanish and Indian institutions, set him apart from the typical American scholars of the time.
Quotes from others about the person
“Anyone who deals in books runs the risk of becoming a collector.” - John W. Caughey
Interests
Book collecting
Connections
During his visit to New York, Bancroft met Emily Ketchum, who became his first wife. After her death in 1869, he was married again in 1876, to a younger woman named Matilda Coley Griffing with whom he had four children.