Calico Chronicle
by Betty J. Mills
1985 - Texas Tech Univeristy Press
ISBN 0-89672-128-0
Calico Chronicle is the source book for teachers, students, historians, costumers, reenactors, or history buffs searching for costume history of the Texas frontier and the American West – an area which has had scarce documentation, verbal or visual. Author Betty J. Mills has fitted together priceless pieces of the past found in excerpts from letters, diaries, oral histories, historic journals, and even police blotters, to compile an account that reveals much about the lifestyles of frontier women. Containing more than one hundred photographs of costumes, patterns, mail-order sources, and artist’s renderings from the Museum of Texas Tech University, Calico Chronicle also provides a glossary of terms and a chart that composites colors, prints, fabrics and general characteristics by decade form 1830 to 1910.
Keeping Hearth & Home in Old Texas
Compiled and Edited by Carol Padgett, Ph.D.
2001 - Menasha Ridge Press
ISBN 0-89732-409-9
Keeping Hearth & Home in Old Texas is a “how-to” book, but not for you. Drawn from a wealth of authentic Victorian-era books and magazines, it is like the book your great- or great-great-grandmother might have read at age 17 to prepare herself for the etiquette of courting, to learn how to conduct herself in public, and to learn what would be required of her during marriage. Later, she might have read the same book through all over again, for ideas about how to arrange the parlor and how to direct her children’s playtime. It’s also the book she would have grabbed off the shelf the first few times she needed to butcher and prepare a hog, make cologne clean her finest church silk, or make a syrup to treat her baby’s nagging cough. Finally, she could depend upon it to provide sure-fire recipes for the most common edible dishes – and disease remedies – of the day.
The Colonel’s Lady on the Western Frontier The Correspondence of Alice Kirk Grierson
1989 - University of Nebraska Press
ISBN 0-8032-7929-9
The modern woman who tries to juggle private and public roles with equilibrium will discover a spiritual ancestor in Alice Kirk Grierson. The colonel’s lady spent most of her life at army outposts on the nineteenth-century western frontier, where she faced the problems of raising a large family while fulfilling the duties of a commanding officer’s wife. Fortunately for history, she left a large and extraordinary candid correspondence, which has now been edited by Shirley Anne Leckie.
I Married a Soldier
by Lydia Spencer Lane, with an Introduction by Darlis A. Miller
1987 - The University of New Mexico Press
ISBN 0-8263-0934-8
From 1854 until her husband’s retirement in 1870, Lydia Lane crossed the Great Plains by wagon seven times, traveled nearly 8,000 miles, and became accustomed to tours of duty that required the family to move at least every six months. The mother of three children born on the frontier, Lane provides a pleasing account of f the domestic side of Army life. Although she chronicles important facets of military life, she also raises issues of interest to women’s history, such as giving birth on the overland trail, health care and the raising of young children, and the independence of frontier women. The book is also valuable because of Lane’s description of Baylor’s invasion and her comments on James Magoffin, Kit Carson, and General H. H. Sibley.
Interwoven – A Pioneer Chronicle
by Sallie Reynolds Matthews
1982 - Texas A&M University Press
ISBN 0-89096-123-9
Sallie Reynolds Matthews wrote Interwoven so that her children and their children would know how their family and Lambshead Ranch legacy grew on the Texas frontier. Far beyond her modest intentions, the book became a classic soon after its original publication in 1936.
As daughter, sister, wife or mother of three generations of cattle ranchers, Sallie Reynolds Matthews writes from the perspective of a woman intent upon embodying the strength and gentleness required of a wife and business partner. She describes traveling by wagon through the wilds encountering Indians, and setup up housekeeping with little more than buckets, blankets, and cast-iron cookpots. Tragedy and illness often visited the Interwoven Matthews and Reynolds families, but those who settled the Clear Fork of the Brazos River – the Lambshead range – put down roots that tornadoes, droughts, Indians, and disease could not dislodge. As her memoirs so clearly show, Sallie Reynolds Matthews had an intelligence, warmth, and zest for life that nourished her family through difficult times.