Lady's Choice: Ethel Waxham's Journals & Letters, 1905-1910

Rating:
Summary: Inside look at early west
Review: Ethel Waxham is, beyond doubt, absolutely charming. The story of her courtship by John Love, a Wyoming sheep baron, is the focus of these collected journal entries and letters. Their correspondence betrays an endearing, down-home, extended Western romance heavily seasoned by John's devotion, Ethel's wry humor, and the quick intelligence of both.

The two of them met in Wyoming, in 1905, when Ethel accepted a teaching assignment there. After the school year was over, Ethel left to continue her education, and subsequently took teaching assignments elsewhere in the country, adventures documented by her letters to John Love. It is evident that Ethel felt keenly the conflict between a poorly-paid, but independent career, and a more comfortable but narrow married life.

Meanwhile, John Love was apparently building a sheep empire. His adventures were of a more dangerous variety: rounding up and taming wild horses, herding sheep in the middle of Wyoming snowstorms, travelling 80 miles through horrific weather to spend a day or two by Ethel's side.

The two principals in this play are engrossing enough. However, there is a whole extended cast of characters contributing sub-plots: Ethel's close circle of college friends and co-teachers, who write to her from the four corners of the US. Their letters provide a glimpse into the lives of young, educated, intelligent, ambitious, and surprisingly (to this reader) modern women. Among them were socialists, vegetarians (Ethel herself!), suffragettes, women pursuing graduate degrees and medical degrees, women teaching in Paris or Texas or California or Illinois. It is inspiring and encouraging to be reminded that women were doing such things long before the Baby Boom generation "invented" women's lib, slowly pushing out the social and political barriers to what women could be and do.

This is personal history, however, not political, and it has all the intimate appeal of narratives which are not varnished, interpreted, collated or generalized by the historian. Peek inside the classrooms, boarding-house bedrooms, and isolated ranches where Ethel and her contemporaries lived, taught, and wrote warm missives to distant friends under dim lamplight. They are our pioneers.

Rating:
Summary: History we can all relate to....
Review: Ethel Waxham1s journals and letters (both sent and recieved) from 1905-1910 tell the kind of American story that history books mostly only refer to, and then through an editorial filter that often simplifies or glorifies them out of their true, gritty, witty reality. Waxham graduated from Wellesley College in 1905, a Classics scholar. Within a few months, and forecasting her independent spirit, she was teaching in a one-room school in central Wyoming, as far from her background as a foreground can be. Over the next five years, her mailbox serves as a kind of telescope, bringing into view the incongruous disparities of Time and Place. In the same letters are the unlikely combinations ofwindswept treeless wilderness and life in a sheepherder1s wagon in winter hard beside the railroad, telegraph, telephone, a teachers1 convention, or a fancy box of chocolates pulled from under a horse-and-buggy seat to pass an all-day ride to town. The reader is experiencing America1s adolescence, that period of intense, rapid growth in which can be seen simultaneously the Past and the Future untangling themselves. But this is only the setting. Better than in a novel, we have the person of Ethel, the woman of extraordinary observation and insight and the expressive language to share them as she is drawn into this harsh but beautiful life and world. And her counterpart, the Scottish sheep baron/rancher John Galloway Love, who reportedly knew Butch Cassidy and who thought little of riding seventy miles in a day to carry on his apparently futile, and almost completely epistolary, five-year courtship of the schoolmarm. Ethel1s college friends begin to think that she is the model for the heroine in Owen Wister1s The Virginian (1902), yet Ethel is the real thing. And unlike in fiction, where the author is chosing each narrative step, each exchange of dialogue in a calculated fashion, Ethel and John correspond over the years completely spontaneously. The letters are full of mostly inconsequential detail--a kind of literary pointilism--any one of which makes no real difference. But magically, they create portraits even truer to life than the best fiction. The reader may discover, well into the book, that he or she seems to know Ethel Waxham better than all but one1s best friends. And she is so worth knowing, both for herself and for her complex portrait of the American West at the turn of the century. This is the same John Love and Ethel Waxham, the same Love Ranch that is featured prominently in Ken Burns1s television series, The West. And it is John Love1s son, David, growing up there, who becomes the geologist profiled in John McPhee1s Rising From the Plains. For those who understand that the joy of history is the fitting together of many small pieces, Lady1s Choice is the edge and corner pieces that let you really get into the puzzle.

Rating:
Summary: Inside look at early west
Review: Excellent book covering the lifes and loves of the two major characters. Not only good reading, but a very good insight into the manners, culture and living conditions in the early 1900's.

