The First We Can Remember: Colorado Pioneer Women Tell Their Stories ed. by Lee Schweninger (review)

Those who complain about traffic jams, long working hours, and other hassles of twenty-first-century life will be chastened after reading The First We Can Remember: Colorado Pioneer Women Tell Their Stories. This compilation of sixty-nine interviews with pioneer women reveals what it was like traveling to, and settling in, Colorado during approximately the last quarter of the 1800s. Drought, isolation, grasshopper plagues, primitive sod houses, tensions with Native Americans, and other hardships were a way of life for these intrepid settlers—yet their narratives reveal an impressive stoicism that also nicely counterbalances the traditionally male-centric view of Western history.

These interviews, published verbatim and organized by region, were conducted in nineteen counties by Depression-era Civil Works Administration field workers in 1933 and 1934. The project “enabled professional but unemployed writers, teachers, and historians across the state to interview former pioneers, asking them to talk about their experiences in coming West and settling” (xxi). Among the inducements to what some pioneer women called “western fever” were railroad expansion and the 1858 discovery of gold near what is now Denver. Land policy also triggered westward migration. The Federal Homestead Act of 1862—for which women qualified as well as men—let homesteaders acquire 160 acres after living on the land for five years while making improvements. With the Timber Culture Act of 1873, settlers could claim another 160 acres by planting trees on a quarter of their property.

At first glance, the women’s interviews read like a litany of woe. Hailstorms, drought, hot winds, and—in 1872—grasshoppers, which “came in the afternoon about four o’clock and darkened the sky like a cloud,” according to Mrs. Pitt Smith, and ruined crops (114). Settlers routinely encountered bears, wolves, and coyotes, and thought nothing of killing these creatures, who were considered threats rather than part of the ecosystem. Pioneer Sallie Cheairs built her house over a rattlesnake den, unaware that the snakes lived in the thick native grass. Wagon trains had to navigate swift-moving rivers and steep canyons. Food often consisted of coffee, bread, and buffalo meat (until settlers decimated the buffalo population by the 1880s). Lacking landmarks such as roads or fences, pioneers got lost in prairie blizzards. Early schoolhouses consisted of little more than log benches, desks made of dry-goods boxes, a random assortment of books, and schoolteachers as young as sixteen. Women often outlived one or more of their children. Some, left alone with small children for months by husbands working far away, wept from loneliness.

Yet a sense of optimism and grit undergirds many recollections. As Mary Belle Kiser Haynes said, “I shall always appreciate the friendships made and the neighborly folks who were always willing to share in our joys and sorrows” (153). Emma Daum Amick looked around in awe, noting, “And yet with all the seeming hardships, we paused at times to note the beauty of God’s wonderful creations” (17). Indeed, an admirable sangfroid runs through most of the interviews, typified by Sarah Elizabeth Walker Moore’s comment that “after I got over being afraid of the Indians I liked pioneer life very much” (255).

The First We Can Remember is historically relevant at a number of levels. It shows that interactions between Native Americans and white settlers were more complex than traditional history suggests: “Native Americans had more to fear from the settlers than the settlers from the Indians.” The quick and thorough settlement of European Americans “meant specifically the displacement of Indians living in and around Colorado.” And a number of women noted that Indian uprisings only occurred when white people provoked them (xxxi, xxvi, 221). Contrary to the stereotype of fearing Indians, these women “frequently had the opportunity—as procurers of food, clothing, and other domestic goods—to develop a collegial relationship with Indians in their mutual quest for survival” (xxix).

From a gendered...