In many historical accounts of United States expansion when settlers moved west observers framed the rhetoric in terms of conquest.  Historians described people going west to carve out a new existence or to conquer the land, while other observers noted that migration was because of economic necessity. While the reasons for going west were many: some went to get land; some went for freedom from oppression; some went to search for wealth, and some, just for the thrill of the adventure, all settlers faced similar challenges. 

The mountains and plains of the American West presented a formidable barrier not easily penetrated from the east.  In the exploratory years only fur trappers and prospectors took a living from the Rocky and Cascade Mountains ranges of western United States and Canada.  The Great Plains, which stretched south from Texas to the northern reaches of Saskatchewan, offered different challenges to settlers.  Miles of rolling hills covered in grass beckoned to the farmer.  The soil, however, resisted the plough, and wood for building houses or fences was scarce.  In the summer the rain fell either infrequently (drought) or too heavily (flood) and in the winter blizzards and ice storms made travel impossible and life precarious.  Most of the rivers were full of quicksand and sandbars, shallow and unnavigable for the most part.  And over this vast and often uninviting land the wind blew incessantly. 

Stories of the pioneer’s struggle against the natural elements permeated American Western literature and film.  In 1925 a Texas regional writer, Dorothy Scarborough, anonymously published a novel of West Texas entitled, The Wind.  Eastern critics applauded the work, calling it “one of the distinctive novels of the year,” and “a piece of masterly realism that rings true.”[1] Readers in West Texas, however, called it “spurious natural history,” unfair even to the prairie dog.  They complained that the author was woefully cruel to the main character and to the people of Sweetwater.  Texas critics went on to declare:  “We have another wait before us for the epic of the cattle days of West Texas: for that is something that `The Wind’ is not.” [2] In 1928, actress Lillian Gish bought the film rights to the novel and starred in a silent film version of the story.  Both the novel and the film presented a graphic and bleak picture of the violence inherent in the weather and geography of the American western plains and man’s struggle t live on them.

            The novel told the story of an impressionable young woman from Virginia who came to West Texas in 1886 searching for a new life, only to be destroyed by the natural elements of the untamed frontier.  In a rebuttal to her Texas critics, Scarborough pointed out that they had failed to make the distinction between “a novel and a historical treatise,” while she had captured the “essential truth of the time and the place.” “[The] book,” she asserted, “does not represent the East writing ignorantly of the West.  It was written by one who was born and brought up in Texas and to whom West Texas is no strange land.”[3]  Scarborough was not trying to create the epic story of West Texas; she was telling a tale based on her mother’s unpleasant experiences in Sweetwater.  The novel, the silent film based on it, and the historical record of the Western Plains all presented a picture of the violence of nature and its effect on the people who were determined to live there.

Scarborough used the young Easterner, Letty Mason, to tell her story of Texas because the devastation of the drought and other hardships of frontier life were particularly forceful images when described through the naive and uninformed perception of a female tenderfoot.  “I was trying,” Scarborough wrote, “to show the woman’s side of pioneer life, because most of the Western fiction had been about men and their struggles.” [4]                   Dorothy Scarborough

Women have often been excluded from the history of the American West.  Recent historians who tried to reinsert them found that lofty but distorted rhetoric and stereotypical images often replaced solid research of frontier women experiences.  Most of the images of western women have come to modern audiences through popular fiction and Hollywood films.   For early historians it was more convenient to refer to “gentle tamers”, “sun-bonneted helpmates”, and “hell-raisers” than to confront the reality of women and their roles in the settling of the American West, and there are plenty of examples of western pioneer women who embodied the three categories.[5]

