On Sidesaddles to Heaven - Softcover

Laurie Winn Carlson

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0870043846 ISBN 13: 9780870043840

Publisher: Caxton Press, 1998

Synopsis

Laurie Winn Carlson analyzes the lives of the first six white women missionary wives to cross the Rocky Mountains, offering a fresh and sometimes startling view of these pioneers.

About this title

About the Author

<div></div>Laurie Winn Carlson is the author of several successful books and was named 1993 Idaho Writer of the Year by the Idaho Writers League. Her articles have been published in several magazines and newspapers. She is a member of the Western Writers of America, Women Writing in the West and served on the Idaho Public Television advisory board. She is a Cheney, Washington resident.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

CHAPTER ONE

"May a wise providence direct my way. perhaps I have a better opinion of myself than I ought to have Birds that fly high light low may be true of me yet. But I hope not." -- Mary Richardson (Walker) diary entry, Sept. 1836

Mary Richardson, like any other young woman living in a rural Maine village in the mid-1830s faced a future with hard choices; choices her mother and grandmother had never had to make. While they had married young and made their family and home the mainstay of their lives, Mary was a young adult at a time when the country and the economy were in upheaval. Like many, the talk was always of going farther west; building new communities, clearing new land, expanding. Surely the West, which was the Ohio Reserve at that time, was a powerful magnet. But not everyone saw appeal in forging out away from civilization.

Like nearly all Yankee girls, Mary's social life revolved around school and church. While seated primly in church, she would have heard the warnings and worries of clerics who saw the West, even the far-off Rocky Mountains, as a place where vile men had gone in order to enjoy "vice and human nature, even animal nature." If the West beckoned with financial opportunity, church-goers were reminded that it was important that civilized people went West, too, taking their culture with them. Clergymen warned of "the bowie-knife style of civilization," and the very real probability that westerners would descend into anarchy, with armed bands of ruffians roaming the West at will. With such dire warnings, it seemed unlikely any properly educated, upwardly-striving young woman like Mary would ever dream of going to such a wasteland.

She was practical and a product of her time; she wasn't flighty or enamored with doing foolish things. When she was a child she used to watch swallows building their nests, "Some would choose a place to build, persevere, and in a few days finish a fine nest; others would place a few bills full of mud in one spot, a few in another, & then desert all." She thought the latter "wanting in good sense."

But Mary Richardson wanted to do something with her life. When she considered her own future, a spartan New England cottage filled with children, or the likelihood of becoming an unmarried spinster toiling the rest of her days as an ill-paid teacher or seamstress, she wasn't enamored with what she faced. The typical life of the women around her didn't interest her as much as the potential for taking part in the genuine battle between good and evil that was going on in the West, where the outcome would determine the fate of the nation. It was a matter of character; Mary and other missionaries saw themselves as entering a larger arena, and doing something grand with their lives.

Mrs. Childs, author of a wildly-popular guidebook for housewives at the time, advised women that "self-denial, in proportion to the narrowness of your income, will eventually be the happiest and most respectable course for you and yours." If one were to live in a state of self-denial, as young women were being advised to do, why not practice self-denial in a situation that offered the possibility of spiritual salvation? Why not offer oneself to the missionary cause?

Unmarried, educated young women had real worries about becoming a spinster. If a girl didn't marry, she would have to support herself, but how? Teaching was still not entirely acceptable for a young woman, yet. Sunday school, that was alright, but of course it didn't pay. Otherwise, a girl had to work hard just to obtain an appointment to her own school. Mary's mother had been the town's first female teacher, but she'd given it up when she married. Teaching didn't pay much, and the young women were forced to live with students' families and try to collect tuition money from tight-fisted parents.

Mary fretted about a persistent suitor, a neighboring farmer who was always trying to court her. She was frustrated that he took "so much liking," and admitted that she didn't think she "ever could like him much." In fact, she could "find very few" men that interested her. She worried that she might be a "solitary creature," as she could "find few that think and feel as I think & feel."

It was an increasingly complicated world. Young men were waiting longer to marry than their fathers had. In an economy that was changing, they had to make something of themselves in order to someday support a wife and children. It was harder to obtain decent farmland or start new businesses than it had been for the generation before them.

The average age in the United States in the period from 1815 to 1830 was sixteen. That meant by the mid-1830's there were many more young people trying to make a living and start a family than there were opportunities. Both men and women were waiting longer to marry, hoping to hit upon a suitable business or profession, often going back to complete their elementary schooling in their twenties in hopes of obtaining a position somewhere. Teaching, military or missionary was often the only choice for a young person who wanted to escape their small community in order to see the world.

Edition details

• Publisher: Caxton Press
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0870043846
• ISBN 13: 9780870043840
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256