Margaret Jewett Bailey

Novelist and author of Ruth Rover whose birth and death elude chronology, Margaret Jewitt (Smith) Bailey came to Oregon from Saugus, Massachusetts with a Jason Lee party of Methodist missionaries in 1837. She taught at Willamette Mission for a time but by 1839 had married Dr. William J. Bailey, after which she retired from missionary work. In the early 1840s she lived happily with her husband on a French Prairie farm, being visited there in June of 1841, by Charles Wilkes of the U.S. Navy, on official tour of the Oregon Country. From the time the Oregon Spectator furnished a medium for her pen, she became a regular contributor, both of prose and poetry. Increasing domestic troubles and daily associations with squaw wives of Champoeg district farmers, are believed to have moved her to writing, much of which reflected the loneliness of her life. Her principal literary effort was Grains, or Passages in the Life of Ruth Rover, with Occasional Pictures of Oregon, Natural and Moral, a long novel printed in parts by Carter & Austin, Portland, in 1854. A sensitive and personal study of married life, this book early disappeared from public attention; only one copy is known to exist. After obtaining a divorce from her doctor husband in 1854, the unhappy author—the book was not favorably received—remarried in 1855, but from this union to Francis Waddell she was divorced in 1858, at Salem. She moved to Washington Territory, where she later died.

From the Dictionary of Oregon History