Ada Bass: Pioneer Woman of the Grand Canyon

By Kristy McCaffrey

Ada Bass was the first European-American woman to raise a family at the Grand Canyon. In 1893, at the age of twenty-six and considered a spinster, Ada Diefendorf traveled from New York to the Arizona Territory to visit an aunt. In August 1894, she decided to take a tour of the Grand Canyon guided by William Wallace Bass. He was twenty years her senior, but Ada was smitten and within five months they were married. However, she would come to find that life with her charismatic but relatively poor husband wouldn’t be easy.

Grand Canyon

Their first year of marriage was a nomadic existence with treks from Williams, Arizona, to Ash Fork, Bass Camp, and The Caves. Ada cooked and cleaned and made camps while Bass guided tourists into the canyon. Six months into her marriage, Ada began using the abbreviation S.O.S. in her diary, meaning “same old stuff,” signifying the drudgery of her daily life. When they did acquire money, Bass frequently spent it on liquor.

Ada Bass

Ada would go on to have four children, but the family frequently had no home and so little money that Ada was forced to sell her possessions, including an embroidered bedspread, a fine-pieced quilt, pillow slips with lace, her silverware and a music book. Fed up, Ada left Bass more than once and went back East to live with her parents, but she always returned, saying many years later that, “You know, I love the Grand Canyon too.” And despite everything Bass put her through, including philandering, she remained with her husband until the end.

William Bass

By 1911, Bass had built a house for his family on the South Rim and his tourist business was netting a good income. But in 1919 the Grand Canyon became a national park and Fred Harvey became the park’s main concessioner. By 1923, Bass’s tourist business couldn’t compete. He and Ada eventually retired to Wickenburg, near Phoenix.

William Bass died in 1933 at the age of 85. Ada remained in Wickenburg until her death in 1951 and is buried at the Grand Canyon Cemetery on the South Rim.

Come along with Texas Ranger Nathan Blackmore and Emma Hart as they journey through Grand Canyon in 1877.
Click here to learn more about THE SPARROW.

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Who Was the First Woman to Write a Western Romance?

by Heather Blanton

A simple question on the surface, I thought a quick Google would give me the answer. Turns out, a few females claim the honor. So after a little more serious digging, I came up with Mary Hallock Foote and her first novel, Led-Horse Claim: A Romance of a Mining Camp published in 1883.

Turns out, Mary was quite an interesting gal. Born in 1847 in New York to Quaker parents, she attended school at the very proper Female Collegiate Seminary in Poughkeepsie. Her gift for the creative arts convinced her father (clearly a forward-thinking man) to invest more in his daughter’s education. He sent her to Cooper School of Design for Women, and by her early twenties, Mary was a sought-after illustrator and designer for some of the most notable publishers in New York City. She loved her job. She loved the city. But she loved a man more.

In 1876, she married Arthur De Wint Foote, a young mining engineer whose career would take her deep into the wild-and-wooly Western frontier. Mary saw it all. From Deadwood to Leadville, from Idaho to Mexico.

Impressed, sometimes astonished, at the characters populating these rowdy mining towns, Mary wrote and illustrated dozens of articles for readers “back East.” She quickly gained the reputation for being one of the sharpest observers of, and most civilizing influences on, the bawdy mining, and ditch (irrigation) towns out west. According to an article in the Oregon Cultural Heritage Commission, “The Victorian gentlewoman traveled the American West dressed in hoop skirt and petticoats, insisting that her children be educated by an English nanny and fed by a Chinese cook, so that she could work on her illustrations and stories, without interruption.”

What this quote doesn’t tell you is that Mary didn’t have time to raise the children because she had to help put bread on the table. Her husband’s career as a surveyor and civil engineer was difficult, at best, due to his unswerving honesty. Apparently, fudging numbers was expected in the mining industry, but Arthur didn’t play along. Hence, the continual moves from one town to the next. But Mary wrote about it all and her short stories and serials gained in popularity. They were published alongside the likes of Rudyard Kipling. Her articles and observations of life in the Wild West were met with lavish reviews, especially by those who could recognize the ring of authenticity—because they lived it.

