The Colonel's Lady on the Western Frontier: The Correspondence of Alice Kirk Grierson (Women in the West)

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 lift 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 extraordinarily candid correspondence, which has now been edited by Shirley Anne Leckie. Alice was the wife of Benjamin B. Grierson, a major general in the Civil War who won fame for a raid that contributed to the fall of Vicksburg. Her letters begin in 1866, when her husband reentered the army as colonel of the legendary "buffalo soldiers" of the Tenth Cavalry, and end with her death in 1888. During these years she chronicles the criticism experienced by her husband in commanding one of the army's two black mounted regiments and the frustration when he is repeatedly passed over for promotion, in part because he advocated a more humane Indian policy. All the while her position requires her to assume heavy responsibilities as a hostess. Her letters are just as unflinching in describing the daily hard-ships of raising a family at frontier posts like Forts Riley, Gibson, Sill, Concho, Davis, and Grant, where two of her seven children died young and two suffered from manic-depressive psychosis. They are extraordinary for their insight into nineteenth-century attitudes toward birth control, childbearing, marital roles, race relations, and mental illness.

Biographies & Memoirs

Grierson, Alice Kirk

Community & Culture

University Of Nebraska Press

<p>Contains frontier recipes of the period from 1850s to late 1880s with some of Mrs. Grierson's household hints &amp; home remedies. Old recipes in one color, new tested versions of them in another. The original recipes are printed exactly as they were written in her book with old spelling forms and punctuation.Some of the culinary adventures described by other officer's wives of the period are included in an attempt to give the reader a glimpse into the kitchen of a frontier army wife.</p>

An Army Wife's Cookbook

Cookbooks, Food & Wine

Cooking Education & Reference

Western Natl Parks Assoc

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