| The women of Greeley seem to me to have great spirit and
cheerfulness. Yet I felt that with their new, strange, wild
surroundings, -- the illimitable vastness of earth and sky,
-- with new labors and hardships and deprivations and
discomforts, -- with the care of all the ditchers than cometh
upon them daily, -- they must be discontented, unhappy,
rebellious; and I tried to win from them the sorrowful
secret. I gave them to understand that I was a friend to the
sex, ready at any time, on the shortest notice, to lift my
voice against the wrongs and disabilities of women; that I
deeply felt for wives and daughters whom tyrant man and
dragged away from comfortable Eastern homes, neighborly
cronies, and choice Gospel and shopping privileges. But the
perverse creatures actually declared that they were never so
happy and so healthy as they are here, right on the edge of
the great American Desert; that they life in the sure hope of
soon having more than the old comforts and luxuries around
them; that, in short, the smell of the "flesh-pots of Egypt"
has gone clean out of their nostrils. In fact, I find Colorado women everywhere, on mountain or plain, in town or ranch, singularly courageous and cheery, and I think that the cause in great part lies in their excellent health. The pioneer women of Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois had in their time to endure similar hardships and privations, with ague and fevers thrown in. The spirit shook with the body; when the liver gave out, the heart soon failed. |