Hubert Howe Bancroft (May 5, 1832 – March 2, 1918) was an American historian and ethnologist who wrote, published, and collected works concerning the Western United States, Texas, California, Alaska, Mexico, Central America, and British Columbia.
Hubert Howe Bancroft was born on May 5, 1832, in Granville, Ohio, to Azariah Ashley Bancroft and Lucy Howe Bancroft. The Howe and Bancroft families originally hailed from the New England states of Vermont and Massachusetts, respectively. Bancroft's parents were staunch abolitionists and the family home was a station on the Underground Railroad.
Bancroft attended the Doane Academy in Granville for a year, and he then became a clerk in his brother-in-law's bookstore in Buffalo, New York.
In March 1852, Bancroft was provided with an inventory of books to sell and was sent to the booming California city of San Francisco to set up a West Coast regional office of the firm. Bancroft was successful in building his company, entering the world of publishing in the process. He also became a serious collector of books, building a collection numbering into the tens of thousands of volumes.
In 1868, he resigned from his business in favor of his brother, A. L. Bancroft. He had accumulated a great library of historical material and abandoned business to devote himself entirely to writing and publishing history.
Bancroft's library consisted of books, maps, and printed and manuscript documents, including a large number of narratives dictated to Bancroft or his assistants by pioneers, settlers, and statesmen. The indexing of the vast collection employed six persons for ten years. The library was moved in 1881 to a fireproof building and, in 1900, numbered about 45,000 volumes.
He developed a plan to publish a history in 39 volumes of the entire Pacific coast region of North America, from Central America to Alaska. He employed writers and wrote some of the material himself, though he credited only himself as an author. In 1886, the publishing establishment of A. L. Bancroft & Company burned, and the sheets of seven volumes of the history he had written were destroyed.
Bancroft's first marriage was to Emily Ketchum in 1859. They had one child, a daughter named Kate who was born in 1859. Emily died in childbirth in 1869. In 1879, Bancroft married his second wife, Matilda Coley Griffing, with whom he had four children.
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. He was also elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1875.
He died on March 2, 1918, at his country home in Walnut Creek, California. "Acute peritonitis" was blamed as the cause of death in published
newspaper reports. Bancroft was 85 at his death. His body was interred in the Cypress Lawn Memorial Park in Colma, California.
Bancroft often published writing by others under his own name, fitting others' writing into a narrative of history as Bancroft saw it. This "literary factory" style of production resulted in writing of uneven quality. By modern standards Bancroft would not be considered the author of many of the works he attributed to himself; he often failed to give adequate credit to the contributing writers. Bancroft's staff copied and summarized material in archives throughout California and the Southwest, and collected oral histories. The result was 39 volumes of history attributed to Bancroft.
Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo served as Bancroft's contact among the Californios. Based on interviews, Vallejo produced a five-volume work of history for Bancroft. Vallejo was disappointed by how Bancroft used the work, subsuming the stories of Mexicans into a master narrative organized around the Gold Rush. Bancroft tried to purchase the writing of historian Antonio María Osio, who refused to sell so that Bancroft could not credit himself as the author of her work.
Bancroft's personal views appear conflicted and are difficult to know exactly because he published writing by others under his own name. According to the Bancroft Library:
Bancroft's writings and work are riddled with contradictions, tensions, and ambiguities. For instance, while using the racist language of the day to discuss Chinese immigrants in the United States, Bancroft also opposed Chinese exclusion and spent pages of Retrospection excoriating Denis Kearney, one of the leaders of the anti-Chinese campaign in California. In a similar vein, he wrote unquestionably bigoted and offensive things about African Americans, while at the same time holding "anti-slavery" perspectives and coming from an abolitionist family. He was similarly dismissive of women, and yet interviewed Californio and Mormon women as part of his history project.
Bancroft's writing expressed support for vigilance committees in the West. Bancroft celebrated "the honor of the first popular tribunal of the placer mining epoch" in Hangtown, a place named for its many vigilante lynchings.
In the late 19th century, it was determined that much of the work of which Bancroft claimed authorship had in fact been written by others. This tainted his legacy in the eyes of some scholars, on the principle "false in one thing, false in all." The Salt Lake Tribune called him a "purloiner of other peoples' brains" in 1893.
The Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, reflects the collector's name. The University of California purchased his 60,000-volume book collection in 1905.