Was born in White County, Illinois, on the 1st of June, 1827, and is the daughter of Richard Freeman Boren and Sarah Latimer Boren. Her father, a young Baptist minister, died when she was an infant, and she has often said, “I have missed my father all my life.” A religious nature seems to have been inherited, as she has also said, “I cannot remember when I did not pray to God.”
Her early youth was spent on the great prairies, then a veritable garden adorned with many beautiful wild flowers, in the log cabin with her widowed, pioneer mother, her sister Mary and brother Carson.
She learned to be industrious and thrifty without parsimony; to be simple, genuine, faithful. In the heat of summer or cold of winter she trudged to school, as she loved learning, showing, as her mind developed, a natural aptitude and taste for the sciences; chemistry, philosophy, botany and astronomy being her especial delights.
Of a striking personal appearance, her fair complexion with a deep rose flush in the cheeks, sparkling eyes, masses of heavy black hair, small and perfect figure, would have attracted marked attention in any circle.
Her temperate and wholesome life, never given to fashion’s follies, retained for her these points of beauty far beyond middle life, when many have lost all semblance of their youth and have become faded and decrepit.
Her school life merged into the teacher’s and she took her place in the ranks of the pioneer instructors, who were truly heroic.
She taught with patience the bare-foot urchins, some of whom were destined for great things, and boarded ’round as was the primitive custom.
Going to camp meetings in the summer, lectures and singing schools in the winter were developing influences in those days, and primitive pleasures were no less delightful; the husking-bees, quilting parties and sleigh rides of fifty years ago in which she participated.
In 1851, when she was twenty-four years of age, she joined the army of pioneers moving West, in the division composed of her mother’s and step-father’s people, her mother having married John Denny and her sister Mary, A. A. Denny.