Page:The Souvenir of Western Women.djvu/15

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LTHOUGH the writer hereof began to see in the early '50s the need of a radical innovation in governmental affairs which should recognize the legal existence of wives and mothers, she did not, for a long time, comprehend the fundamental principle of equal rights, as embodied in the law-making power itself.

In the Territorial days, prior to the year 1859, the States of Washington and Idaho, with a large slice of Montana, comprised a component part of the great original Oregon domain. Settlements of white people were few and far between. Women were relatively scarce, especially on the ranches; and bronzed and rugged bachelors, from far and near, sought frequent relief from their o"vn household labors by mobilizing themselves at the border cabins, where mothers of young children wrestled, as best they could, with the crude surroundings of their scant environments, to provide for the daily needs of their own rapidly increasing families and the added requirements of a free hotel. With the border woman's mental vision continually expanding under the inspirations afforded by the virgin opportunities with which the new country was teeming, she found herself handicapped by a chronic condition of financial nonentity, to which no amount of laudation by the said bachelors could reconcile her reasoning faculties.

As I had been blessed with a more than usually harmonious marriage, and enjoyed the natural ability to express my ideas on paper in a somewhat