"Strong, and Wild, and Green": Ethel Augur's Western Adventure, 1911-1914

Surely I'm in a dream, and its all too wonderful for words," Ethel Augur wrote to her family in Connecticut as she approached Yellowstone Park for the first time in 1912.¹ Still it was words she offered, nearly seventy thousand of them, in 350 typescript half-sheet pages of letters to parents and siblings chronicling her extensive western travels from September 1911 to the summer of 1914. Family records and recollections don't reveal what prompted Augur to head west at age thirty-two. Her motivation doesn't seem to have been the teaching position in Montana that financially enabled her travel, as her first letter to her mother makes clear: "I'll do as well in school as I can, but I'm here for another reason" (29 Sept. 1911). What that reason was, she didn't say. Not directly anyway. But readers can piece together several possible explanations. Perhaps it was the homesteading fever so prevalent in early twentieth-century North America. Augur wrote often and at length of looking for just the right piece of ground to anchor her dreams. Her epistolary enthusiasms sometimes echoed the "go-West" promotional circulars from governments and railroads that she had almost certainly read. She wrote often of "making good" (15 Nov. [1911]), "prov[ing] up" (10 Oct. [1911]), "earn[ing her] way" ([late 1912]). Or perhaps, in that puzzling tradition of so many nineteenth-century travel writers, she set out to improve her health. As she traveled, she frequently remarked how well she felt: "I'm thoroughly thankful that I have come West, if for no other reason than to recover my control of nerves" (7 Dec. 1912). Perhaps she was one of the "born vagabonds" she wrote to her sister Edna about: "[B]efore I settle down I'm just going to look over this next hill . . . to see if I can't find just one more pleasant little spot where the sun lies warm and the mosquitoes are not too thick" (11 May [1913]).

Whatever her reasons for setting out, Augur's pleasure in the decision was apparent from her first letters. They open with a sense of elation, even of escape, and contain enough jittery excitement to alert a watchful family that they weren't likely to see her return any time soon. Though later letters referred to her travels as a "quest" (21 Nov. 1913), the earliest letters were simply catalogs, thick with description of the country she was passing through by rail—Pennsylvania gorges; Ohio cornfields; Chicago sights, toured after missing connections; midwestern cattle trains that had priority over the Pullman she traveled on; piles of burning wheat chaff in the Dakotas. She wanted to see it all. She confided to her mother that "[o]ne can learn more geography from a Pullman window in half an hour than a life time of books" (29 Sept. 1911).

Augur wasted no time speculating on the unusual aspects of her situation. Though she observed enough emigrant cars carrying homesteaders to the Dakotas and Montana to know that most westward movement was a group process, relying on extended family or neighborhood interdependence, she traveled alone (Bennett and Kohl 40–54). She also knew that leaving family for adventure or economic opportunity was an appropriate gender script for men, but that such autonomy was discouraged in women. Emphasizing to her family that she would not be afraid to come home if she failed to "make good," she remarked that such behavior was "a silly run-away boy trick" in which she would never indulge (31 May 1913). Neither isolation nor gender expectations seemed to daunt her. Instead, she reveled in her independence: "Is it I or some other person seeing all these long read about things?" (1 Oct. [1911]). She dreamed of finding "seeds enough to plant a million worlds" (31 May 1913). No job seemed beyond her: "I feel bully, just like pitching in, so this easy job [as a young lady's companion] won't do for this Hercules" (30 Oct. [1912]). Nearly three years after setting out...