Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
December 1976 | Volume 28, Issue 1
”years Came Along One After The Other …”
Text Complexity Grade Level
9
Occasionally the quiet testimony of another era forces us, in the old-fashioned phrase, to count our blessings. Benefits fought for and painfully won in an advancing society quickly become rights to be taken for granted—the right to receive aid from the government when we are unemployed or unemployable; the freedom of children from ceaseless labor in their growing years; the eight-hour workday and the minimum wage; the right to protection for farms, homes, and savings; the right to get financial and medical help in our old age. We accept these rights so naturally that they become assumptions, seldom examined until some witness from the past—even the quite recent past—jolts our consciousness.
The brief memoir by Emma Mitchell New printed below exerts such a jolt. Mrs. New was a pioneer who wrote an account of her life from 1877 to 191 7 on the Kansas prairie. She was not a writer, and her experience was probably not notably different from that of hundreds of other lonely, overworked pioneer women. She wrote about it because she was asked to do so by a contemporary suffragist, lawyer, and publisher, Lilla Day Monroe, who commissioned hundreds of Kansas women to record their experiences for a book she was planning to publish.
Mrs. Monroe died, however, before she could complete the work. The memoirs she had collected, 770 of them, were recently rediscovered by her great-grand-daughter, Joanna L. Stratton. Ms. Stratton, a Harvard University student, came across the material in the attic of her grandmother’s house in Topeka, Kansas- thousands of handwritten pages inscribed on notebook paper and stationery that had been stored unpublished in a file cabinet for fifty years.
Now, three generations later, Ms. Stratton plans to finish her great-grand-mother’s work. Her book, to be entitled Pioneer Women, will eventually be published by Simon and Schuster.
We landed in Russell [on the prairie of central Kansas] forepart of December, 1877, with our car-load of goods, consisting of a few household goods, team of horses, a few chickens, a wagon and plow, enough lumber to build a small house, and a fairly good supply of provisions. We boarded at a hotel for two weeks and by that time the house was finished enough that we could move in out on a claim two miles northwest of Russell. Many a homesick day I saw, many a tear was shed. I couldn’t bear to go to the window and look out. All I could see everywhere was prairie and not a house to be seen. We had been there about three months when my two little children, a boy and a girl, came rushing into the house so excited, for they saw a woman coming over the hill toward the house. It proved to be a neighbor that lived a mile and a half from us. The hill between us had obscured their little dugout. We felt so happy to know that we had a neighbor. I called on them one day, and they