Jeana’s Journal

Recently I have been reading letters and journals of women on the western frontier in the nineteenth century. One particular journal, kept by 22-year old Angie Mitchell, contains many lively narratives of her first-hand experiences while boarding with different families. Angie was hired as a school teacher and her living accommodations were provided by the local residents near where she taught in Prescott, Arizona.

The events she describes are amazing to our twenty-first century sensibility, but probably not unusual in the time and place in which she lived. I have been thinking much about some of them and I think you may enjoy them too. From time to time I will share a few of them with you. This particular journal is found in So Much To Be Done, edited by Ruth B Moynihan, Susan Armitage, and Christiane Fischer Dichamp, 1990.

Here is the first:

“October 26, 1876. Worse and more of it: Baby grew easier about 1 & we went to sleep—Mrs. Hook slept with me & she snored & snorted so & then tossed around like a restless child that my sleep was of short duration.

While I was meditating about sliding out on the floor with a quilt, there arose a great barking of coyotes & bellowing of cattle some ways up the mountain side above us. It awakened us all and in a minute we heard the hoof beats of the panic stricken cattle & their bellowing grew nearer.

We sprang out of bed & rushed in a body for the door, sure that the stampeding herd would rush straight thro’ our frail house & probably crush us as well. Everyone grabbed the first thing they could that would aid in frightening them. Alice & I were first out & each had a sheet so we ran round to the side the cattle were coming from & faced them & indeed it was a sight.

Not more than a hundred yards away, tearing along in that manner peculiar to a badly frightened herd of stampeding cattle & making straight for our house in their mad rush for the creek & safety—were about 100 head of stock. We took a firm hold of our sheets, flapped them up & down & ran forward yelling as loud as we could while directly behind us came Mrs Harer & Mrs Hook each beating a tin pan with a stick & yelling & behind them Clara & Belle with an old tin can & a spoon for Belle and a big white apron & an old tin horn of Abbie’s for Clara, each swelling the noise as well as they could & Clara wildly waving her apron in one hand.

Such an awful pow-wow was too much for the cattle & they swerved passed each side of us & our house, so close they nearly grazed us and went on tearing thro the bushes & rushed across the creek—then we returned out of breath & badly scared to find Janie lying just outside the door in a faint with her baby wrapped in a blanket close to her. Her strength was not sufficient for the shock. We brought her to & took care of baby & built up a little fire & got hot water to make tea for Jane & at last subsided into our ‘peaceful beds.”

This morning we find that the cattle demolished our brush shade that we fixed to wash under—trampled our one tub & the wash bucket & bench & a stool we had there into a shapeless mass of sticks and battered tin.

Also that a skirt of mine & some things of Alice & Clara’s have been either trampled under the wreck of a clump of bushes we used as a ‘clothes line’ or carried in fragments away on their horns. Thank Heaven the damage is no more serious—five minutes of inaction on our part & awful would have been the results….”