It is this very dearth of so many things that once made her life easy and comfortable which throws her back upon her own resources. Here again is woman's strength. Fertile in expedients, apt in device, an artisan to construct and an artist to embellish, she proceeds to supply what is lacking in her new home. She has a miraculous faculty for creating much out of little, and for transforming the coarse into the beautiful. Barrels are converted into easy chairs and wash-stands, spring beds are manufactured with rows of slender, elastic saplings; a box covered with muslin stuffed with hay serves for a lounge. By the aid of considerable personal exertion, while she adds to the list of useful and necessary articles, she also enlarges the circle of luxuries. An hour or two of extra work now and then enables her to hoard enough to buy a new looking-glass, and to make from time to time small additions to the showy part of the household.
After she has transformed the rude cabin into a cozy habitation, she turns her attention to the outside surroundings. Woodbine and wild cucumber are trailed over the doors and windows; little beds of sweet-williams and marigolds line the path to the clearing's edge or across the prairie-sward to the well; and an apple or pear tree is put in here and there. In all these works, either of use or embellishment, if not done by her own hand she is at least the moving spirit. Thus over the rugged and homely features of her lot she throws something of the magic of that ideal of which the poet sings:
"Nymph of our soul and brightener of our being
She makes the common waters musical—
Binds the rude night-winds in a silver thrall,
Bids Hybla's thyme and Tempe's violet dwell
Round the green marge of her moon-haunted cell."
It is the thousand nameless household offices performed by woman that makes the home: it is the home which moulds the character of the children and makes the husband what he is. Who can deny the vast debt of gratitude due from the present generation of Americans to these offices of woman in refining and ameliorating the rude tone of frontier life? It may well be said that the pioneer women of America have made the wilderness bud and blossom like the rose. Under their hands even nature itself, no longer a wild, wayward mother, turns a more benign face upon her children. A land bright with flowers and bursting with fruitage testifies to the labors and influence of those who embellish the homestead and make it attractive to their husbands and children.
A traveler on the vast prairies of Kansas and Nebraska will often see cabins remote from the great thoroughfares embowered in vines and shrubbery and bright with beds of flowers. Entering he will discern the rugged features of frontier life softened in a hundred ways by the hand of woman. The steel is just as hard and more serviceable after it is polished, and the oak-wood as strong and durable when it is trimmed and smoothed. The children of the frontier are as hardy and as manly though the gentle voice of woman schools their rugged ways and her kind hand leads them through the paths of refinement and moulds them in the school of humanity.
CHAPTER IX.
SOME REMARKABLE WOMEN
Of all the tens of thousands of devoted women who have accompanied the grand army of pioneers into the wilderness, not one but that has been either a soldier to fight, or a laborer to toil, or a ministering angel to soothe the pains and relieve the sore wants of her companions. Not seldom has she acted worthily in all these several capacities, fighting, toiling, and ministering by turns. If a diary of the events of their pioneer-lives had been kept by each of these brave and faithful women, what a record of toil and warfare and suffering it would present. How many different types of female character in different spheres of action it would show—the self-sacrificing mother, the tender and devoted wife, the benevolent matron, the heroine who blenched not in battle! Unnumbered thousands have passed beautiful, strenuous and brave lives far from the scenes of civilization, and gone down to their graves leaving only local, feeble voices, if any, to celebrate their praises and to-day we know not the place of their sepulcher. Others have had their memories embalmed by the pens of faithful biographers, and a few also have left diaries containing a record of the wonderful vicissitudes of their lives.
Woman's experience of life in the wilderness is never better told than in her own words. More impressible than man, to passing events; more susceptible to pain and pleasure; enjoying and sorrowing more keenly than her sterner and rougher mate, she possesses often a peculiarly graphic power in expressing her own thoughts and feelings, and also in delineating the scenes through which she passes.
A woman's diary of frontier-life, therefore, possesses an intrinsic value because it is a faithful story, and at the same time one of surpassing interest, in consequence of her personal and active participation in the toils, sufferings, and dangers incident to such a life.