The Army Wife On The American Frontier

"No one interested in the history of the American West or in women's history should miss this well-written, carefully researched, comprehensive treatment of a subject that previous scholars have largely ignored. Based on the writings of more than fifty women who accompanied their husbands to remote duty posts in the far west.

Many extraordinary women traveled west with their Army officer husbands between 1865 and 1890 and discovered a world that was completely controlled by the United States Army. The Army as a public institution colored virtually every aspect of their domestic lives. Army directives, customs, and traditions imposed social obligations on these women, and the world of the frontier Army garrison continually challenged their sense of what it meant to be true women. Remarkably, they flourished and established a defined role for themselves that went beyond the conventional definition of true womanhood. The shared values, loyalties, and patriotism within the institutional environment of the frontier garrison transcended gender. As distinctly masculine as the Army garrison was perceived to be, the officers' wives shared with their comrades in arms an unequivocal commitment to the Regiment. Because of their presence, the frontier garrison became a much different place to live, as they subtly and slowly changed the very nature of the institution through their efforts to bring some notion of proper society to these rugged circumstances. Unlike most studies, which focus only on farm and frontier women, this volume details the experiences of the women who viewed the world from within garrison walls.

In the summer of 1871, Frances Marie Antoinette Mack married Fayette Washington Roe, fresh out of West Point, and left the East behind to join his infantry regiment at Fort Lyon, Colorado, where her sprightly account of frontier life begins. As a western army wife Frances Roe found herself in the shadow of the Rockies--Lt. Roe was stationed at Piegan Agency, Montana Territory, as well as in the Cheyenne country of Colorado and Indian Territory--and her book is filled with the beauty of the wilderness. She records the problems of camp and garrison life with servants, sand, and shortages, and the pleasures of parties and new friends, of hunting, fishing, and camping trips, and of long romps with her dog Hal. One chapter reports a fine summer's outing to twelve-year-old Yellowstone National Park in 1884. In the cavalcade of men's western memoirs, books written by frontier women have too often gone unheralded and almost unnoticed. Yet women were among the keenest observers of the nineteenth-century West and its inhabitants, as seen nowhere better than in Frances Roe's vivid account of life with the western army.

Women filled many roles during the settling of the American West. Women of the American Frontier is a multi-cultural look at those who were gold miners, army wives, trail riders, outlaws, political reformers, frontier teachers, and more.

A view of the early Texan frontier from a female view point Teresa Viele was a strong minded woman with clear cut views. Fate would dictate that her life would not be defined by her experiences as an army wife, but in this book she has left us a significant insight into the activities of the officers, soldiers and families of a United States Infantry regiment on the Texas frontier in the pre-Civil War period. Her account encompasses everything that came under her eye and into her active mind-from travel, landscape, flora, fauna and food. Less domestically, she turned her thoughts and pen to the subject of Mexicans and United States political relations with Mexico, the omnipresent threat of Comanche raiders and the ability and capacity of the army to fulfil its border protection duties. Viele also provides an interesting perspective on Jose Maria Jesus Carbajal and the Merchants War. This is an unusual female viewpoint on life on the early South Western American frontier and is an important chronicle of a woman in Texas during the pioneer period. Available in soft cover and hard back with dust jacket for collectors. Leonaur editions are newly typeset and are not facsimiles; each title is available in softcover and hardback with dustjacket.

The accounts of two women of the West in the 1850s The Great Plains evoke the very essence of the wild American frontier. In reality, beyond the 'settled and civilised' eastern seaboard lay a great wilderness-a barrier to be traversed if the 'Manifest Destiny' of the American people to populate the entire North American continent was to come to fruition. During the nineteenth century many men and women embarked upon this perilous endeavour. All had to brave every element that Nature could throw against them, within terrain as varied as any on Earth and often harassed by outlaws and Indian tribes who sought to maintain control of their own ancestral lands. Some who came were pioneers, settlers whose aim was to carve a new life for themselves and some were those whose task it was to protect them-soldiers and peace keepers-so that a new nation would be born. Whilst history tends to concentrate on men, women had no less of a vital role in this great task, for without them none of it would have been possible. This book contains the accounts of two of these resolute ladies and their struggles during the early years of westward expansion. Lydia Spencer became the wife of young Lieutenant William Lane of the U. S Mounted Rifles and she recounts her story from the perspective of an army wife. Lodisa Frizzell, another early traveller across the Plains, was a pioneer in company with her husband and children setting out for a new start in California from their old home in Illinois. These two memorable accounts are joined together here for value and this book is available in softcover or hardback with dust jacket.

"An Army Wife" - fully illustrated - King's writings, relating to American Indians, cover a complex range of opinion within his novels. His sympathy for their cause of defending their homelands, and being forced to adopt a new lifestyle, did not stop him from graphically portraying them as savage and barbaric peoples. However, King also used his writings to harshly criticize U.S. government policies that resulted in Indian treaties not being honored and that permitted rampant corruption among government-appointed reservation agents. As a lieutenant in the 5th Cavalry, King was a participant on the American western frontier, who personally fought in battles with Southwestern and Plains Indians and observed government policies first hand. Charles King is credited today with helping to establish the "Western novel" as a romantic and dramatic genre of American literature, based upon a sturdy foundation of historical realism.