Woman on the American Frontier | Page 5

A Life-boat
Manned by a Girl. A Night of Peril. A Den of Murderers and an
Unsullied Maiden. The Freezing Soldiers of Montana. A Despairing
Cry and its Echo. The Storm-Angel's Visit.

CHAPTER XXI.
WOMAN AS AN EDUCATOR ON THE FRONTIER, A Mother of
Soldiers and Statesmen. A Home-school on the Border. The Prairie
Mother and her Four Children. A Garden for Human Plants and
Flowers. The First Lesson of the Boy and Girl on the Frontier. The
Wife's School in the Heart of the Rocky Mountains. A Leaf from the
Life of Washington. The Hero-Mothers of the Republic. A Patriot
Woman and a Martyr. A Mother's Influence on the Life of Andrew
Jackson. Woman's Discernment of a Boy's Genius. West, the Painter,
and Webster, the Statesman. The Place where our Great Men Learned
A. B. C. Miss M. and her Labors in Illinois. A Martyrdom in the Cause
of Education. Woman as an Educator of Human Society. Incident in the
Life of a Millionaire. What a Mother's Portrait Did. A Woman's Visit to
"Pandemonium Camp." An Angel of Civilization.

CHAPTER I.
WOMAN AS A PIONEER
Every battle has its unnamed heroes. The common soldier enters the
stormed fortress and, falling in the breach which his valor has made,
sleeps in a nameless grave. The subaltern whose surname is scarcely
heard beyond the roll-call on parade, bears the colors of his company
where the fight is hottest. And the corporal who heads his file in the
final charge, is forgotten in the "earthquake shout" of the victory which
he has helped to win. The victory may be due as much, or more, to the
patriot courage of him who is content to do his duty in the rank and file,
as to the dashing colonel who heads the regiment, or even to the

general who plans the campaign: and yet unobserved, unknown, and
unrewarded the former passes into oblivion while the leader's name is
on every tongue, and perhaps goes down in history as that of one who
deserved well of his country.
Our comparison is a familiar one. There are other battles and armies
besides those where thousands of disciplined men move over the
ground to the sounds of the drum and fife. Life itself is a battle, and no
grander army has ever been set in motion since the world began than
that which for more than two centuries and a half has been moving
across our continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific, fighting its way
through countless hardships and dangers, bearing the banner of
civilization, and building a new republic in the wilderness.
In this army WOMAN HAS BEEN TOO OFTEN THE UNNAMED
HEROINE.
Let us not forget her now. Her patience, her courage, her fortitude, her
tact, her presence of mind in trying hours; these are the shining virtues
which we have to record. Woman as a pioneer standing beside
her rougher, stronger companion--man; first on the voyage across a
stormy ocean, from England to America; then at Plymouth, and
Jamestown, and all the settlements first planted by Europeans on our
Coast; then through the trackless wilderness, onward across the
continent, till every river has been forded, and every chain of
mountains has been scaled, the Peaceful Ocean has been reached, and
fifty thousand cities, towns, and hamlets all over the land have been
formed from those aggregations of household life where woman's work
has been wrought out to its fullness.
Among all the characteristics of woman there is none more marked
than the self-devotion which she displays in what she believes is a
righteous cause, or where for her loved ones she sacrifices herself. In
India we see her wrapped in flames and burned to ashes with the corpse
of her husband. Under the Moslem her highest condition is a life-long
incarceration. She patiently places her shoulders under the burden
which the aboriginal lord of the American forest lays upon them.
Calmly and in silence she submits to the onerous duties imposed upon

her by social and religious laws. Throughout the whole heathen world
she remained, in the words of an elegant French writer, "anonymous,
indifferent to herself, and leaving no trace of her passage upon earth."
The benign spirit of Christianity has lifted woman from the position she
held under other religious systems and elevated her to a higher sphere.
She is brought forward as a teacher; she displays a martyr's courage in
the presence of pestilence, or ascends the deck of the mission-ship to
take her part in "perils among the heathen." She endures the hardships
and faces the dangers of colonial life with a new sense of her
responsibility as a wife and mother. In all these capacities, whether
teaching, ministering to the sick, or carrying the Gospel to the heathen,