Lydia Spencer Lane's account of her life as a young army bride on the early southwestern frontier is both invaluable history and delightful commentary. As an officer's wife, Lane left her home in Pennsylvania in 1854 to accompany her new husband to his first post in the West--the encampment at Fort Inge, Texas, then in the midst of a yellow-fever epidemic. For the next sixteen years, Lane crossed the Great Plains by wagon seven times, traveled nearly 8,000 miles, raised three children, and became accustomed to tours of duty that required the family to move at least every six months to a...

The accounts of two women of the West in the 1850s
The Great Plains evoke the very essence of the wild American frontier. In reality, beyond the 'settled and civilised' eastern seaboard lay a great wilderness-a barrier to be traversed if the 'Manifest Destiny' of the American people to populate the entire North American continent was to come to fruition. During the nineteenth century many men and women embarked upon this perilous endeavour. All had to brave every element that Nature could throw against them, within terrain as varied as any on Earth and often harassed by outlaws and Indian...

The accounts of two women of the West in the 1850s
The Great Plains evoke the very essence of the wild American frontier. In reality, beyond the 'settled and civilised' eastern seaboard lay a great wilderness-a barrier to be traversed if the 'Manifest Destiny' of the American people to populate the entire North American continent was to come to fruition. During the nineteenth century many men and women embarked upon this perilous endeavour. All had to brave every element that Nature could throw against them, within terrain as varied as any on Earth and often harassed by outlaws and Indian...