, and turned barren prairie into
fruitful field; but of their wives and daughters, who bore the larger
share of those privations and suffered more terror in those perils, we
are given no record save in the most general terms. Perhaps the
chroniclers who tell in terms of admiration of the endurance and courage
of the pioneers and forget to mention those of their wives unconsciously
pay the latter, and womanhood through them, the greatest of homage, in
taking such qualities for granted in women and, hence, too natural to
call for record. However this may be, we know, from acquaintance with
the general facts, that with the ever-encroaching frontier of our
country's western limit of habitation there always advanced the foot of
woman, braving all perils in her love for her husband, her children, and
her home.

It was the presence of this gallant band, as well as their courage and
endurance, which assures us of one of the most predominant traits of the
most distinctive American womanhood in those days. That trait is the
love of home. It was to seek a home, a habitation and spot of ground
that should be their very own, that the pioneer and his wife dared the
perils of the wilderness; and in this search the wife was at least as
instrumental as the husband. To have a home was the ambition of every
American woman of those times; and, if she could not compass this by
ordinary methods, she had recourse to extraordinary ones. If she could
not find a home among the habitations of her fellows, if her good man
could not give to her this one desire of her heart, then she urged her
husband forth into the barren fields of the unknown West, where danger
and death might await them, but where at least there was promise of the
home,--the Mecca of her every wish.

Toward the end of the period included in this chapter there occurred
another westward movement which happily is not entirely relative to the
story of American womanhood, and yet must receive mention here. The
credulous followers of John Smith, the Mormon, as they are conveniently
though incorrectly styled in general terminology, driven from their
abodes among the more civilized of their race, sought asylum on the
shores of the Great Salt Lake and there built a city to be their abiding
place for ever. Somewhat later the Mormon creed boldly avowed its
adherence to the theory of polygamy, in practice only at first and then
in precept as well, and thus revived, even though within narrow