Women such as Abbie Bright, who moved from Indiana to Iowa alone and unmarried to teach school in her brother’s town and then to move on to do the same in Kansas.  She left a brief diary detailing some of her journeys.  Or Harriet Fish Baskus, who married her school sweetheart and followed him west to Telluride Colorado where she lived in the mining camps near the Japan Flora Mine.  She and her growing family followed her assayist husband through the mine fields from Colorado to British Columbia, Nevada, Montana and even Australia.  She survived avalanches, starvation, whooping cough, the flu epidemic and the death of her third child and husband. And then there was Elizabeth Bradshaw who emigrated from England and traveled across the Great Plains to settle in Utah.  She also left a diary that detailed the hardships of that journey, “conditions grew steadily worse.  Clothing and shoes were in rags.  . . . The suffering was intense and one morning we heard sobbing and discovered that in the tent next to mine a lady had awakened to find her husband and little child dead, one on each side of her.”  The last part of her story recalled being rescued by Brigham Young who sent oxen teams and food to see them through the last portion of their trip, and finding their eventual farmland in Bountiful. And finally women such as Lydia Leaming whose family crossed the plains from Iowa to Oregon in 1866. Leaming’ s journal told the story of that trip.  She wrote of Indian raids, flooded rivers, stinging insects, poisonous water, and everyday accidents.  By the time the group arrived at The Dalles only about one-half of the families survived the trip.[6]  Scarborough wrote to celebrate those women, the ones whose stories got lost in obscurity. Scarborough not only included women in her story but made them central to the tale.  Western life was hard for both men and women, and ultimately people succeeded or failed.  The stories of those who simply tried are often what the historian chronicles and the novelist, and filmmaker dramatizes.

 The Wind, both as novel and film, in comparison to historical accounts of western life, offers a portrait of the violence of western weather and the suffering caused by the many droughts that plagued the region during the later years of the nineteenth century. Scarborough begins Letty’s story by declaring:   “The wind was the cause of it all.  The sand, too, had a share in it, and human beings were involved, but the wind was the primal force, and but for it the whole series of events would not have happened.” [7] Letty Mason, orphaned and destitute, comes west to live with her Cousin Beverley’s family.  Having led a sheltered life in Virginia, she is ill prepared for the geographic harshness and social isolation of West Texas.  On the train between Fort Worth and Sweetwater she meets Wirt Roddy, a gambler and the human villain of the story.  Roddy fires her imagination with stories of the hardships of the West–dead cattle, failed ranches, social isolation, and above all, the “demon wind.”  He tells Letty that the wind is evil as it “comes laarupin over the prairie like wild mustangs on a stampede.  .  .  ‘tain’t human.  It’s a devil.  Seven devils sometimes, when it goes rampagin’ round.”[8] The land she can see from the train window appears even harsher to Letty than Roddy’s discourse on the weather, and her first glimpse of Sweetwater depresses her more.  The town is little more than a collection of unpainted rude structures: no trees or grass to soften the landscape, only sand, everywhere. 

            Scarborough’s description of the weather, the geography, and Letty’s despair reinforces the picture of desolation and hopelessness of West Texas at the height of the drought of 1886.  Sweetwater, Texas, was less than ten years old when the drought hit the area in1885-87.  The Texas and Pacific Railroad controlled most of the land in the area and established the town of Sweetwater on a portion of land officially recorded as “Section 47.”   Established in 1877, the town got its post office and official name in 1879.  In 1880 it became the county seat for newly organized Nolan County. The first buildings in the new county seat were a house and a saloon, both built from lumber brought in by the railroad in June of 1881.  By 1883, Sweetwater had five saloons, and the Nolan County population stood at 640. Sweetwater grew and by 1887 the town could boast of several churches, more saloons, hotels, a saddle and harness store, dry goods store, livery stable, schools, one private bank, and a newspaper. County population grew as well, and peaked in 1884 at just a little over 1,230.  Unfortunately, the blizzards and drought years greatly affected the growth of the area, and by 1890 the county population had dropped to only 614.[9]                                                                                                                            

            Nothing about her introduction to Sweetwater encourages Letty.  The trip from town to the ranch is long and cold, the landscape is uninviting, and the ranch is a disappointment:  “Letty watched the prairies stretch out before her, vast reaches of sand covered with bunch grass.  .  .  .  The house was a frame shack.  .  .set in an arid waste with no fence around it.”[10]

Even though her cousin Bev welcomes her, his wife Cora, does not.  Letty cannot fit into the household because she has no practical skills to offer the family.  With some encouragement Letty might have developed the tools to survive as other immigrants had.  Observers of the Texas frontier noted that even the daintiest ladies acquired the skills they needed:  “Delicate ladies find that they can be useful and need not be vain.  .  .  .  Many latent faculties are developed.”[11]  Letty is more of a burden than a help to the capable Cora.  Cora is a true woman of the West; she not only survives on the frontier, she thrives there. “Such a magnificent woman!  Tall, like some goddess of the prairie, deep bosomed, with noble softly flowing lines like a statue; erect, instinct with vibrant magnetic life!”   She is what Texas emigrant writer, Mary Austin Holley, called the “Texas Diana.” — “the same bold mind which in different circumstances would make such a female a polished lady, would lead her, here, to acquire the accomplishments of wood‑craft.”[12]

