From Southern Belle to Cattle Queen and Then Some...

More than a decade ago, I read A Bride Goes West, the memoirs of Wyoming wife and rancher Nannie Alderson. The book haunts me to this day. You’d have to read it to understand, but Nannie was a fire-cracker with a rebel’s heart! Nothing ever kept her down; she accepted life with grace and grit and lived a grand adventure when the west was still wild and wooly.

 Born to an affluent southern family, Nannie grew up in post-Civil War Virginia. Her home and community were spared much of the desolation of war, leaving her to blossom in a world that clung to the most genteel Southern graces. Her petticoats were ironed daily, she never cooked a meal or did her own laundry, but she did learn the most useless graces of high society. Her mother was a vain woman who enjoyed being the belle of the ball and was pleased to groom her daughter for the same fate.

Nannie only felt strangled by the shallow, societal confinements.

In 1880, she had the opportunity to visit a cousin in wild-and-wooly Kansas. Nannie jumped at it. Right from the start, she fell in love with the freedom of the West. No one judged her there; no one treated her like a hot-house flower. What you wore or who you ate dinner with didn’t impress anyone. Folks were measured by their grit, not their silk breeches. Hard work and honest words were all that mattered.

While there, she met the man who epitomized these traits. Walt Alderson had left home at the age of 12 to make his way as a cowboy. He spent years learning to be the best cowboy he could be with the ultimate goal of running his own spread. In all that time, he never made one visit home.

He and his business partner had purchased some land in Montana and started the work of building a ranch. For whatever reason, Walt decided in the midst of all this to check in on his family. The night he came home, Nannie was sitting on his living room settee.

Nannie’s recollections of building a ranch in the wilds of Montana with Walt are fascinating, detailed, peppered with humor, and always honest. She went from gliding across hardwood floors to sweeping dirt floors covered with canvas. She went from living in an antebellum mansion to a drafty, two-room cabin. She went from swirling about at parties with young men in perfectly tailored suits to dancing with dusty cowboys in patched up dungarees.

She had to learn to cook and her tutors were those trail-hardened ranch hands who treated her like a princess and readily forgave her for the rocks she called biscuits. She survived bed bugs and blizzards; delivered children with no midwife and stared down Indians. Nannie even shot a rattlesnake who attempted to take up residence in her kitchen. She readily admits she had moments when she felt sorry for herself, but, mostly, Nannie counted her blessings. She loved her life. She loved the way of life out West.

Like Walt, quitting was never part of the plan, even when the stock market crashed and Indians burned their house. For ten years they worked and slaved to forge a home from the beautiful, desolate, wide-open country in Montana.  Even when Walt died, leaving her a widow with two young children, Nannie cowboyed up. She made ends meet; she raised good kids.

The next time your microwave goes on the fritz or you forget to pick up milk at the store, pick up a copy of A Bride Goes West. I guarantee this gritty pioneer gal will put things in perspective for you. If you enjoyed this post, I hope you'll consider signing up for my newsletter. In return, you'll get a free copy of my "sampler"--the openings to several of my books. 

So, what do you think? Have we gone soft? Do Americans face up to things the way our ancestors did?

Should We Make History Polite and Palatable?

Whitewashing history is a very dangerous game to play...

by Heather Blanton

Is it right to tell a story from the past but filter it through the sanitized, politically-correct lens of the twenty-first century? What do we lose if we follow that process? If we bury the sins and mistakes of the past, aren't we in danger of repeating them?

 Recently, I was doing some research and a friend gave me a couple of books on South Dakota history. They are all in the series Daughters of Dakota, edited by Sally Roesch Wagner. Each volume is a fascinating look at the life of lady pioneers--the gals who crossed the plains, stared Lakota Sioux right in the eye, lost husbands and children, survived fires and floods. You get the picture. The true Ladies in Defiance. But best of all, these books tell the stories in the women's own words. Each volume is a compilation of letters, diaries, and transcribed stories. First-hand accounts of pioneer life that give an amazing glimpse of life in South Dakota from the 1870s to the early 1900's.