Rating:
Summary: A Moving Collection
Review: This collection is truly wonderful. Ethel Waxham and many of her correspondents are of such intelligence, perceptiveness, spirit, and wit that they are, as John McPhee says of Ethel Waxham in the Forward, irresistable. The jounal entries and the letters make it clear that the story of Ethel Waxham's journey from Wellesley to the ranch on Muskrat creek just south of Moneta was deeper and more complex than the story of the PBS series. The endnotes are particularly good -- a story in and of themselves. I do wish there were more pictures of the ranch itself and its surroundings (even from today), "where the gray hills lie, Eternally still, under the sky," and the people, and I wish that I could know more about Ethel Waxham and the authors of the letters. I also wish that the unpublished sources were available -- as they are by "EPW" and J. D. Love, both of whom are of indisputable eloquence, they would make wonderful reading. And finally, as stated by McPhee: "I will wait impatiently for the sampler" -- the collection ends in one sense where the adventure just begins, and I long to see more of the correspondence and hear more of the story of the life at the Ranch on Muskrat Creek.

Rating:
Summary: A Moving Collection
Review: This collection is truly wonderful. Ethel Waxham and many of her correspondents are of such intelligence, perceptiveness, spirit, and wit that they are, as John McPhee says of Ethel Waxham in the Forward, irresistable. The jounal entries and the letters make it clear that the story of Ethel Waxham's journey from Wellesley to the ranch on Muskrat creek just south of Moneta was deeper and more complex than the story of the PBS series. The endnotes are particularly good -- a story in and of themselves. I do wish there were more pictures of the ranch itself and its surroundings (even from today), "where the gray hills lie, Eternally still, under the sky," and the people, and I wish that I could know more about Ethel Waxham and the authors of the letters. I also wish that the unpublished sources were available -- as they are by "EPW" and J. D. Love, both of whom are of indisputable eloquence, they would make wonderful reading. And finally, as stated by McPhee: "I will wait impatiently for the sampler" -- the collection ends in one sense where the adventure just begins, and I long to see more of the correspondence and hear more of the story of the life at the Ranch on Muskrat Creek.

Rating:
Summary: LOVE ACROSS THE AGES
Review: When John McPhee published his now-classic RISING FROM THE PLAINS, he introduced Ethel Waxham Love in the first paragraph. All through the rest of the book he interwove her story with that of her son, Wyoming geologist David Love and the geology of the Great Plains. When fan mail came rolling in, readers wanted to know more about the "slim young woman" who stepped down from a train in Rawlings, Wyoming one fall morning in 1905.
LADY'S CHOICE is Ethel Waxham Love's story. Her granddaughters, Barbara Love and Frances Love Froidevaux, have collected her writings -- journals, letters, poetry, essays, stories -- present them in combination with letters from her friends and classmates as well as from the man she would marry.

Her story begins in the Fall of 1905. She has graduated from Wellesley and spent the Summer working as an assistant to her doctor father in Denver. When she gets the opportunity to teach in a log cabin schoolhouse in Wyoming, she accepts the offer. Her first journal entry describes her journey into the wilds of Wyoming by train, stage coach and wagon. With a sure pen and a sympathetic eye she records her impressions of the land, the people and events. Her observations are those of a sharp mind (she had earned a Phi Beta Kappa key at Wellesley, specializing in Greek, Latin and French), her descriptions are those of a major literary talent.

Of one acquaintance she writes, "Mrs. Butler. . .is a little war-horse of a woman, with a long, thin husband. I'm telling you about her because she has been improving him for twenty years and it is beginning to tell on him."

Her year in this community is surprisingly eventful, considering the isolation and the seeming lack of resources. But Ethel is a resourceful person, full of imagination, the kind of person who makes things happen. She visits friends, attends church services and "sociables," and dines in local restaurants. There are dances and suppers and school entertainments. And there is John Love, the man she will marry after the five-year courtship that is recorded here.

She is enchanted by her surroundings. "The color of the white hills against the pale of the blue sky is most exquisite i the world. The cedars are gray with snow, the sagebrush white clumps of crystals. Where a long way off the sun touches the tops of the snow-covered hills there are shines a streak of silver. A whole white world was there, rising around us, as far as we could see; there did not appear to be such a thing as direction. Everywhere the whiteness, everywhere the hills. Where the stubble of the fields of the range rose above the snow,there was a shading of gold over the white. . .and when the full moon shines out of the deep dark night sky, the hills are like shining silver."

You, too, will find a lady to love in these pages. Her journal begins as she stands on the threshold of her life, emerging from the chrysalis of a protected girlhood toward the challenge of womanhood. Here she records a land, a people, a life, a love, welcoming them as unequivocably and eagerly as only the young do.

LADY'S CHOICE eclipses others of its type. It not only showcases the lady's life and the choices she made, it reveals a true literary talent and a rare human being. Wallace Stegner (ANGLE OF REPOSE, SPECTATOR BIRD, CROSSING TO SAFETY)once spoke of the "inextinguishable western hope" expressed by writers of history as they look at the world and at humanity's place in it. Ethel Waxham Love's letters and journals provide a major contribution to that hope as well as to the history and the the belles lettres of the American West.

(c)2002 Sunnye Tiedemann
(Ruth F. Tiedemann)