Margaret Jewett Bailey

[3] She attended the Methodist Episcopal Wesleyan Academy in Wilbraham over the objections of her family, especially her father, who wished for her to care for him in his old age and who threatened to disown her.

[1] She was courted by William H. Willson and was engaged to him for a time, but she refused to marry him after learning he had also written to another woman, Chloe Clark, asking her to come to Oregon to become his wife.

[8] According to Bailey, as she writes in the first chapter of Grains, "I am avoided and shunned, and slighted, and regarded with suspicions in every place till my life is more burdensome than death would be.

[9][10] Bailey was already known to some Oregon readers by the time The Grains was published because of her work in the Spectator (signed "MJB"), and her letters home that were printed in Boston- and New York-based Christian newspapers as early as 1838.

[14] The book drew on letters and her diary and journal entries, but she disguised the names of many of the principal characters (Willson becomes "Wiley", Leslie becomes "Leland", and Bailey becomes "Binney").

[18] The Grains, which was considered a "lost" work, was republished in a single volume by the Oregon State University Press in 1986 and was produced by combining the last three known copies in existence with a separately published story.

[19] A review of the 1986 edition notes that as a primary source, the book is a "fascinating (if seamy) insight into the workings of both daily life and internecine warfare at the 'Oregon Mission'".

Moss, who was from Oregon City, sent the manuscript with a friend to the east coast where it was published by Stratton & Barnard in Cincinnati, Ohio under the name Emerson Bennett, a well-known author of the time.

In 1852, the satiric political play Treason, Strategems, and Spoils, A Melodrame in Five Acts by Breakspear (William Lysander Adams) was published in five installments in The Oregonian and appeared later as a pamphlet.