Letty tries to please Cora, but nothing she does is good enough.  The struggle with Cora and the monotony of ranch life play on Letty’s fears, and she becomes even more timid and withdrawn.  Just when she despairs of ever enjoying a civilized activity again, a neighboring family invites everyone in the county to a dance.  Letty’s description of the dance mirrors the experiences of actual pioneers.  Fanny Beck, who moved to West Texas with her family in the 1870s, remembered the all-night dances she attended: 

“Many a night I have spent out on some lonely ranch dancing all night because the distance was too great to get back to town and there was no provision for sleeping at the ranch.  .  .  .  There was no love‑making, no drinking, no foolish and questionable conversation.”[13]

The dance offered only a short rest from the reality of prairie life.  The refined lady, more comfortable at a dance than on a ranch, had no place on the frontier because only the capable survived.  The useless were often objects of ridicule.  A cowboy from the Texas Panhandle complained that his sister‑in‑law, a genteel lady transplanted to the West, was an “extravagant women from the improvident South.  .  .  [who] would make doggies of three poor calves just because she wanted cream and cake with her afternoon tea.”[14]

            Cora despises Letty for being useless and yet envies her for being young and pretty.  She wants the young girl out of her house, and the only way to achieve this would be to marry Letty off.  Even on the frontier the “true” vocation for a woman in the nineteenth century was marriage and motherhood. Letty resists all proposals But, as a winter storm known as a “blue norther” blasts the frail ranch house, driving Letty into a panic, she finally agrees to accept local cowboy, Lige, if he will protect her from the wind.

Marriage was often the catalyst that brought women to the western frontier.  Some of the more famous mail order brides were the Washington territory Mercer Girls.   “In 1864 eleven ladies (referred to in history only by the title given them that referred to the gentleman who arranged their journey) embarked upon a courageous endeavor. They left their comfortable homes in cities in the east to travel to the far western shores of the North American continent, arriving in a new town called Seattle. “Historians have done well in educating us about Asa S. Mercer, the man who lent his name to this group of ladies.”[15] While in Seattle, he helped to construct the Territorial University and upon its completion was appointed as its first president. According to history it was Asa’s idea, at a time when men out numbered women 9 – 1, to go back east to seek ladies of quality and refinement to help balance the male/female ratio of the region. Mercer took this group of ladies, via a steam ship, from New York to Aspinwall/Colon, Panama then across the Isthmus by train where another ship was waiting to take them to San Francisco. From San Francisco they traveled by way of a lumber bark to Seattle, arriving May 16th, 1864.[16]

But what do we know of the ladies? Who were they? Where did they come from? What made them leave their homes and families for all the unknowns and uncertainties of the Pacific Northwest? And most importantly what became of them once they were in Seattle?   In most cases not much – but recently Washington State historians have gone searching for their stories.

 Here are three of them: In 1864, Josie and Georgia Pearson made the trip to Washington Territory with Asa Mercer accompanied by their unemployed and in ill father, Daniel Pearson. He left his wife Susan, son Daniel and youngest daughter Flora behind in Lowell, Massachusetts, until he and his older daughters were settled. After her arrival in the Washington Territory Susan Josephine “Josie” was hired to teach school in Coupeville, on Whidbey Island. On August 24, 1864, a little over three months after her arrival, she died suddenly while walking to her home after teaching school. She was buried in the Sunnyside cemetery at Coupeville. After her sister’s death Georgianna, “Georgia, and her father moved into the Admiralty Head lighthouse on Whidbey Island where he became the lighthouse keeper and she his assistant. On October 2, 1867

