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Show -16- primitive mining camp on the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains. Mrs. Edgerton, who had spent much of her life in a large house and had seldom been without domestic help, now found herself confined to a small log cabin with a leaky dirt roof and inadequate heating. In Ohio she had enjoyed the company of a circle of relatives and friends, but she found few respectable women in Bannack. It was, almost exclusively, a town made up of men who had come alone to the goldfields, intent on making their fortunes and then escaping back to civilization in "the States." To make matters worse, Sidney Edgerton was gone a good part of the time. In January of 1864 he left the territory and returned to Washington, D.C., to lobby for the dividing of Idaho Territory. He left his wife, then pregnant, alone, with only their thirteen-year-old daughter, an unfamiliar doctor, and Edgerton's niece to help her through the pregnancy and all that it involved. In July, when Edgerton finally returned, he arrived as governor of the new Montana Territory. Mary Edgerton was now Montana's first lady, but the distinction did not mean very much, for her husband's promotion to the governorship did little to change their lifestyle. During her months on the plains and two years in Bannack, Mrs. Edgerton wrote a series of letters to her family in Ohio, vividly describing her journey over the plains and her life on the frontier. She was a witness to many of the important developments in Montana's early history, and her letters home provide additional information about these events. But much more important than that, they furnish a fresh and intriguing insight into a lady's life on the mining frontier. An introduction and editorial notes have been provided by Dr. James L. Thane, Jr., a native of Montana, now chairman of the History Department, Black Hawk College, Moline, Illinois. The editors of Utah, the Mormons, and the West Series are pleased to announce the publication in a soft cover of A Mormon Mother, by Annie Clark Tanner. The book sells for $5.00 and all orders should be sent to the University of Utah Press, Building 513. Because this first Volume in the Series is now out-of-print, it has been reissued in a new format. The book has received laudatory reviews since it first came to the attention of the public. It has been acclaimed by Dale L. Morgan, noted western historian, as "one of the monuments of Mormon literature." |