Joanna Stratton

This was a wonderful collection of accounts written by the women who played an integral part in settling Kansas. These women worked side by side with their husbands while raising a passel of children. There were no Wal-Marts back then so most everything was made by hand including all their clothing and the soap they washed it with. They rarely complained about the hard work, but the loneliness was hard to bear. The pictures showed them in their "Sunday best" but it's no wonder that nobody was smiling.

It made me tired just to read these vignettes of backbreaking work to raise a crop only to have it wiped out by a hailstorm or other freak of nature. The grasshopper scourge in the mid-1800s would have been the worst thing for me to bear. Not only did they eat all the crops but they invaded their homes as well. *Shudder* This is history at its finest sharing the human side of misery rather than just stating the facts of what happened.… (altro)