Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
1991
Abstract
Unlike many of the collections of letters or journals written by women chronicling the nineteenth-century western experience that center on rural women's lives or the overland trip, Elizabeth Chester Fisk's letters describe a western woman in an urban environment. From Lizzie's riverboat trip up the Missouri River to Helena, Montana, in 1867 to the death of her mother and correspondent in 1893, the editor has chosen the best from a large collection. Through her letters, the reader glimpses the public and private politics that marked Lizzie's life and the tension between a woman's affiliations with family and the community and her aspirations to contribute to life beyond her home. Not only do Lizzie's letters convey the events punctuating life in a community growing from mining camp to transshipment and bureaucratic center, but they also allude to the particular problems involved in women's roles in the West. Lizzie, for example, was ever mindful of the problems of childrearing in a "fast" and worldly community. There was very little that escaped Lizzie's watchful and critical eye. When "a young man who used to sing and dance in a hurdy house and was an especial favorite with Daisy Dean (a low, bad woman who keeps a saloon) read sort of a sermon," Lizzie had had enough and disappeared from the church congregation for a time. But Lizzie was compassionate, too, and took time to teach her household help the three R's. A complex women, Lizzie was an apt raconteur and subtle observer of her world.
Comments
Published in GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY 11:4 (Fall 1991). Copyright © 1991 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.