Georgia married Charles Townsend Terry. The wedding took place in the lighthouse parlor. By this time Georgia’s mother, brother and younger sister had joined Georgia and her father on Whidbey Island. (They made the trip to Washington Territory with Asa Mercer’s second group in 1866).  Georgianna and Charles Terry had five children, all born in Coupeville. Georgia died in Coupeville, Washington Territory, on April 23, 1881 and was buried in the Sunnyside cemetery.  The third Mercer Girl researched was Sarah Cheney. Sarah graduated at the head of her class at Lowell High School and attended Maplewood Institute in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. After her arrival in Seattle she was engaged to teach art and music at the University, but soon moved on because she only had three students. Hearing that there was a need for teachers in Port Townsend, Washington, she applied and was hired at once.  At a dance at the military post in Port Townsend Sarah met Captain Charles Willoughby, a widower with a 3-year old son. They were married Oct 5, 1865. She and her husband had four children. Sarah died in Port Townsend, Washington Nov. 7, 1913. Services were held at the St. Paul Episcopal Church where Sarah had been the organist for over 50 years. [17]

The Mercer girls may have found a good life in the Washington territory, but Scarborough’s heroine Letty was not so fortunate.  Letty moves into Lige’s shack after the wedding but her new home on the prairie is more primitive than her cousin’s house.  The two-room shack had rough planks for walls but was more conventional than a dugout, or “Soddy” the makeshift dwelling that many Texas settlers lived in before they built more permanent homes.  Some settlers found them depressing and distasteful but other pioneers such as Ella Elgar Bird Dumont considered the whole experience a grand adventure.  Dumont described her prairie accommodations almost with fondness:  “The ranch house consisted of two large dugouts with no furniture whatever, except bedsteads and some benches.  . . . No one expected anything better.  The wealthiest cowmen’s families lived in dugouts when they first came here.”[18]

In the novel, as in historical Sweetwater, the weather took as great a toll on the people as it did on the livestock and crops.  Seasoned settlers struggled and newcomers had little chance of survival.  Kansas pioneer Sarah Everett wrote to her sister‑in‑law in New York.  “I am a very old woman,” she wrote, “[m]y face is thin sunken and wrinkled, my hands bony withered and hard‑‑I shall look strangely I fear with your nice undersleeves and the coquettish cherry bows.”  Sarah Everett was only twenty‑nine when she wrote those words.[19]

Scarborough’s depiction of the devastated land and dismal conditions was fairly accurate, and her description of the drought-stricken cattle as “gaunt, cadaverous beasts. . . .  tortured by heel‑flies that nagged them constantly, bawling in distress, searching everywhere for food and water,” was mirrored in the official state and federal agricultural reports. The damage she described was only the latest in a long chain of disasters for the ranchers and farmers of West Texas.[20]  The winter of 1885 was the severest on record.  Fences had to be cut to prevent the buildup of snow, and cattle pastured on open ranges drifted hundreds of miles in search of grass and shelter. 

Ninety percent of the sheep in Nolan County died and a large percentage of the cattle perished as well.  The winter of 1885 became known as the great “die up of ’85.” After April of 1885 no rain fell in the area for over two years. County statistics reported to the Texas Department of Agriculture, record that by 1887 the county had lost 93 percent of its total crops to the drought which followed the blizzards.   County wide cattle deaths at the height of the drought in 1887 totaled 129,962. [21]

            Texas historian W.C. Holden noted that the drought of 1886 was a “landmark year in the history of West Texas.”  Settlers, he wrote, often referred to things that happen “before the drought” or “after the drought,” much the way a Southerner dates events in terms of the Civil War by saying “before the War” and “after the War.”  The dry spell created the impression that Texas was a desert plagued by wind and drought, an image that was hard to live down. Rivers and creeks dried up and cattle died by the thousands.  “People began to leave the county. . . .  Their credit was gone, there was no work, no sale for what they had, their families were hungry and the prospects were growing more dismal all the time.”  Ranchers and farmers who could not dig wells to irrigate simply left the land, often leaving behind signs like the one on the door of a house in Blanco County:

            250 miles to nearest post office; 100 miles to wood;

            20 miles to water; 6 miles to hell.  God bless our home!

