Collection is open for research.
Diaries gift of Isabel Blythe, October 1966 (Lib. Acc. 10288). Typescript of diary entries and reminiscences gift of George Flynn Marlor and Thelma I. Marlor, October 1983 (Lib. Acc. 16576).
Samuel Finley Blythe was born in 1842 in Pennsylvania. He was living in Ohio at the outbreak of the U.S. Civil War, and served in the Union Army during that conflict. In 1866, he went to St. Joseph, Missouri, where he briefly worked at the St. Joseph Gazette. He then joined an emigrant party that went to Bozeman, Montana, where he worked as a farmhand before working as a printer for the Montana Post.
After briefly returning to Ohio and then working in California, Blythe moved to Portland, Oregon, in 1870. There, over the course of the next two decades, he worked as a printer for the Portland Bulletin, the Daily Bee, the Daily News, and the Farm and Dairyman. In 1877, Blythe purchased farmland in Hood River, Oregon, which was named Twin Oaks farm. From 1894 to 1904, he was the publisher for the Hood River Glacier.
Blythe married Emma Nation in 1873; the couple had three children. Blythe died in 1928.
Sources: Vital records on Ancestry.com; articles in the Oregonian, 1915-1928.
Blythe's diary is described in "Overland passages: a guide to overland documents in the Oregon Historical Society," entry 24, and is also listed in "Platte River road narratives," entry 2048.
Samuel F. Blythe diaries and reminiscences, Mss 3, Oregon Historical Society Research Library.
Collection was titled "Samuel Finley Blythe diaries and accounts" prior to 2022. Includes materials previously designated Mss 3-1.
The collection consists of two pocket diaries of Samuel F. Blythe, and a transcript of Blythe's diary entries and later reminiscences compiled and edited by his grandson, George Finley Marlor, and Marlor's wife, Thelma I. Marlor. The first pocket diary details Blythe's 1866 journey from Eaton, Ohio, to St. Joseph, Missouri, his brief time working in St. Joseph, and his subsequent participation in an emigrant party traveling from St. Joseph to Bozeman, Montana. This diary makes multiple references to hostile interactions between Euro-Americans and Native peoples. The second pocket diary contains entries concerning Blythe's travels in the late 1860s, lists of wages he received while working as a printer for Montana newspapers, and notes about bills that he paid.
The transcript by George Finley Marlor and Thelma I. Marlor, titled "Saga of the Prairies: Part 2 of Recollections of a Long Life," includes a combination of entries from Blythe's diaries and passages from reminiscences that Blythe wrote beginning in 1925. The transcript also contains footnotes for historical contextualization, and an index.
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