Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 3.djvu/845

845 governments of their respective territories on republican principles. Writing of herself and her labors, Mrs. Duniway says:

I was born in Pleasant Grove, Tazewell county, Illinois, October 22, 1834, of the traditional "poor but respectable parentage" which has honored the advent of many a more illustrious worker than myself. Brought up on a farm and familiar from my earliest years with the avocations of rural life, spending the early spring-times in the maple-sugar camp, the later weeks in gardening and gathering stove-wood, the summers in picking and spinning wool, and the autumns in drying apples, I found little opportunity, and that only in winter, for books or play. My father was a generous-hearted, impulsive, talented, but uneducated man; my mother was a conscientious, self-sacrificing, intelligent, but uneducated woman. Both were devotedly religious, and both believed implicitly that self-abnegation was the crowing glory of womanhood. Before I was seventeen I was employed as a district school teacher, received a first-class certificate and taught with success, though how I became possessed of the necessary qualifications I to this day know not. I never did, could, or would study when at school.

In the spring of 1852 my father decided to emigrate to Oregon. My invalid mother expostulated in vain; she and nine of us children were stowed away in ox-wagons, where for six months we made our home, cooking food and washing dishes around camp-fires, sleeping at night in the wagons, and crossing many streams upon wagon-beds, rigged as ferryboats. When our weary line of march had reached the Black Hills of Wyoming my mother became a victim to the dreadful epidemic, cholera, that devastated the emigrant trains in that never-to-be-forgotten year, and after a few hours' illness her weary spirit was called to the skies. We made her a grave in the solitudes of the eternal hills, and again took up our line of march, "too sad to talk, too dumb to pray." But ten weeks after, our Willie, the baby, was buried in the sands of the Burnt River mountains. Reaching Oregon in the fall with our broken household, consisting of my father and eight motherless children, I engaged in school-eaching till the following August, when I allowed the name of "Scott" to become "Duniway." Then for twenty years I devoted myself, soul and body, to the cares, toils, loves and hopes of a conscientious wife and mother. Five sons and one daughter have been born to us, all of whom are living and at home, engaged with their parents in harmonious efforts for the enfranchisement of women.

The first woman suffrage society ever formed in Oregon, was organized in Salem, the capital of the State, in the autumn of 1870, and consisted of about a dozen members. Col. C. A. Reed was chosen president and G. W. Lawson, secretary. This little society which maintained a quiescent existence for a year or more and then disbanded without ceremony, was, in part, the basis of all subsequent work of its character in Oregon. In the winter of 1871 this society honored me with credentials to a seat in the woman suffrage convention which was to meet in San Francisco the following May. My business called me to the Golden City before the time for the convention, and a telegraphic summons com-