            Gone to live with wife’s folks.[22]

When the rains came again to the western prairies it was too late for many ranchers.  Men and women suffered together, but differently.  The men saw the losses in terms of long hours on the range, dead cattle, and failed farms, but the women saw the loss more personally.  It was as though the men lost things and the women lost themselves.  Women like Julia Gage Carpenter wrote of their frustration and fears in daily diaries:  “This is awful country and I want to live East. . . .  Frank did not come home.  I stayed in the house all alone overnight . . . . dreadfully, dreadfully forlorn.  Can’t stand being alone so much.” [23]  Or Maggie Brown who wrote in desperation to her sister in Virginia, asking for help:  “We have no money at all.  Dr. Brown is in debt for what we had to get to eat.  He is almost in rags and I am no better.”  Her sister, shocked by Maggie’s letters and a picture she had sent, drafted this frantic appeal to their father: “She is as much broken as an old woman and she is not middle aged.  . . . I am afraid she will die if she does not come home.”[24]

            Letty could have written these entries, for her story resembled Julia Carpenter and Maggie Brown’s realities. Near the end of the novel, Letty finds herself alone with the villain Roddy as a “Blue Norther” whirls around the shack.[25]  She rails at him for having put the fear of the wind into her mind and though he apologizes, the damage has been done.  As Letty frantically pleads with him, a blast of wind hits the house and blows open the door.  “Half swooning with terror of the invisible, the unearthly, Letty flung herself into Wirt Roddy’s arms, and clung around his neck as a drowning person would.  “The Wind!  The Wind!  Don’t let the wind get me!”  “I won’t!” he said hoarsely, as his arms closed round her.”[26]

Letty’s final destruction is caused by the man who had inspired her fear of the wind and from the wind itself.  Wirt Roddy is able to seduce her by playing upon her fear of the wind as the storm rages outside the cabin, but in the morning the horror of her betrayal, fear of Lige’s reaction, and the social consequences of marital infidelity drive Letty over the edge.  She orders Roddy out of her house at gunpoint, and when he tries to take the gun away from her, she shoots him.  Panic-stricken, she buries his body in the sand drift beside the barn but the body will not stay buried.  Unable to face what she has done; Letty flees out onto the prairie to her doom:

There was no mound at all by the wind‑break!‑-only bare ground, and a dead body of a man lying there, .  .  .  So the wind was determined Lige should know!  .  .  .  She had known all along that the wind would get her! . . . No use to fight anymore!  She would give up.  .  .  .  With a laugh that strangled on a scream, the woman sped to the door, flung it open and rushed out.  She fled across the prairies like a leaf blown in a gale, borne along in the force of the wind that was at last to have its way with her.[27]

Letty was a proper lady but she was a failure as a pioneer.  She did not possess the skills she needed to survive in the West and she never learned them.  She had no support system.  Other women would not, or could not, help her.  Like so many women who found themselves alone on the frontier, Letty experienced a social and physical isolation that drove her farther into despair, and the wind finally claimed her.  For Letty, the wide expanse of the West Texas prairie was as confining as the bedroom for the unnamed narrator in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’ s “The Yellow Wallpaper.”[28] Both women are victims of the psychological pressures exerted on them by their environment and cultural mores.

In his criticism of the novel, Sweetwater newspaperman R.C. Crane takes Scarborough to task for the last scene.  He complains that the only reference he can find to such an incident was the story of an immigrant woman whose husband accidentally shot himself and died on the trail.  With no one to help her, she dug his grave in the loose dirt with a butcher knife.  The next spring some of the dirt blew away and a passersby found a foot protruding from the grave.  The wife, Crane maintained, never had to stay around and see the corpse and then go crazy on the prairie.[29]

Scarborough defended her description of the power of the sand from firsthand experience:  “I have seen the sand drift enough for a body to be buried in it.  I’ve seen it!  And I’ve seen it swept away by the wind in a few hours, too.  Yes, in the Sweetwater section.”[30]

The images of despair and grinding hardship on the Plains and the violence of the weather were also the major themes of the 1928 silent film based on Scarborough’s novel.  The film, starring Lillian Gish as Letty, presented an unusual project in many ways.  Gish read the book, found it intriguing, and after some “arm-twisting” convinced Metro‑Goldwyn‑Mayer to produce it.  Filming the movie on location in the Mojave Desert in temperatures of near 120 degrees Fahrenheit was difficult for cast and crew.  Gish suffered nearly as much as her character Letty had. She wrote about the experience, saying:  “Working on the Wind was one of my worst experiences in film making.  Sand was blown at me by eight airplane propellers and sulphur pots were also used to give the effect of a sandstorm.  I was burned and in danger of having my eyes put out.  My hair was burned by the hot sun and nearly ruined by the sulphur smoke and sand.”[31]

