Happy Thanksgiving, Everyone!

Still Life: Balsam Apple and Cabbage by James Peale, 1820

Strength from God's Beauty

The Nebraska Sky compliments of Down and Out.

A new minutes later, Elmira fainted again.
"She's too weak," Cholo said.
"Poor thing," Clara said. "I would be too, if I came that far. That baby isn't going to wait for her to get strong."
"No, it's going to kill her," Cholo said.
"Well, then, save it at least," Clara said, feeling so downcast suddenly that she left the room. She got a water bucket and walked out of the house, meaning to get some water for Bob. It was a beautiful morning, light touching the farthest edge of the plains. Clara noticed the beauty and thought it strange that she could still respond to it, tired as she was and with two people dying in her house--perhaps three. But she loved the fine light of the prairie morning; it had resurrected her spirits time after time through the years, when it seemed that dirt and cold and death would crush her. Just to see the light spreading like that, far on toward Wyoming, was her joy. It seemed to put energy into her, make her want to do things.

--Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry

Things We Forget

A family posing in front of its sod house.

It is all well and fine to reminisce and celebrate a time gone by that seems more genteel, and surely I think of myself as a cultural reactionary. But it's always good to confront some of the things of the past that we are happy, living in modern times, to be without. For instance, I don't recall that Laura Ingall Wilder in Little House in the Prairie or Willa Cather in My Antonia, describing life in sod houses, ever mentioned this:

Clara had always hated the sod house, hated the dirt that seeped down on her bedclothes, year after year. It was dust that caused her firstborn, Jim, to cough virtually from his birth until he died a year later. In the mornings Clara would walk down and wash her hair in the icy water of the Platte and yet by supper time, if she happened to scratch her head, her fingenails would fill with dirt that had seeped down during the day. For some reason, no matter where she moved her bed, the roof would trickle dirt right onto it. She tacked muslim, and finally canvas, on the ceiling over the bed but nothing stopped the dirt for long. It sifted through. IT seemed to her that all her children had been conceived in dust clouds, dust rising from the bedclothes or sifting down from the ceiling. Centipedes and other bugs loved the roof; day after day they crawled down the walls, to end up in her stewpots or her skillets or the trunks where stored her clothes.
I'd rather live in a teepee, like an Indian," she told Bob many times, "I'd be cleaner."

--Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry

One Way to Dispell Stress

A woman on the Montana frontier toward the end of the 19th century. Photo taken by Evelyn Jephson Cameron, who was born in Britain but married and came to Montana and worked hard.

Whenever I start to feel overly stressed, I think about what it was like to be a woman on the American frontier. In comparison to what so many of the women on the frontier went through, I become ashamed for being such a wimp and try to get on with life in a more optimstic mood.

In Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry paints a fascinating picture of a frontier woman, when he tells the story of Clara, the long-lost love of Augustus McCrae. She did not marry Gus, as he was called, realizing wisely that he was not the settling-down type of man. She instead married a horse trader and had lived with him for 15 years in a sod house in Nebraska, before they had bought new land and she used money left her by her parents to build a two-story frame home.

She had three sons by her husband, and she kept the remaining money to send her boys away to school in their youth, so they "would not have to spend their whole youth in such a raw, lonely place.... although one by one the three boys died long before they were old enough to be sent anywhere. The last two lived long enough for Clara to teach them to read,. She had read them Walter Scott's Ivanhoe when Jeff and Johnny were six and seven, respectively. Then the next winter both boys had died of pneumonia within a month of one another. It was a terrible winter, the ground frozen so deep there was no way to dig a grave. They had had to put the boys in the little kindling shed, wrapped tightly in wagon sheets, until winter let up enough that they could be buried. Many days Bob would come home from delivering horses to the Army--his main customer--to find Clara sitting in the icy shed by the two small bodies, tears frozen on her cheeks so hard that he would have to heat water and bathe the ice from her face."...

Despite Clara's resolve not to open up her heart again, she had two more children, both girls. But then her husband had been kicked in the head by a horse and was in a coma. She alone kept her husband clean while also managing the farm and tending to her daughters. McMurtry paints her as a heroic figure, taking care of a husband on teh brink of death, teaching her girls, keeping house, cooking, and training and trading horses--a busy woman, who was never afraid to open her door to strangers, who did not fear Indians, and must have worked hard 16 to 18 hours a day. She was strong but not hard-bitten, sad but not bitter. Her only self-indulgence was to bake and eat cake.

It's Therapeutic

Walter Reed Hospital, 1918

Shorpy gives us a photograph of recuperating soldiers at Walter Reed Hospital in 1918 with World War I still blazing in Europe. I imagine that these wounded soldiers are knitting for fellow soldiers. (Knitting for soldiers was also the presumption of critics of Knitting in Highbridge Park by George Luks.)
The sight of wounded men knitting highlights the therapeutic effects of all such hand crafts--knitting, hand sewing, crocheting, and embroidery. For example, when the crafty colorist genius Alicia Paulson of Posie Gets Cozy was forced to stay in bed for a full year after her foot had been run over by a truck, she started making things--crocheting, knitting, sewing--to make her recuperation bearable and in the process found a whole new career. I find the repetition of knitting and hand sewing to be relaxing. It calms the soul as an activity in itself and the bonus is that you have something to show for it! It seems that the administration of Walter Reed Hospital in 1918 understood this principle, and so set wounded soldiers to work to knit. That this might be regarded as women's work seemed to be beside the point. It is good work that probably helps the one who does it the most.