Mary’s stories leaned more toward Western romance, though, as opposed to Owen Wister-style shoot-outs and brawls. She wrote fifteen novels in all. However, her husband eventually landed a job managing a mine in California and as his salary increased, Mary’s hectic writing pace decreased. Her last book was published in 1919. She didn’t seem to miss writing.

Mary and Arthur were married nearly sixty years. She, ever hardy and determined, lived until the ripe old age of 90. Unfortunately, while her life was long, her fame was not. It is nearly impossible to find the complete collection of Mary’s works now, even on Amazon. What a loss for the Western Romance genre.

NELLIE BLY, PIONEER OF A DIFFERENT TYPE

No, she's not a cowgirl or a rancher. This woman was a pioneer of a different type, one who made history for women and the world.

Nellie Bly was the pen name of American journalist Elizabeth Jane Cochrane. She was a ground-breaking reporter known for a record-breaking trip around the world in 72 days, in emulation of Jules Verne's fictional character Phileas Fogg, and an exposé in which she faked insanity to study a mental institution from within. She was a pioneer in her field, and launched a new kind of investigative journalism. In addition to her writing, she also was an industrialist, inventor, and charity worker.

At birth she was named Elizabeth Jane Cochran. She was born in "Cochran Mills", today part of the Pittsburgh suburb of Burrell Township, Armstrong County, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Mary Jane and Michael Cochran. Her father was a modest laborer and mill worker who taught his young children a cogent lesson about the virtues of hard work and determination, buying the local mill and most of the land surrounding his family farmhouse. As a young girl Elizabeth often was called "Pinky" because she so frequently wore the color. As she became a teenager she wanted to portray herself as more sophisticated, and so dropped the nickname and changed her surname to Cochrane.

She attended boarding school for one term, but was forced to drop out due to lack of funds. In 1880, Cochrane and her family moved to Pittsburgh. An aggressively misogynistic column entitled "What Girls Are Good For" in the Pittsburgh Dispatch prompted her to write a fiery rebuttal to the editor under the pseudonym "Lonely Orphan Girl". The editor, George Madden, was impressed with her passion and ran an advertisement asking the author to identify herself.

When Cochrane introduced herself to the editor, he offered her the opportunity to write a piece for the newspaper, again under the pseudonym "Lonely Orphan Girl". After her first article for the Dispatch, entitled "The Girl Puzzle", Madden was impressed again and offered her a full-time job. Women who were newspaper writers at that time customarily used pen names, and for Cochrane the editor chose "Nellie Bly", adopted from the title character in the popular song "Nelly Bly" by Stephen Foster. She originally intended for her pseudonym to be "Nelly Bly," but her editor wrote "Nellie" by mistake, and the error stuck.

Nellie Bly

As a writer, Bly focused her early work for the Dispatch on the plight of working women, writing a series of investigative articles on women who were factory workers, but editorial pressure pushed her to the so-called "women's pages" to cover fashion, society, and gardening, the usual role for women journalists of the day. Dissatisfied with these duties, she took the initiative and traveled to Mexico to serve as a foreign correspondent. Still only 21, she spent nearly half a year reporting the lives and customs of the Mexican people. Her dispatches later were published in book form as Six Months in Mexico. In one report, she protested the imprisonment of a local journalist for criticizing the Mexican government, then a dictatorship under Porfirio Díaz. When Mexican authorities learned of Bly's report, they threatened her with arrest, prompting her to leave the country. Safely home, she denounced Díaz as a tyrannical czar suppressing the Mexican people and controlling the press.

Burdened again with theater and arts reporting, Bly left the Pittsburgh Dispatch in 1887 for New York City. Penniless after four months, she talked her way into the offices of Joseph Pulitzer's newspaper, the New York World, and took an undercover assignment for which she agreed to feign insanity to investigate reports of brutality and neglect at the Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's Island.

