Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Fall 2010
Document Type
Article
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly 30:4 (Fall 2010).
Abstract
In her early nineties, decades after she had left the Kansas Flint Hills, Adaline Beedle Sorace sat down with her daughter to write her memoirs. With extraordinarily vivid recall, she evokes the place and the people of her youth, weaving the strands of a family and personal saga that stretches from the 1860s to the 1930s.
"Addie" Sorace's maternal forebears, the pioneering RogIer family, were German immigrants who settled in Chase County, Kansas, in the 1860s. Over the decades, the Roglers acquired thousands of acres of rolling grassland and became one of the wealthiest and most influential cattle ranching families in the Great Plains.
Addie's mother (also Adaline), daughter of the youngest and perhaps least successful RogIer brother, had a college education and was about to embark on a career in New York when she fell in love with a Chase County neighbor, Carl Beedle. Adaline became a farm wife, left alone in the little town of Matfield Green for months at a time with the care of three children, a farmstead, and her widowed, alcoholic father, while her husband, who farmed and ranched only in the summer, spent the winters trying to make a living in the Oklahoma oilfields.
Comments
Copyright © 2010 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska.