Western Wagons
They went with axe and rifle, when the trail was still to blaze,
They went with wife and children, in the prairie-schooner days,
With banjo and with frying pan—Susanna, don’t you cry!
For I’m off to California to get rich out there or die!
We’ve broken land and cleared it, but we’re tired of where we are.
They say that wild Nebraska is a better place by far.
There’s gold in far Wyoming, there’s black earth in Ioway,
So pack up the kids and blankets, for we’re moving out today!
The cowards never started and the weak died on the road,
And all across the continent the endless campfires glowed.
We’d taken land and settled but a traveler passed by—
And we’re going West tomorrow—Lordy , never ask us why!
We’re going West tomorrow, where the promises can’t fail.
O’er the hills in legions, boys, and crowd the dusty trail!
We shall starve and freeze and suffer. We shall die, and tame the lands.
But we’re going West tomorrow, with our fortune in our hands.
Stephen Vincent Benet
I wager most people under 40 today would assume this to be fiction. Our culture has cleansed itself of anything praising or suggesting a need for such character. More’s the pity.
Frank:
I think most modern physicians would say that a woman working that hard that close to delivery was crazy.
There is a commercial on television promoting the sale of western boots and western virtue. Don’t know about the boots but they may a point about the need for virtue.
There are few if any women like that pioneer any longer. Just arrogant feminists who think they know better than anyone else, but can’t do any real work even if necessary to save their souls. But they damn sure want to tell you and me how to do things. They are weak, cowardly, nasty, backstabbing, uppity, elitist, contemptible witches (and that other word beginning with “b” that rhymes with witches). I utterly despise them.
Don’t sugarcoat it LQC. Tell us how you really feel.
I grew up on the family farm. My grandmother went out to pick strawberries the day after she gave birth to my father. This was in 1920.
You know, there may have been a reason why the Old Testament law declared women to be “unclean” for at least 40 days after giving birth… since any person or thing an unclean person touched also became unclean, this would have had the effect of excusing postpartum women from typical household chores, and allowing them to be left alone ro bond with their babies for the duration. It sounds terribly misogynistic but isn’t.
Elementary school history needs to include liberal doses of accounts like this.
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Now for a rant:
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I’m recalling the PBS American Masters documentary devoted to Laura Ingalls Wilder. They included extensive interviews with a lump named Caroline Fraser, who’d actually won a Pulitzer Prize for her book on the Wilder family. Fraser’s a lapsed academic who writes for The New Yorker. She also despises Charles Ingalls. Our chatterati haven’t figured out that they’re expendable. Pioneer women were anything but.
My great, great grandparents, German Catholics, had a farm in Minnesota. One day my grandmother was visited by the Lakota braves. They were looking through the cabin windows. They were probably hungry and could smell the baking bread. As her husband wasn’t on the farm she took a horse and rode to find him. The braves thought was this was great fun chasing her. She rode so fast that after awhile they peeled off. It turns out that she gained a reputation as the white woman who rides like the wind.
She died in her second child birth. It was a baby boy. He died a month later. My great great grandfather took the first child, a daughter, back to Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. He married a young Swiss woman. The father took his family of four children back to MN. It grew to ten children.
A lot of woman in those days died in child birth. Doctors were few and washing of hands were not always done. Then there was the milk sickness. Milk and meat from cows that ate the white snake root killed many pioneers. The root contains a toxic alcohol called tremetol (or tremetone).
A man from our church had 26 relatives that were killed in the Lakota uprisings in the area of New Ulm.