Neighbors

The Good Samaritan by Rembrant van Rijn, 1644

There seems to be a new view going around that neighbors--that is, those who live within close proximity to one's house--should be left alone: You leave them alone, and they leave you alone. This idea empties the word "neighbor" of all of its meaning in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Both the Old and the New Testament call upon us to "love thy neighbor" and indeed, when a young man asks Christ "Who is my neighbor?" as related in Luke 10:30-37, Christ replies, "A certain man went down from Jericho" and tells the parable of the Good Samaritan. Then he poses the question to the young man, "Now which of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbor unto him that fell among thieves?"

Time and again in reading all kinds of books about women and their everyday lives, often in the past, I am struck by the stories of "neighborliness" of people. Here is such a story told by Laura Ingalls Wilder in the column she wrote for a local newspaper in March 1922:

I often thought that we are a little old-fashioned here in the Ozark hills; now I know we are, because we had a "working" in our neighborhood this winter. That is a blessed, old-fashioned way of helping out a neighbor.

...This neighbor, badly crippled with rheumatism, was not able to get up his winter's wood. With what little wood he could manage to chop, the family scarcely kept comfortable.

So the men of the neighborhood gathered together one morning and dropped in on him. With cross-cut saws and axes, they took possession of the wood lot... By night, there was enough wood ready for the stove to last the rest of the winter.

The women did their part, too. All morning they kept arriving with well-filled baskets, and at noon a long table was filled with a country neighborhood dinner [note that dinner is at mid-day]. ... Then when the dishes were washed, they sewed, knit, crocheted, and talked for the rest of the afternoon.... We all went home with the feeling expressed by a newcomer when he said, "Don't you know I'm proud to live in a neighborhood like this where they turn out and help one another when it is needed."

"Sweet are the uses of adversity" when it shows us the kindness in our neighbors' hearts.

I am thinking that this winter will be a cold one for many -- not a time for the new idea of neighbors to shove out the old.


Samaritan Bringing the Man to the Inn by Rembrandt van Rijn, 1649

School Time -- Teachers of the Past 3

School Time, Winslow Homer, 1874

I love this painting, which shows how much these girls love their teacher. I feel unfortunate not to have had a young teacher in elementary school that I could idolize. But there were certainly young women, older than myself, that I looked up to with adoration. The children gathered around the teacher in Homer's painting look as if they can hardly wait for her to show up; her head is bent as she listens to their chattering. Perhaps they are pleading for a privilege or an outing or maybe they are regaling her about an exciting happening at their home or farm.

The teacher's role was not only to convey knowledge. The building of a school and the collection of funds among families to bring a teacher signified a commitment to a permanent stay on the frontier, a commitment to bring culture west. For the teacher, this was a great responsibility, and not in abstract, but in helping her children every day. As prairie teacher Anna Johnson described it, as quoted in Schoolwomen of the Plains and Prairies by Mary Hurlbut Cordier:

I not only taught, but was also an administrator, mother, doctor, nurse, judge and jury, arist, cook, librarian, custodian, or janitor, carpenter or fixer, advisor, psychologist, disciplinarian, and humanitarian. I might say that I was a "jack of all trades and a master of none." In this rural community I was very close to the children and all of the parents and many others in the area. Their problems often became my problems, which sometimes made my task even harder.

Their role in extending culture westward was well understood throughout the 19th century. As early as the 1840s, the National Board of Popular Education recruited 600 teachers from the northeast to be trained and then sent on their way to teach frontier communities across the country, as far as Oregon.

Teachers, especially women teachers, tended to be leaders in their community, not only the pillar of the local school but also of the church. Their commitment and spirit of charity were exemplary, as shown in the compassionate downward turn of the head of the teacher in Homer's painting.

We see this in the writings of the young teacher, Miss Bessie Tucker, whose diaries are featured in Schoolwomen of the Plains and Prairies:

It seems a bit presumptuous to hope and pray that one's life might better a community in any way, but don't think me conceited, little book [diary], when I say that one of my greatest desires and constant prayers is that some word or act of mine may brighten some life, may help someone in a spiritual way and may leave happy memories of the nine months [school term] I have spent in their midst.

And after her first year of teaching as she prepared to move to a new school, Miss Tucker wrote:

a little white school house with the beautiful bell .... little parsonage which I called home for six months ... I shall take the memories of the lives of many people whom I have met and and who have made me feel one of them.... how I would like to leave something behind me. A memory of a life that might be helpful to someone. I am realizing more and more, little book, the non-importance of things that seem to take up so much of our time. Only as they may be a help to others are they important and I am learning to make that one of the guiding rules of my life.