There are several books in the collection. In Book 1, the editor goes to great pains to express that each story contains the actual words of the pioneer woman. Following the suggestion that "the English or grammar used is to be the writer's own for history is wanted [unvarnished] and not perfect manuscripts," editing was kept to a minimum. In fact, Wagner says, "The words have not been changed." 

South Dakota and her pioneers are all there in their ugliness—violence, racism, bigotry—and their beauty—generosity, kindness, self-sacrifice.

However, by book 6, Wagner has had a complete change of heart. She has decided she knows life in the nineteenth century better than the ones who actually lived then. "Today," she writes, "we know the disrespect and contempt contained in the word, 'squaw'; had these pioneer women known what we know, they would undoubtedly not have used the word."

Well, the poor, little, ignorant pioneers. If only they'd had someone like a college professor to enlighten them on diversity and social justice.  

To paint over this 19th-century mindset and not offend our modern one, Wagner continues, "In respect to them and their Native American friends, I have changed that word whenever it has appeared in the manuscript, along with the words, 'papoose' and 'buck.'"  

I don't know about you, but the woman's audacity almost leaves me speechless. But, wait. There's more. "'Colored' and 'Negro' are no longer considered correct usage; African American has replaced them in the women's stories." 

Don't get me wrong. I am certainly not defending the use of racial slurs. However, a hundred, a hundred-and-fifty years ago these words were common descriptors, sometimes used with malice, sometimes not. In my humble opinion, whitewashing history is a very dangerous game to play. If you don't present the past in its completeness, you get a skewed image that buries sins and hides mistakes. And that's not history at all. That's fiction.  

Do you agree with me or should we be making all history politically correct, polite, and palatable?   

Sarah Thal and Her Life on the Bitter, Windswept North Dakota Plains

by Heather Blanton

I love learning about the women who settled America. As a breeder of German Shepherds, I seek out certain characteristics and temperaments to create the best dogs possible. For a long time, America was no different. The bloodlines were amazing.

The people who thrived here were independent, strong willed, stubborn, adventurous risk-takers.

Just this morning I read the story of Sarah Thal, a German-Jewish immigrant who came to America with her husband in 1880. On the way here she contracted typhoid, but the couple soldiered on and settled in North Dakota. Her second child was born in a cabin so full of cracks that a make-shift tent was draped around her and the baby. They literally camped in front of the fireplace to keep warm. She watched prairie fires light up the distant sky on more than one occasion. Took shelter from tornadoes. Begged God for rain.

The winter of Sarah's first year in North Dakota, a neighbor and her child were lost in a three-day blizzard. The pair were found fifty feet from their front door. "I remember that beautiful baby to this day," Sarah wrote. "She wore coral ear rings and necklace. The frost glistened on her cheeks making her look more like a wax doll than a once live baby. The tragedy and the horror of that experience is as clear in my memory as though it happened yesterday."

Sarah lost a baby one winter because 10 feet of snow prevented her from getting to a doctor. "For many years we kept up the lonely graves. In time the wolves and elements destroyed them. They are unmarked in all save my memory. All the neighbors came to the funeral. Among them were Mr. and Mrs. Gutting. Afterwards we became fast friends. The friendships of those days lasted as long as life itself."

This was Sarah’s existence. It never broke her. She didn’t let it turn her into a bitter old woman. She accepted God’s will and plowed on, making friends and living life for all she could wring out of it.

One year the German community decided to get together and celebrate the 4^th of July. It was a 22-mile trip each way for the Thal’s to attend, but they were proud and eager to do so. As she wrote in a letter, “Each foreign colony celebrated in their own fashion, loyal to the traditions of the old land and faithful to those of the new. . . .”

Women who chose to come to America in those early days of the American West were strong and resilient as a rule. I would argue the toughest in the world. I appreciate their bloodlines and hope I do them justice in the stories I write.