Woman on the American Frontier / A Valuable and Authentic History of the Heroism, Adventures, Privations, Captivities, Trials, and Noble Lives and Deaths of the "Pioneer Mothers of the Republic"

by William Worthington Fowler

Into this savage semi-pandemonium entered one day, two unwonted visitors—the wives of miners who had come to join their husbands. Polite, kind, gentle, intelligent, and pious, their very presence seemed to change the moral atmosphere of the place. All the dormant chivalry of man's nature was awakened. Their appearance in the midst of that turbulent band was a sedative which soon allayed the chronic turmoil in which the settlement was embroiled. The reign of order commenced again: manners became softened, morals purified: the law of kindness was re-established, and slowly out of social chaos arose the inchoate form of a well-ordered civil society.

This illustrates woman's influence in one of the peculiar conditions of our American frontier communities. But in all other phases of true pioneer life, her influence is as strongly, if not as strikingly displayed as a humanizing, refining, and civilizing agent.

We have said that woman is the cohesive force which holds society together. This thesis may be proved by facts which show that power in all those relations in which she stands to the other sex. In cultured circles she shapes and controls by the charms of beauty and manner. But in the lonely and rude cabin on the border her plastic power is far greater because her presence and offices are essentials without which development dwindles and progress is palsied. There, if anywhere, should be the vivified germ of the town and the state. There, if anywhere, should be the embryonic conditions which will ripen one day into a mighty civil growth. A wife's devotion, the purity of a sister's and a daughter's love, the smiles and tears and prayers of a mother—these make the sunshine which transforms the waste into a paradise, the wild into a garden, and expands the home by a law of organic growth into a well ordered community.

The basis of civil law and social order is the silent compact which binds the household into one sweet purpose of a common interest, a common happiness. Woman is the unconscious legislator of the frontier. The gentle restraints of the home circle, its calm, its rest, its security form the unwritten code of which the statute book is the written exponent.

The cross is emblazoned on the rude entablature above the hearth-stone of the cabin, and where woman is, there is the holy rest of the blessed sabbath. She, who is the child's instructor in the truths of revealed religion, is also the father's guide and mentor in the same ways. Faith and hope in these doctrines as cherished by woman are the sheet anchors of our unknit civilizations.

Law is established because woman's presence renders more desirable, life, property, and the other objects for which laws are made.

Religion purifies and sanctifies the frontier home because she is the repository and early instructress in its Holy Creeds.

The influence that woman exerts on man is one that exalts: while she educates her child she elevates and ennobles the entire circle of the family.

If we cast our eyes back over the vast procession of actors and events which have composed the migrations of our race across the continent, from ocean to ocean, we are first struck by the bolder features of the march. We see the battles, the feats of courage and daring, the deeds of high enterprise in which woman is the heroine, standing shoulder to shoulder beside her hero-mate. Again we look and see the wife and mother worn with toils and hardships, and wasted with suffering which she endures with unshaken heart—a miracle of fortitude and patience. Then we behold her as the comforter and the guardian of the household amid a thousand trying scenes, soothing, strengthening, cheering, and preserving.

Grand and beautiful indeed are such spectacles as these. They rivet the eye, they swell the breast, they lift the soul of the gazer, because they are an exhibition of great virtues exercised on a wide field, in a noble cause—the subjugation of the wilderness, and the extension of the area of civilization. The hero who fights, the martyr who dies, the sufferer who bleeds, the spirit of kindness and sympathy which comforts and confirms are objects which call for our tears, our praise, our gratitude. But after all, these are incidents merely, glorious and soul-stirring indeed, yet scarcely more than superficial features and external agencies of the grand march, compared to the moral influence which emanates from the wife and mother in a million homes and through a million lives with a steadfastness and power and beneficence which can best be likened to the sunshine.