Years of Heaven

IN HIS introduction to Pioneer Women, by Joanna Stratton '76, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. recalls the iron-gray Auntie Em of The Wizard of Oz, the sexless and colorless lady of the Kansas plains who has come to represent the withered frontier woman in the minds of childhood readers. The transformation of Dorothy's maternal surrogate, one of the more familiar passages of the beloved novel, goes like this:

When Aunt Fm came there to live she was a young pretty wife. The sun and wind had changed her, too. They had taken the sparkle from here eyes and left them a sober gray: they had taken the red from her cheeks and lips, and they were gray also. She was thin and gaunt, and never smiled now....

But Stratton's recent discovery of hundreds of memoirs from the women who settled the western wilderness against great odds in the mid-19th century has unveiled a female frontier population which seemed to strengthen and thrive and gain color from the prairie sun and wind. These women, who trailed west after their husbands, unwillingly at first, soon burst out in lively appreciation of and identification with the frontier landscape. Carrie Stearns Smith, one pioneer woman, recollects the liberating power of the prairie as it accosted her constricted New England sensibility:

Away we dashed. I fairly holding my breath and railing at the end of my seat. But the sensation of swift motion and aloftness, the keen air of the October morning's dawn, the unusualness and unexpectedness of that phase of my journey--it was intoxicating.

Stratton stumbled upon this gold mine of frontier history--a unique and impressive collection--five years ago in her grandmother's attic. Visiting her ancestor's Topeka. Kansas, home during a semester break from Harvard. Stratton uncovered the manuscripts while poking in a musty filing cabinet lodged under the eaves. Its contents revealed reams of personal testimonies from 800 Kansas women: women in combat with rattlers, prairie blazes and cayotes: women in solitary labor in the cornfields and in the home giving birth with only the cows as witnesses: and, by the 1870s, women embroiled in local politics, temperance and the suffrage movements as the West grew up.

Behind this discovery is Stratton's great-grandmother. Lilla Day Monroe--a pioneer herself as one of the more influential suffrage leaders of her day, the founder of a western newspaper, and the first woman admitted to practice before the Kansas Supreme Court. In the 1920s, she concocted the idea of soliciting female survivors of the Kansas frontier to chronicle their lives and entrust the stories to her care. She had in mind a magazine article, but when the submissions flooded in by the hundreds. Monroe expanded her project to an anthology. Illness and the obligations of public life prevented her from completing the work, and she left the manuscripts to her daughter. The daughter filed the papers in a cabinet after Monroe's death, and there they sat--for almost 50 years.

Stratton, who was in Cambridge last week, says that after making her fortuitous excursion to the attic, she returned to Harvard in search of an adviser but could find no frontier historian in the History Department. She finally appealed to Frank Freidel. Warren Professor of American History, inquiring if he would be free for an independent study. Sorry, no time, he told her. "Then I told him I had 800 memoirs from Kansas pioneers that no one had ever seen before." He found time. Working closely with Freidel and Michael F. Jimenez, a graduate student in history. Stratton produced a 300-page account in the next five years.

For the most part, the author rightly allows the women to speak for themselves: she refrains from interpreting their words and interjects only to summarize. "I wanted to preserve their lives, not analyze them," she explains. But one wonders why she felt compelled at all to depart from her great-grandmother's desire to compile an anthology. If her plan was simply preservation, an unfragmented assemblage of these memoirs would have provided a greater service to historians of the frontier and to women studies than Stratton's dissection and seemingly arbitrary reorganization of their tales. This is especially true since the original papers are tucked away in the Kansas Historical Society archives, inaccessible to most history students. (Stratton says Schlesinger Library wanted the documents, but her family decided to keep the memoirs in their home state.)

STRATTON'S annoying insistence on imposing her authorial presence is exacerbated by her repetitive and often unimaginitive writing style, overburdened with tired and unnecessary adjectival and adverbial phrases about "the tough life." One wearisome sentence, characteristic of this style--"For these women, life was far from easy"--reemerges 20 pages after it first appears as. "For Emma Mitchell New and her growing family, life on the plains of central Kansas was far from easy," and crops up yet again 100 pages later as. "For the frontier teacher, life on the job was far from easy." Such observations add nothing to our understanding of the pioneering experience and detract from the women's spirited accounts. Amy M. Loucks' recollection of suturing a scalped friend "with a fiddle string and common needle" more effectively conveys the same message.

The book is at its best when Stratton quotes long segments of the memoirs without interruption. The ungarnished language of these pioneers presents a quiet celebration of lives simply lived, without grand ambition, self-glorification or moralizing, Mother never judged, one frontier daughter recalls. "She always saw all sides and nothing seemed to horrify her, for she always made allowances for human frailty." To survive from day to day was regarded an achievement deserving of praise. Esther Clark remembered her mother's solo wagon ride to save their sheep from a flooding river and how later the men cheered "Leny's nerve." It took greater courage, however, Esther believed to endure in the face of the countless, humdrum days of frontier isolation:

But I think, as much courage as it took to hang on to the reins that day, it took more to live twenty-four hours at a time, month in and out, on the lonely and lovely prairie, without giving up to the loneliness.

Their exultation and private communion with the surrounding natural serenity rivals Willa Cather's My Antonia. Lydia Murphy Toothaker writes:

It was such a new world, reaching to the far horizon without break of tree or chimney stack: just sky and grass and grass and sky....The hush was so loud. As I lay in my unplastered upstairs room, the heavens seemed nearer than ever before and awe and beauty and mystery over all.

Included in these stories are some exceptionally rare finds: an account of captivity and a subsequent forced marriage to an Indian, and a description of the Victoria settlement--an abortive experiment by a band of pretentious Britons who brought their teacups and lace to Anglicize the West. Unfortunately, the memoirs fail to encompass all types of pioneer women; as Stratton notes in her forward, "the voices of the marginal women"--the poorest working classes, the barmaids and prostitutes, the Black women and Native Americans--have gone unrecorded.

The political development of the white homesteading women represented in the memoirs is well documented as they move from passive helpmates to gun toters, mayors, and temperance and suffrage stumpers. Carrie Nation, one of the more notorious Kansas pioneer women, appears in several memoirs, her rallying cry of "smash, women, smash" booming as she and her followers raid the western saloons, hatchets in hand. But the willful impulse of these independent-minded women, made infamous by the likes of Carrie, finds a less flamboyant, yet sterling expression in the simple declaration of one pioneer bride:

I already had ideas of my own about the husband being the head of the family. I had taken the precaution to sound him on "obey" in the marriage pact and found he did not approve of the term. Approval or no approval, that word "obey" would have to be let out, I had served my time of tutelage to my parent, as the other half of the head of the family. His word and my word would have equal strength.