to the queen of the revel. There was needed some cataclysm
to rescue American womanhood from the peril which she was approaching;
and it was well for her that that cataclysm came at need, however
terrible it may have been in the coming.

Yet even in those days the social world did not represent all that was
best in American womanhood or even all that was most noteworthy. Therein
alone, it is true, were to be found those whose individuality became
famous; but in other fields there labored many American women who were
unknown to all but those of their immediate environment, and yet whose
work was of national importance. Steadily, even while the butterflies of
society danced at rout and revel in the East, the western frontiers were
being pushed further and further toward the great ocean that had crept
round the feet of Balboa, first of white men to stand upon its shores.
Kentucky was no longer "the West"; it had sent a president in Jackson, a
great senator in Clay, and it was recognized as a sister state even by
the proudest of its eastern fellows. But beyond the Mississippi still
stretched a country which was practically a _terra incognita_, and which
still awaited reclamation from the rule of the savage and the wild
beast. Into this waiting region strode many a determined explorer with
axe and rifle, bent on winning a home from the grasp of the wilderness;
and with him went his wife to give grace to the home when it should be
won and "make the wilderness blossom like a rose." They were survivals,
these women, of the primitive type of American womanhood: strong, grave
of countenance and bearing, caring little for pleasure or recreation,
putting duty before all things in their lives as in their esteem, almost
masculine in determination and courage. To their hands the rifle was
more familiar than the distaff, for upon them often depended the safety
of home and children when their husbands were afield or slain; yet they
were feminine in many ways of the best and fitted to become the mothers
of a sturdy race of warriors and tillers of the soil.

There is no record of any individual heroines among these women of the
pioneers of western civilization, unless it be of purely local limit,
nor do we even know much of the story of these women in the mass. We
hear no little of the sufferings, privations, and perils of the men who
beat back the Indian from his hunting grounds, chased the grizzly bear
to his lair in the Rocky Mountains