After her husband's severe injury in 1862, she supported the family by teaching and running a millinery in Albany, Oregon. She moved them to Portland in 1871 and began publishing The New Northwest.
Her Captain Gray's Company, or Crossing the Plains and Living in Oregon (1859) was the first novel to be commercially published in Oregon. She wrote a booklet called My Musings after attending a convention of the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1872. Her last publication was Path Breaking: An Autobiographical History of the Equal Suffrage Movement in Pacific Coast States, in 1914.