Recollections of Past Days: The Autobiography of Patience Loader Rozsa Archer

by Sandra Ailey Petree (Editor)

Overview

For visitors to the Martin's Cove historic site in Wyoming, Patience Loader has become an icon of the disastrous winter entrapment of the Martin and Willie handcart companies. Her record of those events is important, but there is much else of interest in her autobiography. In fact, it is a bit unusual that someone such as her would have left such an engaging record of her life.

The daughter of an English gardener, Patience Loader became a boarding house servant, domestic maid, and seamstress. Converted to Mormonism, she shipped with her parents to America. They joined the ill-fated Martin company, which because of poor planning and a late start west, was caught poorly prepared by severe high plains snowstorms in October and November 1856. The combined fatalities of the Martin and Willie companies made this the worst disaster in the history of overland travel. Patience = s father was one of those who died. After reaching Utah, Patience took the unusual step for a Mormon of marrying a soldier, John Rozsa, stationed at Camp Floyd. The troops there had made up the Utah Expedition, sent to ensure federal authority over the Mormons. Rozsa was a Hungarian immigrant and Mormon convert. When the Utah troops were recalled for the Civil War, Patience accompanied her husband, as an army laundress, to Washington, D.C., running a boarding house while Rozsa fought. After the war, he died at Fort Leavenworth of consumption, and Patience returned alone to Utah, where she became a cook at a mining camp in American Fork Canyon. Her autobiography ends there in 1872, though she lived till 1922.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780874215311
Publisher:	Utah State University Press
Publication date:	03/10/2006
Series:	Life Writings Frontier Women , #1
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	18 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Sandra Petree teaches literature as a member of the English faculty at Northwestern Oklahoma State University and was originally drawn to this autobiography as a literary text. While her historical annotation is thorough, she also considers the memoir as the self-inscription of an ordinary woman who did extraordinary things and then, as best she could, gave them a vivid expressive form. Petree = s edition of Loader fits well the literary as well as historical aims of series editor Maureen Ursenbach Beecher.

Table of Contents

Contents Acknowledgments 000 Introduction 000 "Reccolections of past days" England, 1827-December 1855 000 On the John J. Boyd, December 1855-February 1856 000 America, February-July 1856 000 Starting Westward, July 3-July 28, 1856 000 On the Plains, July 28-November 30, 1856 000 In the Valley, November 30, 1856-December 1858 000 Camp Floyd, December 1858-July 27, 1861 000 On the Trail to Washington, July 27, 1861-November 1861 000 Washington, November 1861-April 1866 000 Back to Utah, April 1866-July 21, 1866 000 Back in the Valley, July 21, 1866-1872 000 Afterword 000 Appendices Appendix 1 James and Amy Britnell Loader Genealogy Chart 000 Appendix 2 John and Patience Loader Rozsa Genealogy Chart 000 Appendix 3 Transcript of Article from The Latter-day Saints Millennial Star, December 22, 1855 (Article by Franklin D. Richards on Handcart Emigration) 000 Appendix 4 Transcript of Article from The Mormon, December 1, 1855 (Article by John Taylor on Handcart Emigration) 000 Appendix 5 Transcript of Article from The Millennial Star, June 14, 1855 (Letters between Patience Loader and John Jaques) 000 Appendix 6 Letter from Marshall Loader to Amy Britnell Loader, August 6, 1857 000 Appendix 7 Letter from Patience Loader Rozsa Archer to Tamar Loader Ricks, November 17, 1914 000 Notes 000 Bibliography 000 Index 000