In the summer of 1860 the author of these recollections, Mary Ann Stucki, then six years old, walked beside her parents' handcart from Florence (Omaha), Nebraska, to Salt Lake City, Utah. The family, converts to Mormonism, had left their comfortable home near Bern, Switzerland, to make the long journey to the Mormon Zion. Nearly eighty years later, Mary Ann Hafen published this account of her life, giving us an unparalleled, candid, inside view of the Mormon woman's world. Called to go with the Swiss company to settle the "Dixieland" region of southern Utah --a hot, dry, inhospitable land--Mary Ann's family lived in thatch, dugout, and adobe houses they built themselves. While still hardly more than a child, Mary Ann cut wheat with a sickle, gleaned cotton fields, made braided straw hats for barter, and spun and dyed cloth for her dresses. Always sustained by her faith in the church, she took part in a millenarian scheme that failed--a communal order--and entered a polygamous marriage, raising almost single-handedly a large family. Mary Ann Hafen has left an authentic, matter-of-fact record of poverty, incredibly hard work, and loss of loved ones, but also of pleasures great and small. It is a unique document of a little-known way of life.

This classic history is filled with colorful pathmarkers like Jedediah Smith, John C. Främont, and Kit Carson; with packers, home seekers, and mail couriers; and with horse thieves and enslavers of Indian women and children.

Embracing the crossroads that made the region distinctive this book reveals how American families have always been characterized by greater diversity than idealizations of the traditional family have allowed. The essays show how family life figured prominently in relations to larger struggles for conquest and control.

Includes biographical information on 4,500 individuals associated with the frontier

Western history is all the richer thanks to LeRoy and Ann Hafen, who have assembled a fascinating array of diaries and memoirs of forty-niners who set out from Salt Lake City toward California?s gold fields over the Old Spanish Trail. For many would-be gold miners, this dry, dangerous route was preferable to crossing the Sierra Nevada. The Donner party disaster was only three years old and fresh in the minds of many. In reality, the choice of the southern route did not ease travelers? efforts. The unremitting heat and lack of water killed more people and animals than the snows of the mountains. Jacob Stover?s narrative provides fine descriptions of these challenges, especially the difficulty in transporting supplies. Of added interest is the journal of Henry Bigler, a former member of the Mormon Battalion, who was the first person to record Marshall?s discovery of gold at Sutter?s Mill.

The Claremont Women's Oral History Project has collected hundreds of interviews with Mormon women of various ages, experiences, and levels of activity. These interviews record the experiences of these women in their homes and family life, their church life, and their work life, in their roles as homemakers, students, missionaries, career women, single women, converts, and disaffected members. Their stories feed into and illuminate the broader narrative of LDS history and belief, filling in a large gap in Mormon history that has often neglected the lived experiences of women. This project preserves and perpetuates their voices and memories, allowing them to say share what has too often been left unspoken. The silent majority speaks in these records. This volume is the first to explore the riches of the collection in print. A group of young scholars and others have used the interviews to better understand what Mormonism means to these women and what women mean for Mormonism. They explore those interviews through the lenses of history, doctrine, mythology, feminist theory, personal experience, and current events to help us understand what these women have to say about their own faith and lives.

In this critical biography, Susan Lee Johnson braids together lives over time and space, telling tales of two white women who, in the 1960s, wrote books about the fabled frontiersman Christopher "Kit" Carson: Quantrille McClung, a Denver librarian who compiled the Carson-Bent-Boggs Genealogy, and Kansas-born but Washington, D.C.- and Chicago-based Bernice Blackwelder, a singer on stage and radio, a CIA employee, and the author of Great Westerner: The Story of Kit Carson. In the 1970s, as once-celebrated figures like Carson were falling headlong from grace, these two amateur historians kept weaving stories of western white men, including those who married American Indian and Spanish Mexican women, just as Carson had wed Singing Grass, Making Out Road, and Josefa Jaramillo. Johnson's multilayered biography reveals the nature of relationships between women historians and male historical subjects and between history buffs and professional historians. It explores the practice of history in the context of everyday life, the seductions of gender in the context of racialized power, and the strange contours of twentieth-century relationships predicated on nineteenth-century pasts. On the surface, it tells a story of lives tangled across generation and geography. Underneath run probing questions about how we know about the past and how that knowledge is shaped by the conditions of our knowing.