Recollections of a handcart pioneer of 1860
Subtitle: a woman's life on the Mormon frontier
By: By Mary Ann Hafen.
Edition: Bison books ed.
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Published: 2004
Place of publication: Lincoln
Language: eng
Number of pages: 100
Subjects: Hafen, Mary Ann, 1854-; Mormon pioneers -- Utah -- Biography.; Mormon pioneers -- Nevada -- Biography.; Frontier and pioneer life -- Utah.; Frontier and pioneer life -- Nevada.; Mormon handcart companies.; Utah -- Social life and customs -- 19th century.; Nevada -- Social life and customs -- 19th century.; Utah -- Biography.; Nevada -- Biography.
Genres: Biography.
Description: "In the summer of 1860 the author of these recollections, Mary Ann Stucki, then six years old, walked beside her parents' handcart from Florence (Omaha), Nebraska, to Salt Lake City. The family, converts to Mormonism, had left their comfortable home near Bern, Switzerland, to make the long journey to the Mormon Zion. Nearly eighty years later, Mary Ann Hafen published this account of her life, giving us an unparalleled, candid, inside view of the Mormon woman's world." "Called to go with the Swiss company to settle the "Dixieland" region of southern Utah - a hot, dry, inhospitable land - