Glorious Fourth of July and Other Stories from the Plains by Catherine Rademacher Gibson (review)

Late in her life, Catherine Rademacher Gibson, an early resident of Watertown, South Dakota, painted thirty-two watercolors capturing reminiscences of her childhood in the Great Plains. In Glorious Fourth of July and Other Stories from the Plains, Gibson’s daughter, Mary Gibson Sprague, united her “memory paintings” (1) with the stories that inspired them. The earliest story captured in drawing and text recounts a European American settler ancestor’s interaction with a band of Dakota men in the mid-nineteenth century. Five recount a summer visit to her grandmother’s homestead in Montana. But most focus on Gibson’s childhood in early twentieth-century Watertown.

Most of Gibson’s memories about life in the Great Plains parallel those of other childhood frontier memoirs: outdoor play, wagon and railroad travel, disease outbreak, severe weather, community celebrations, and technological change. But several of Gibson’s stories contain surprising twists. Picking wild strawberries devolves into a silly game that destroys her father’s raincoat and endangers the interior of his Model T. Young Catherine must choose between fighting for her right to play baseball with the boys and maintaining female friendships. Particularly valuable are domestic scenes less commonly captured in pioneer narratives. For example, the children comb their grandfather’s beard as he tells them stories. Studying the related painting reveals that the women of the house are playing piano and doing laundry in a wash basin using water from their indoor pump. Other paintings vividly illustrate Gibson’s stories while similarly revealing valuable aspects of daily life.

Gibson’s lively stories and whimsical water-colors will appeal to both school-aged children and adults. Researchers will be able to mine valuable details from both written and visual retellings. But as with any memoir or oral tradition, we must consider the role of memory in shaping these stories and paintings. That is particularly true of this series of “memory paintings” and family stories collected decades later. Scholars would benefit from more specific information about when and how Sprague transferred her mother’s stories to written form. A more detailed biography of the artist and storyteller would also be helpful.