Tough women, pioneer style
Mary Mann Hamilton’s life was an endurance test and Trails of the Earth is her remarkable story. It’s a rare first-hand account of a 19th-century pioneer’s life set in the rural south — and it’s an inspiring read.
Hamilton was fearless. After her mother and brother died suddenly of pneumonia, she left her familiar community and work at a rooming house in Arkansas to seek adventure in the undeveloped south. Her partner in this ambitious plan was her new husband, Frank Hamilton, a footloose British immigrant with a mysterious past.
Frank worked in the lumber trade and his able wife gladly assumed the roles of timber camp cook, farmer and mother to nine children (four perished).
The family eked out a modest living at various timber camps on the Mississippi Delta. The couple and their surviving children lived harmoniously together in cramped quarters without basic services. Hamilton slept in a tent, hauled her own water, grew vegetables and provided camp meals from an old wood-stove for the rough men who cleared the region.
This compelling autobiography is fastpaced, detailed and fascinating. Modern women will marvel at Hamilton’s gruelling daily schedule. The stoic housewife worked from dawn to midnight. She made breakfast, lunch and dinner for her big family and their numerous boarders, hoed cotton, took on extra sewing for $1 per dress, disciplined her children and taught them how to read.
There are valuable lessons to be gleaned from Hamilton’s pioneer code of conduct, such as the importance of neighbours: “You can live without money, or could in those days, but not without friends. I always looked for friends and not for trouble. Trouble was something I found without looking for it,” she wrote.
Frank was a binge drinker and this weakness contributed to his family’s chronic instability. Mary Hamilton was the one constant in the family. She faced down cyclones, floods, fires and legal troubles — all with the calm assurance of a woman of unerring faith.
Read Trials of the Earth. You’ll be inspired by the sensible pioneer’s capacity to cheerfully adapt to adverse circumstances. Mary Hamilton thrived in trying conditions that would break most people’s hearts. Ex-urbanite Patricia Dawn Robertson lives in a 1925 Eaton’s catalogue house in Wakaw, Sask., where she writes for a living and maintains a massive garden.