After a night of practicing deranged expressions in front of a mirror, she checked into a boardinghouse. She refused to go to bed, telling the boarders that she was afraid of them and that they looked crazy. They soon decided that she was crazy, and the next morning summoned the police. Taken to a courtroom, she pretended to have amnesia. The judge concluded she had been drugged.

She was then examined by several doctors, all of whom declared her to be insane. "Positively demented," said one, "I consider it a hopeless case. She needs to be put where someone will take care of her." The head of the insane pavilion at Bellevue Hospital pronounced her "undoubtedly insane". The case of the pretty crazy girl attracted media attention.

"Who Is This Insane Girl?" asked the New York Sun. The New York Times wrote of the "mysterious waif" with the "wild, hunted look in her eyes", and her desperate cry: "I can't remember I can't remember."

Committed to the asylum, Bly experienced its conditions firsthand. The food consisted of gruel broth, spoiled beef, bread that was little more than dried dough, and dirty undrinkable water. The dangerous patients were tied together with ropes. The patients were made to sit for much of each day on hard benches with scant protection from the cold. Waste was all around the eating places. Rats crawled all around the hospital. The bathwater was frigid, and buckets of it were poured over their heads. The nurses were obnoxious and abusive, telling the patients to shut up, and beating them if they did not. Speaking with her fellow patients, Bly was convinced that some were as sane as she was.

On the effect of her experiences, she wrote: "What, excepting torture, would produce insanity quicker than this treatment? Here is a class of women sent to be cured. I would like the expert physicians who are condemning me for my action, which has proven their ability, to take a perfectly sane and healthy woman, shut her up and make her sit from 6 a.m. until 8 p.m. on straight-back benches, do not allow her to talk or move during these hours, give her no reading and let her know nothing of the world or its doings, give her bad food and harsh treatment, and see how long it will take to make her insane. Two months would make her a mental and physical wreck."

…My teeth chattered and my limbs were …numb with cold. Suddenly, I got three buckets of ice-cold water…one in my eyes, nose and mouth.

After ten days, Bly was released from the asylum at the New York World's behest. Her report, later published in book form as Ten Days in a Mad-House, caused a sensation and brought her lasting fame. While embarrassed physicians and staff fumbled to explain how so many professionals had been fooled, a grand jury launched its own investigation into conditions at the asylum, inviting Bly to assist. The jury's report recommended the changes she had proposed, and its call for increased funds for care of the insane prompted an $850,000 increase in the budget of the Department of Public Charities and Corrections. They also made sure that future examinations were more thorough so that only the seriously ill went to the asylum.

In 1888, Bly suggested to her editor at the New York World that she take a trip around the world, attempting to turn Jules Verne's fictional Around the World in Eighty Days into fact for the first time. A year later, at 9:40 a.m. on November 14, 1889, and with two days' notice, she boarded the Augusta Victoria, a steamer of the Hamburg America Line, and began her 24,899-mile journey.

She brought with her the dress she was wearing, a sturdy overcoat, several changes of underwear, and a small travel bag carrying her toiletry essentials. She carried most of her money (£200 in English bank notes and gold in total, as well as some American currency) in a bag tied around her neck.

The New York newspaper Cosmopolitan sponsored its own reporter, Elizabeth Bisland, to beat the time of both Phileas Fogg and Bly. Bisland would travel the opposite way around the world. To sustain interest in the story, the World organized a “Nellie Bly Guessing Match” in which readers were asked to estimate Bly’s arrival time to the second, with the Grand Prize consisting at first of a free trip to Europe and, later on, spending money for the trip.

During her travels around the world, Bly went through England, France (where she met Jules Verne in Amiens), Brindisi, the Suez Canal, Colombo (Ceylon), the Straits Settlements of Penang and Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan. The development of efficient submarine cable networks and the electric telegraph allowed Bly to send short progress reports, although longer dispatches had to travel by regular post and thus, often were delayed by several weeks.

Bly travelled using steamships and the existing railroad systems, which caused occasional setbacks, particularly on the Asian leg of her race. During these stops, she visited a leper colony in China. In Singapore, she bought a monkey.

