Author. Artist.
One year ago the stories of the sixty men and women in Hope Amid Hardship: Pioneer Voices from Kansas Territory made their first public appearance. The journey I have taken with these incredible pioneers as I share their personal diaries and letters has been a […]
January 1, 1856: “Sunrise -8 degrees . . . Sundown 14 degrees. A Happy New Year! 2150 miles from my former home.” This is how Isaac Goodnow, a resident of Kansas Territory described New Year’s Day in his diary. I wanted to start the new […]
Hardly believing it was already June, I turned the calendar page and read the quote for the new month:
“You are never too old to set another goal or dream another dream.” C. S. Lewis
As I am currently fully engaged in preparing for the release of my book on Kansas Territory, I find myself thinking about things as they might relate to the pioneers that I wrote about.
Not all of the people who went west were young and adventurous. Some were more experienced, but still had a dream of the frontier. David Creek, an Iowa farmer, fulfilled that dream at age sixty, as did George Chapman from Kentucky. Mechanic F. Leitzinger’s dream took him all the way from Germany to Kansas at the age of sixty. But Iowan Hilsey Goble has them topped, traveling to the Territory at age seventy. Certainly C. S. Lewis would have approved.
As for me, I am publishing my first book at a time when many are thinking of retirement and what will come next. I feel fortunate to finally see my dream come true and in print this summer. Without dreams we are at a standstill. With them we are propelled forward to a place with endless possibilities. See you there!
May 11, 2013 The mothers I read about in my research on early Kansas, though living in a very different setting, had the same hopes for their children that we have – good health, education, and a chance to pursue their dreams. Mothers gave their […]
I have always been interested in time travel. No one, that I am aware of, has invented the mechanism to cross chronological boundaries, so I have come up with my own methods. My latest excursion took me along a green timeline that connects 1856 Kansas […]
This is the third post in honor of National Women’s History Month.
Like most citizens of New England, Lucy Larcom had never seen the broad expanse of Kansas. But also like most citizens of New England in 1855, she had heard about, and had strong feelings about, the slavery question and how it should play out in the new territory.
Lucy had been born in Beverly, Massachusetts and lived in Lowell as a young woman, a town also home to poet and Free-state proponent John Greenleaf Whittier. Whittier encourage Lucy, an aspiring writer. In 1855, while a teacher at Monticello Female Seminary, Lucy heard about a contest sponsored by the New England Emigrant Aid Company calling for a Kansas poem. The New England Emigrant Aid Company was organized to assist in making Kansas a free state and was strangely both a money-making endeavor and a charitable operation. The group encouraged migration to the state and assisted eastern emigrants with many aspects of their travel, especially by conducting organized settlement parties.
Lucy’s entry, “The Call to Kansas,” won the fifty dollar prize. The poem was set to music and served as an anthem for many who left their comfortable homes in New England for the Kansas frontier.
Here is the opening verse:
Yeomen strong, hither throng,
Nature’s honest men!
We will make the wilderness
Bud and bloom again.
Bring the sickle, speed the plough,
Turn the ready soil!
Freedom is the noblest pay
For the true man’s toil.
Ho, brothers! Come brothers!
Hasten all with me!
We’ll sing upon the Kansas plains
A song of liberty!
When contacted in 1891 by the Kansas Historical Society to comment on the poem, Lucy said that the poem brought back many memories of the Kansas border struggles and the excitement that the situation there caused in New England. She commented, “I have always hoped to visit Kansas, but never found opportunity to do so.” Her words did travel to Kansas, however, with thousands of others.
This is the first in a series of blogs for National Women’s History Month “I tell you but for the women of Kansas, it would have been abandoned in one week . . .” On September 15, 1879, James Rogers spoke these words at the […]
I admit it. When it comes to household chores, I can easily stray to something else more interesting in trying to carry out the task at hand. This happened just last week. When cleaning out bookcases, who would not want to open the cover of […]
