Abolitionists, Doctors, Ranchers and Writers: A Family Journey through American History by Lynne Marie Getz (review)

In the hands of a masterful storyteller, family histories open an intimate view into the struggles of conscience, politics, economics, and survival of those women and men who lived, loved, worked, and sometimes battled in a particular place and time. Historian Lynne Getz offers readers a sweeping saga of three generations of the Wattles-Faunce-Wetherill family. The book begins with the 1840s homesteading in Bleeding Kansas of abolitionist brothers Augustus and John Wattles and their wives, Susan Elvira Lowe and Ester Whinery, and later explores the pioneering professionalism of granddaughters Sarah Grimké Wattles Hiatt who, while never receiving a formal medical degree, nevertheless practiced medicine with her husband Lundy Hiatt, and her sister Mary Ann Wattles Faunce, who obtained a medical degree before undertaking postdoctoral training in Europe and joining the faculty of the Woman’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Mary Ann’s daughters, Eugenia and Hilda Faunce, united in marriage with two brothers, Clayton and Winslow Wetherill, scions of one of the first white families in what is now the Four Corners area of the American Southwest. The Wetherill family developed fish hatcheries and established guiding and outfitting businesses for active outdoors men and women, leading hunters and fishermen through the beautiful meadows and high mountain streams of the San Juan mountains of southern Colorado. They also explored and excavated the Ancestral Pueblo site of Mesa Verde and established trading posts to sell and exchange mercantile goods for artifacts, pots, and rugs with Native Americans living in the area. In so doing, the Wetherills introduced Native arts to a growing tourist trade and, ultimately, to academe and museology as well.

Working across generations, time, and space as members of the extended Wattles family went east and north from Kansas and west to Arizona and Colorado, Professor Getz tells the story of one American family from the 1830s to the 1930s, revealing much about the vast, contested, and complex space into which white Americans expanded during that period. Getz reveals the family in its several guises as settler colonists, farmers, ranchers (dude and cattle), fish-hatchery owners, outfitters, trading-post operators, and dealers in the Native arts of the American Southwest. She focuses her attention on the cross-generational family values of equal rights for white women as developed and sustained by education, professionalization, and suffrage. A contradictory view of racial equality, from an active commitment to slavery’s abolition to a more exploitative relationship with Native Americans, informed this family’s values over time. Beginning in Kansas, across the generations some went east to New York City, others south into rural Texas or west to the headwaters of the Rio Grande and Navajo country.

The challenges of writing such a cross-generational saga are considerable, and Lynn Getz proves up to the task. Readers will be caught up in such family dynamics as the support of older women for younger ones taking up new educational, professional, and business challenges. They will follow those who confronted the harsh conditions and difficult physical labor required of male and female ranchers and business developers in the West, and the educational challenges of young female physicians who went east. And, like the author, readers will grapple with the actions of settler colonists and their impact on the Native peoples who lived there.