As a result of rough weather on her Pacific crossing, she arrived in San Francisco on the White Star Line ship Oceanic on January 21, two days behind schedule. New York World owner Pulitzer chartered a private train to bring her home. She arrived back in New Jersey on January 25, 1890, at 3:51 p.m.

Just over seventy-two days after her departure from Hoboken, Bly was back in New York. She had circumnavigated the globe, traveling alone for almost the entire journey. Bisland was, at the time, still crossing the Atlantic, only to arrive in New York four and a half days later. Bisland also had missed a connection and had to board a slow, old ship (the Bothina) in the place of a fast ship (Etruria). Bly's journey was a world record, although it was bettered a few months later by George Francis Train, who completed the journey in 67 days.

Nellie about the time of her marriage

In 1895 Nellie Bly married millionaire manufacturer Robert Seaman. Bly was 31 and Seaman was 73 when they married. She retired from journalism, and became the president of the Iron Clad Manufacturing Co., which made steel containers such as milk cans and boilers. In 1904, her husband died. In the same year, Iron Clad began manufacturing the steel barrel that was the model for the 55-gallon oil drum still in widespread use in the United States. Although there have been claims that Nellie Bly invented the barrel, the inventor is believed to have been Henry Wehrhahn, who likely assigned his invention to her. Nellie Bly was, however, an inventor in her own right, receiving US patent 697,553 for a novel milk can and US patent 703,711 for a stacking garbage can, both under her married name of Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman.

Nellie near the time of her death

For a time she was one of the leading women industrialists in the United States, but embezzlement by employees led her into bankruptcy. How sad that such an innovative and intelligent woman was the victim of unscrupulous employees.

Back in reporting, she wrote stories on Europe's Eastern Front during World War I and notably covered the Woman Suffrage Parade of 1913. Her headline for the Parade story was “Suffragists Are Men's Superiors”, but she also "with uncanny prescience" predicted in the story that it would be 1920 before women would win the vote.

She was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1898. The remarkable Nellie Bly died of pneumonia at St. Mark's Hospital in New York City in 1922, at age 57. She was interred in a modest grave at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.

Source: Wikipedia

Decorating Pioneer Homes by Paty Jager

In the nineteenth century, women, who were uprooted from their families and hauled into primitive conditions, had to make due with the housing structures their husband’s provided.

Their first home once they arrived to their location could be a tent, a one  room log cabin with no doors or windows or floor, mining shacks with dirt floors and canvas ceilings, flimsy tar-paper shacks, dark and desolate dugouts or soddies. The men were busy staking claims, putting in crops, or working jobs and only came home to sleep. The manner of the house didn’t matter to them.

But the woman spent every hour of every day in the home other than the hours her chores took her outside. Reading letters by some of the pioneer women it is easy to see how their dreary conditions would be hard to handle.  Especially if they had several children in a small drafty, leaky home.

One woman used grass and fern mixed with mud to fill the cracks in the walls and floor to keep out the drafts, vermin, lizards, and snakes. Many of the floors had cracks so large the eating utensils would fall through the cracks and the boards would have to be pried up to retrieve the tableware.

Another family decided to move to a larger parcel of land and to save time of building another house, they pulled the 12’ x 12’ chicken coop to the new site. Before she could get her things moved in pack rats dragged in their sundry plunder.  They cleaned out the debris and the rats and lived in the building with five children.  The woman didn’t like the gray walls and smell of chickens so she covered the walls with newspapers.   Later the family moved into a more permanent living quarters. This building had a ceiling made of muslin tacked up to the plaster. When it rained hard the muslin would hang down with mud in it, dripping dirty water on everything. After every rain they would have to take the muslin down and wash it. She whitewashed the walls and as the family became more prosperous she bought calico cloth, sewed it together and tacked it to the walls. The one front room window had a cheese cloth curtain she attached crocheted lace to.  When she desired a nicer place for her babies to play than the rough plank floors, she spent a winter making a carpet from rags. She even went to the dump and dug out flour sacks that she died a dull brown using copper.

