Jane Taylor Nelsen

Albert E. Stone's Foreword to this book invites you to compare it to the accounts of frontier farm life of, for instance, Laura Ingalls Wilder (p. xvi). If you want a Laura Ingalls Wilder comparison, this is definitely The First Four Years, not These Happy Golden Years.

Luna Sanford Kellie (Mrs. J. T. Kellie, 1857-1940) was born in Minnesota and moved to Nebraska as a young wife with a babe in arms in the 1870s. (Meaning that her life is in fact very similar to that of Laura Ingalls, but a decade earlier.) There, she experienced poor crop prices, poor harvests caused by drought, the loss of two children, the callousness of a state dominated by railroad interests, and a life of endless hard work. It turned her into an activist -- perhaps even a radical. She became one of the driving forces of Nebraska's Farmers' Alliance, an organization devoted to helping farmers make a living. She also sought to form a new political alternative to the Republicans and Democrats. It was a familiar idea: The Greenback Party, the Populists, the Free Silver-ites all tried to break party shackles -- and you can see how well that worked. Eventually Luna Kellie gave up, sold the printing press she had been using to try to spread her ideas, and went back to being a poor farm wife.

This book contains three works of hers. One is her political manifesto, "Stand Up for Nebraska," a public speech she gave that brought her most of the little attention she earned in her life. The second is a "Political Memoir" describing her career and ideas. And the third is a "Personal Memoir," an account of her life that she wrote, probably in 1925, for her family. It will tell you a little about her high hopes, and how utterly they crashed, that the memoirs were written on the back of old Farmers' Alliance membership certificates, which had been printed in bulk and never used because not enough people joined the group.

Going back to the Laura Ingalls Wilder comparison, this differs from Wilder's writings in two significant respects. First, it's a true memoir, unlike Laura's cleaned-up fictional account that, for instance, erases the birth and early death of Laura's brother. Second, Laura had her daughter Rose Wilder Lane to edit her work; Luna Kellie didn't even get to rewrite her own writing. It's here in its harsh, raw, coarse truth. Luna Kellie was literate, but her orthography was erratic and she wasn't anyone's notion of a stylist. The writing gets its point across, mostly (the personal account does start in the middle, with Luna on a train; her family would have known what was going on, but we don't, and it takes quite a while to realize that she is going to her new home in Nebraska, with her baby but without her husband, and she really doesn't know what lies ahead). It is clearly the work of someone who is not used to writing a continuous story. That's bad -- and it's good; you may have a hard time figuring out what is going on, but what you're reading is at least the unvarnished truth.

This isn't all there is to the life of Luna Kellie. I discovered her by running across a collection of song lyrics that she wrote for the Farmers' Alliance that were later published by the WPA (I think it was) as a bit of Nebraska history. Trying to find out more, I eventually encountered this book -- and discovered that it didn't even include Kellie's songs in its bibliography, let alone print them. This is not a biography of Luna Kellie; it's just a publication of her own memoirs. As such, it has great value for understanding frontier life in Nebraska in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. But I'm still looking for more information about those song texts....… (altro)