The film visually captures Letty’s despair and the forlorn isolation of the West Texas prairie, and Gish gives a moving portrayal of Letty’s descent into near insanity.  The film uses all the usual visual imagery of the Western, but the physical landscape; the wind and the sand overpower the usual cliché pictures of steadfast cowboys, sturdy horses, good women, and dastardly villains.  The movie version, unlike the book, had a “happy ender” [Scarborough’s term].  The studio executives found the final cut of the film too dark and depressing.  Gish had just released The Scarlet Letter, another movie with a tragic ending, and the distribution department of M‑G‑M felt that the public would not accept The Wind if the heroine died.[32]  Because the primary function of this film was to deliver the story to the audience visually, the filmmakers were not concerned with preserving the naturalistic determinism of the novel.  In the cinematic version Lige and Letty were reunited to pursue a successful marriage, and Roddy’s body stays hidden in the sand of Sweetwater. 

Like the novel, the film is told from Letty’s point of view, presenting a picture of the West colored by the perception of an inexperienced young woman who allowed the harsh reality of Western ranching life in the 1880s to overwhelm her.  The hostile Western elements embodied by the prancing stallion Letty imagines coming down from the clouds remain central to the plot.  In the novel Letty was isolated and destroyed by the elements, but in the movie version she and Lige were reunited and faced the elements together.  The film’s artificial happy ending did not really allow Letty to conquer her fears; it only seemed to postpone the inevitable failure.  As the film faded to black, Letty and Lige embraced each other while the wind and the sand continued to assail them.             The 1928 film never received the acclaim that both Gish and Scarborough thought it would, possibly because harsh reality may not have appealed to film audiences of that era. 

The depressing scenes of the mid-1880s drought depicted in The Wind seem to be fairly accurate.  Rivers and creeks dried up and cattle died by the thousands and  writers such as J. Frank Dobie told about the effects of extreme dryness of that era.  They pointed out that a drought could not be measured only in terms of dollars and cents, but had to counted in the effects “upon the inner life” of the pioneer.  At the height of the great drought of 1886‑87, the Nueces River stopped running and only small water holes remained.  As the grass disappeared the cows began to die.  A rancher named George West told his ranch hands to cut the horns off of every dead steer they found and to pile the horns next to his woodpile.  Before the drought broke, West had collected over three thousand horns, and this tally did not account for the number of animals who had died in the brush and whose carcasses had not been found.  “George West used to sit at night on the great mound of horns and scan the sky for a sign of rain.” Almost as an afterthought, Dobie adds, “On all sides of his ungrassed land other land‑dwellers, women as well as men were watching for signs.” No journey, Dobie wrote, no magnificent landscape or great city, can “mean more to an eager traveler than the change felt by a man of drought‑perished soil when rains at last fall upon it.”[33]  A possible reason for Sweetwater’s adverse reaction to Scarborough’s novel and Gish’s film could be local pride and community attitudes formed during hard times. In face of relief efforts, Holden noted, families with the greatest need often refused help because they did not want to be considered objects of charity. At the height of the 1880s drought, community boosters reacted with hostility to anything that would reflect negatively on reputation, heritage or land sales.[34]

What makes both the novel and the film versions of The Wind so powerful has little to do with the quality of the literature or the cinema.  The novel is sentimental and maudlin, and the film is visually harsh and uninviting.  The Wind is important because it was a woman’s story and one of the few Western stories to question realistically the popular Western Myth.  It depicts the boredom and the failure that many pioneers experienced instead of providing the popular image of the hero riding heroically off into the sunset.  Scarborough’s novel asked, “How could a frail, sensitive woman fight the wind?  How oppose a wild, shouting voice that never let her know the peace of silence?”[35]  Thousands of frontier women answered with the testimony of their lives.  Despite the hardships, women as well as men moved west, their experiences mirroring a pioneer poem: 

I took my wife out of a pretty house

I took my wife out of a pretty place

I stripped my wife of comfortable things

I drove my wife to wander with the wind.[36]

For the most part, in American literature and films the woman on the frontier is weak and in need of protection. Historian Susan Armitage observed that in the United States “the frontier myth is a male myth, preoccupied with stereotypically male issues like courage, physical bravery, honor and male friendship.” (need note)  Women did go to the American West and became an integral part of the settlement process.  They were also part of the frontier myth, albeit sometimes a hidden part.  Because American pioneers usually saw the land as an adversary, fictional characters like Letty, and real pioneers like Dorothy Scarborough’s mother were often doomed to vainly struggle against the harshness of the frontier only to be lost in the howling of the wind.

