Review of A Prairie Populist: The Memoirs of Luna Kellie.

Authors

• Susan Sessions Rugh, St. Cloud State University

Date of this Version

1994

Document Type

Article

Comments

Published in Great Plains Quarterly 14:4 (Fall 1994). Copyright © 1994 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

Abstract

Jane Taylor Nelsen has performed a great service for scholars of agrarian life by making available the autobiographical writings of Luna Kellie. Kellie, who migrated from Minnesota to the Nebraska frontier as a young wife in 1877, played an active part in Populist politics beginning in the 1890s. The awakening of her political consciousness grew out of her own experience as a farm wife struggling to wrest a living from the Nebraska soil while she and her husband raised a large family. Catapulted to the position of secretary to the state league by the popularity of a song she wrote, Kellie's formidable organizational skills were first used to coordinate speaking tours and publications. Later she printed a Populist sheet which engendered grass-roots support via reports fr