Frontier Teachers: Stories of Heroic Women of the Old West

by Chris Enss

Overview

Between 1847 and 1858, more than six hundred female teachers traveled across the frontier to provide youngsters with an education, and the numbers grew rapidly in the decades to come. Enduring hardship, the dozen women we meet in these pages demonstrate untold dedication and sacrifice to bring formal education to the Wild West. These women introduced their students to a world of possibilities-and changed America forever. Women like: Olive Mann Isbell and Hannah Clapp, who came to class armed with guns to keep students safe from hostile natives, Eliza Mott, who, lacking schoolbooks and supplies, taught the alphabet using the inscriptions on tombstones, Lucia Darling and Mary Gray-McLench, who trekked hundreds of miles through treacherous country to teach children in the most remote regions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781493064786
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	08/01/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	218
Sales rank:	541,817
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Chris Enss is a New York Times bestselling author who has been writing about women of the Old West for more than thirty years. She has penned more than fifty published books on the subject. Her work has been honored with nine Will Rogers Medallion Awards, two Elmer Kelton Book Awards, an Oklahoma Center for the Book Award, three Foreword Review Magazine Book Awards, and two Western Writers of America Spur Finalist Awards. Enss’s most recent works are The Widowed Ones: Beyond the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Iron Women: The Ladies Who Helped Build the Railroad, and The Lady and the Mountain Man: Isabella Bird, Mountain Man Jim Nugent, and their Unlikely Friendship.

Table of Contents

Foreword David Sanchez viii Acknowledgments x Introduction xi Sister Blandina Segale: The Outlaw's Teacher 1 Mary Graves Clarke: The Sorrowful Teacher 18 Eliza Mott: The Carson Valley Teacher 27 Anna Webber: The Prairie Teacher 32 Tabitha Brown: The Grandmother Teacher 40 Olive Mann Isbell: The Mission Teacher 50 Lucia Darling: The Montana Teacher 59 Sarah Royce: The Philosopher's Teacher 70 Mary Gray McLench: The Oregon Teacher 80 Sister Mary Russell and the Sisters of Mercy: The Orphans' Teacher 87 Hannah Clapp: The University Teacher 99 Bethenia Owens-Adair: The Student Teacher 110 Appendix 123 Bibliography 134 Index 140 About the Author 144

Editorial Reviews

The last time we saw Chris Enss, in her 2006 A Beautiful Mine, she introduced us to women prospectors in the Old West. In this opus, she offers stirring portraits of some of the 600 women who traveled west to teach the sons and daughters of farmers, miners, and other homesteaders. Like other Enss efforts (she has authored or coauthored more than a dozen feminist histories), Frontier Teachers renders the stories of brave women who tamed the West in their own ways.

Enhanced for the reader with the addition of a ten page Bibliography and an eight page Index, this new and expanded second edition of "Frontier Teachers" by Chris Enss is a welcome and unreservedly recommended addition to personal, professional, community, and academic library American History and Women's History collections and supplemental curriculum studies lists. It should be noted for students, academia, historians, and non-specialist general readers with an interest in the subject.

Midwest Book Review