One woman sewed sheets together to tacked them up between the joists of the cabin to make the home more cozy and less drafty. A woman married to a civil engineer, used his geological survey maps to line her walls.

In South Dakota there were the “tar paper homesteaders”. These people had the choice of lining their interior walls with red or blue tar paper. The red was thinner and cost three dollars a roll while the blue was thicker and six dollars a roll. Everyone knew the difference in quality and cost so the blue paper on walls became a sign of class on the frontier.

www.patyjager.net

www.patyjager.blogspot.com

Source: Pioneer Women; The Lives of Women on the Frontier by Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith

Ginger's View of Housekeeping Then and Now

As I was bemoaning the few chores I faced today, I stopped and gave myself a reality check.  I started thinking about the pioneer women in the novels I read and write, and realized how cushy my life is compared to theirs.

Take for instance making the bed.  All I have to do is spread up the sheets and comforter.  Of course, although I b*tch and groan about how my husband's wiggly foot manages to untuck everything, I gave praise that I don't have to deal with a straw mattress and flour-sack sheets and pillow cases. I didn't have to pluck a chicken or turkey to fill my pillow, nor, do I have to empty a chamber pot like those kept beneath the bed to avoid those nighttime potty calls.

 Next time you have to clean the toilet, thank God you have one. Our pioneer sisters didn't have the comfort of having an "on-suite" bedroom, so those treks to the outdoor privy, especially during the winter months, could really be the pits.

As I tossed a load of clothes in my washer and added my convenient liquid detergent and softener, I paused a moment and pictured the agony of having to visit a local stream and beat the clothing clean on a rock or, in the case of the more modern gal of the ages, lug out a washtub and scrub board and spend a few backbreaking hours laboring to refresh the family wardrobe.  Then my gaze caught sight of my dryer and I remembered back to when I first married in the early sixties.  We couldn't afford a dryer at the time, and I had to hang everything on a clothesline.  OMG, I hated that.  Sure, you got the benefit of a fresh air smell...when there was one, but the towels and linens were stiff and you weren't done with the hanging of the wet laundry, you had to go back and retrieve it.  Somehow, it always managed to rain while I had clothes on the line.  I was so happy to see those days pass, and I can bet the head of a pioneer woman visiting today would spin at all the modern conveniences we take for granted.

How about your vacuum cleaner?  The best a pioneer women could do was gather fresh straw and make a new broom.  They may have owned a rug or two, (handmade of course), but dirt or wood floors were the norm.  No wall-to-wall carpets for them.  Sometimes just sweeping the dirt smooth was the best a gal could do.

Can Openers?  Yeah, some of us may still use the ones you have to "manually" twist, but I've moved on to the one you set on the can and it does its magic all by itself.  Imagine using a knife blade to open a tin?  I'd probably be covered with Bandaids.  Hey, did they even have those back in the day?  I don't think so.  Torn scraps of cloth were some of the best first-aid tools available.

Stoves?  Some of the richer pioneers had them bought from the local mercantile.  They were huge and weighty pieces that took up a lot of room, but a vast improvement over bending over the hearth to stir soups and stews suspended over the fire.  With a turn of a knob, we have flames.  Even their modern stoves required wood, and that meant a lot of chopping and carrying to keep the supply plentiful.

Iced tea anyone?  How often have you sat down to enjoy a nice cool drink during the summer?  I live on iced TN sweet tea, but I'd have to learn to forgo the ice in most cases if I was a pioneer.  Since I wasn't sure how the ice was kept, I borrowed this from Wikipedia:

Ice houses are buildings used to store ice throughout the year, commonly used prior to the invention of the refrigerator. Some were underground chambers, usually man-made, close to natural sources of winter ice such as freshwater lakes, but many were buildings with various types of insulation.  During the winter, ice and snow would be taken into the ice house and packed with insulation, often straw or sawdust. It would remain frozen for many months, often until the following winter, and could be used as a source of ice during summer months.

