Hubert Howe Bancroft

Born in Granville, Ohio, in 1832, Hubert Howe Bancroft moved to San Francisco as a young man and began working in the book trade. What started as a bookselling career grew into something much bigger when he began gathering books, manuscripts, and documents about the history of the western side of North America.

Bancroft is best known for assembling a vast library of source material and for publishing an ambitious multi-volume history of the West. His work covered California, the Pacific coast, Mexico, Central America, British Columbia, and Alaska, and he became one of the first major historians to try to document the region on such a large scale.

He died in 1918, but his legacy lasted far beyond his lifetime. The remarkable collection he built became the foundation of the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and his histories are still remembered as major early efforts to preserve the story of the American West.