Pioneers In Petticoats (February 1959 | Volume: 10, Issue: 2)

Pioneers In Petticoats

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Authors: Helena Huntington Smith

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February 1959 | Volume 10, Issue 2

I once had a conversation about the ways of the West with a wise and literate old man who had been a cowpuncher in Montana in the golden days of Charlie Russell and Teddy Blue. John R. Barrows was the author of a book called Ubet, describing the adventures of his parents who ran a stage station rejoicing in that typically jaunty frontier name. They had gone west with a wagon train from Wisconsin in 1879, taking several small children.

“It must have been a dreadful experience,” someone crooned to Mrs. Barrows years later.

“Dreadful?” she said to her son. “We were young. The weather was beautiful and the grass was green. Mrs. X and I were the only women in the party, and we never touched our hands to dish water. It was the time of my life!”

The “dreadful experience” is a sacred cliché of literature and even, with all due respect, of history—since historians perforce use the selective approach. The western frontier was “a great place for men and dogs, but hell on horses and women”—or on women and cattle—you can take your choice of the many versions. Anyway, it was hell. From the sod-house frontier of Nebraska and Kansas to the sun-parched plains of Texas and the big trees of Oregon, the literature of the West, as far as women are concerned, is one long lamentation.

It is “a tale of toil that’s never done,” wrote Hamlin Garland; a picture of faded beauty, broken health, hope destroyed; of women pining for the civilized niceties they have left behind; women driven insane by loneliness, monotony, and wind. They boo-hooed over their complexions, which were ruined by alkali dust—or the writers boo-hooed for them. The emptiness of the Great Plains is thought to be peculiarly depressing to the fair sex, but when we reach the Pacific Northwest it turns out that the trees were what got them down. It was Hamlin Garland, again, who tacked a seemingly indelible epitaph to the grave of the frontier wife: “Just born an’ scrubbed an’ suffered an’ died.”

But this tearful portrait is punched full of holes by the case of Grandma Cooney. Mrs. M. A. Cooney of Helena, Montana, crossed the plains by ox wagon in 1864, a very young wife with a small baby. Interviewed by a local reporter some sixty years later, she informed him briskly that she had worked too hard all her life to have time for worry, “and it’s worry, not work, that kills.” No, she could not recall any hardships on the trail. No, she wasn’t afraid of the Indians. (Other young brides were terrified of them, not without reason.) Covered-wagorr days held only pleasant memories.

Grandma Cooney had passed from the scene before I came along with my notebook and pencil, but the memory of her was lively and green. Her nine children never even slowed her down.