I'm back. *smile*  You didn't even know I was gone, did you? All the thought of iced tea made me thirsty, so I took a break in blogging and went for something to drink.  As I gazed around my awesome kitchen at the automatic coffee pot, the blender, the toaster, and all the other things that have spoiled me rotten, I opened the refrigerator and noticed the bottled water inside.  Although a few pioneers enjoyed a new-fangled indoor water pump, most had to trek to the well or river for water.  Something as simple as bathing for the early 1800 dwellers, consisted of several trips and buckets full for them in order to fill perhaps the same tub they used for washing the clothes.   Boy, do we have it made or what?

The next time I start to feel sorry for myself, I'm going to pull out my history reference book and remind myself of how far we've come.  As I sit here, blogging on my computer, I wonder how a pioneer woman would react to the Internet and the extended and immediate "reach" we have today.  You know, it often took months for the Pony Express to deliver the mail.  Loved ones might not hear from their families for years.  We can reach out and touch someone in seconds.  How great is that?

Oh, and just to give you a taste of how one might incorporate some of the housekeeping chores in a book, I invite you to share this except from Prairie Peace, my debut novel.  It's listed with all my books, on my Amazon page.

Excerpt:

It was apparent why the previous occupants had left behind the odds and ends of furniture. The table and bench were made out of wood so rough, Cecile imagined picking splinters from her behind if she sat. A chair with a broken rocker rested in the corner next to the fireplace, and beside it was an old crate where a rusty lantern perched precariously, most likely to provide light for anyone brave enough to risk the broken chair.

What had she done to herself? She pictured her mother’s living room with its matching furniture and crisp pleated draperies and fought hard to hold back tears. Her mother had never really prepared Cecile for being a wife or housekeeper, requiring she only do minimal chores around the house. She surveyed the challenge set before her. This was going to be a learning experience she'd have to endure on her own. Her days of being spoiled and pampered had ended.

She took a deep breath and dug in, trying to wash away the accumulated dust and grime.
What she hated most was dealing with the various prairie creatures that thought this was
their home. “Oh dear…I hate spiders,” she proclaimed as one skittered across the floor.

Wiping a trickle of sweat from her forehead, she glanced around the room for something
to shuttle the insects outside, and spied an ancient broom in the corner by the fireplace.
Although missing most of its straw, there was still enough left to use. Looking at the dirt
and grime around her, she wondered why the broom looked so worn. How long had it been since anyone used it?

The floor had dried and warped with age, and the cracks between the planks had widened
to reveal the ground below. Cecile vigorously swept several times, trying to get some of the dirt and dust to fall through. When she finished, she wore most of it. Tossing the broom across the room in disgust, she peered at herself through the cracks in the mirror, barely recognizing the reflection staring back. Her hair hung in unruly strands around her face, and her complexion was gray from the coat of dust. She emitted a loud sigh as the looking glass revealed the sagging and dirty mattress behind her. Who or what had slept there before? Clearly, the bedding needed a thorough beating and airing out, and it was
her glorious job to do it.

The tears welled again. She prodded herself to stay busy, believing work would keep her from dwelling on her disappointment. With great effort, she dragged the mattress outside, and for some reason, every whack of the broom against the old tattered thing made her feel better.

She struggled to get it back into the house and onto the bed frame. She refused to call Walt for help because he was busy outside, cleaning the yard and hauling junk from within their poor excuse of a barn. Silly emotions and false pride were not about to get the best of her. She wanted Walt to be proud of her, and she was determined to make the best of this, even if it killed her. Besides, she was tired of sleeping on the hard ground with nothing but a thin blanket between her and the dirt. Even this ugly mattress had some degree of appeal.

As soon as they moved into the house, she’d cover it with the blankets from the bedroll and bring in the pillows still stowed in the wagon. Using the barn as shelter left her worrying the whole thing would fall down and crush them to death in their sleep. So many boards were missing from the walls, she was amazed it remained standing at all.

Note:  The piece of "mirror," hanging haphazardly and cracked, was mentioned in a previous paragraph.