---

            [1]“Anonymous to R.C. Crane,” Scarborough Papers, The Texas Collection, Baylor University, Waco, Texas, (4A283) , all further citations will be noted as the Scarborough Papers.

            [2] “Resident of West Texas Comments on the Local Color of ‘The Wind’, Dallas Morning News (November 22, 1925).

            [3] “Anonymous to R.C. Crane,” Scarborough Papers, 4A283.

            [4] Scarborough Papers, 4A289.

            [5] Joan M Jensen and Darlis A. Miller, “The Gentle Tamers Revisited: New Approaches to the History of Women in the America West,” Pacific Historical Review, 49(May 1980), 178-79

            [6] Ibid

            [7] Dorothy Scarborough, The Wind (Austin:  University of Texas Press, 1925, 1979, 1986), 1, 2.

            [8] Ibid., 24.  All spellings are Scarborough’s.

            [9] For a history of Sweetwater and the surrounding county see E.L. Yeats and Hooper Shelton, History of Nolan County, Texas, (Sweetwater: Shelton Press, 1975).

            [10] Scarborough, Wind, 54, 67.

            [11] Jensen and Miller, 178-79.

            [12] Mary Austin Holley as quoted in Ann Patton Malone, Women on the Texas Frontier:  A Cross-Cultural Perspective (El Paso:  Texas Western Press, 1983), 18.

            [13] Fannie Beck quoted in Texas Tears and Texas Sunshine:  Voices of Frontier Women, ed. Jo Ella Powell Exley (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1985), 186.

            [14] As quoted in Beverly J. Stoeltje, “A Helpmate for Man Indeed, The Image of the Frontier Woman,” Journal of American Folklore 88 (Jan-Mar 1975): 30.  A “doggie” is a term for motherless calf.

            [15] Mercer Girls

            [16] Mercer Girls

            [17] Mercer Girls

            [18] Ella Elgar Bird Dumont, An Autobiography of a West Texas Pioneer, Ella Elgar Bird Dumont, ed. Tommy J. Boley (Austin:  University of Texas Press, 1988), 44.

            [19] Sarah Everett quoted in Annette Kolodny, The Land Before Her:  Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860 (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 174.

            [20] Scarborough, Wind, 263. 

            [21] First Annual Report of the Agricultural Bureau of the Department of Agriculture Insurance, Statistics and History 1887-88. L.L. Foster, Commissioner (Austin:  State Printing Office, 1889), 170. LV.

            [22] W.C. Holden, “West Texas Drouths,” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, XXXII 2 (October 1928):  105-106.

            [23] Julia Gage Carpenter quoted in Elizabeth Hampsten, Read this Only to Yourself: The Private Writings of Midwestern Women 1880-1910, (Bloomington Indiana University Press, 1981) 187.

            [24] Maggie Brown and Amelia Jane quoted in Lillian Schlissel, Byrd Gibbens and Elizabeth Hampsten, Far From Home: Families of the Westward Journey, (New York: Schocken Books, 1989) 146-48.

            [25] A “blue norther” is a Texas term to describe an intense cold front that moves rapidly into an area.  It is characterized by high winds, and an extreme and rapid drop in temperature.  Often it is accompanied by freezing rain, sleet, or snow.

            [26] Scarborough, Wind, 311.

            [27] Ibid., 336-37.

            [28] Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, ed. Joyce Carol Oates (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1992), 154-169.

            [29] Crane, Dallas Morning News, (November 22, 1925).

            [30] Scarborough Papers, “Anonymous to R.C. Crane.”

[31] Lillian Gish, with Ann Pinchot, Lillian Gish:  The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me

(Englewood Cliff:  Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1969), 292.

            [32]Gish, The Movies, 293.

            [33] . Frank Dobie, Cow People (Austin:  University of Texas Press, 1981), 177, 179-80, 193.

            [34] Ibid., 115.

            [35] Scarborough, Foreword to The Wind, xvi.

            [36] Ibid., 3-4, poem identified as a “Benét Poem” quoted in Walker D. Wyman, Frontier Woman:  The Life of a Woman Homesteader on the Dakota Frontier, Retold (n.p:  University of Wisconsin, River Falls Press, 1972), 8.