Women in Waiting in the Westward Movement: Life on the Home Frontier

Women in Waiting in the Westward Movement: Life on the Home Frontier. Peavy, Linda, and Ursula Smith. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994. Endnotes and index. $18.95 paper (381 pp.); $38.95 Cloth (400 pp.).

People interested in published pioneer women's journals and diaries have many to choose from: Mollie: the Journal of Mollie Dorsey Sanford in Nebraska and Colorado Territories, with introduction and notes by Donald F. Danker (1976); Lillian Schlissel's Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey (1992); and Kenneth Holmes' Covered Wagon Women (1995), to name a few. These journals and diaries detail, for the most part, the women's journeys westward in the l9th and early 20th centuries, in the company of family and friends, and tell a side of the story we hadn't heard until fairly recently. Now, with Peavy and Smith's Women in Waiting in the Westward Movement, we are aware of another factor in this exciting and tumultuous time in our country's history for this book recounts the viewpoints of women who remained at the original homestead for years at a time while their husbands forged new lives on the frontier. Peavy and Smith's book helps us understand the complexities of such separations.

Building on their 1990 book, The Gold Rush Widows of Little Falls (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press), Peavy and Smith give a comprehensive look at six women and their husbands, from Maine to Minnesota, who decided, for one reason or sometimes for several reasons, that they must live apart for a time in the hopes of a happy (and prosperous) reunion eventually. After locating materials relating to fiftythree couples separated during the westward movement, some of which they describe in the introduction, the authors used "double sets of letters that described in varying detail the day-to-day activities and experiences of wives on the home front and husbands on the far frontier." These letters, plus family papers, business records, genealogies, and interviews and correspondence with descendants are...