Multi-purpose Prairie Sketches; Or, Fugitive Recollections Of An Army Girl Of 1899. Series [M3wxvuQA]

A very good copy of this well-written account by a teenage girl in the far west. Her father was a major in the 7th Cavalry and so her childhood was one of remote postings, including two years at boarding school on the east-coast.

Her account commences as she returns to the west, namely Rawlins, Wyoming where her mother and a servant were waiting for her. A one hundred and fifty mile journey to Fort Washakie ensues. Her observations throughout make for entertaining and informative reading, ie “Irrigation is all that is necessary to make the prairies of Wyoming blossom like the rose.” There are also notes on Native Americans – the Shoshone and Arapahoe.

They made stops at Sheep’s Ranch (inhabited by a lone coyote); Lost Soldier Ranch (“a small pile of low adobe buildings, unsightly and gray with dust; not a tree or green thing in sight”); Sweetwater Ranch (“much of the land being fenced off with the deadly barbed wire allow no herds of antelope and deer as found in my girlhood”); and Wind River Ranch (“dangerous ascent down steep Beaver Hill imperilled further by a rattlesnake that spooked the mules”).

The book is widely-held in libraries, but scarce in the trade. This copy previously belonged to the Texan book dealer, Dorothy Sloan (1943-2021).

Graff 1251; Howes (1954) 3323; Huntington 292.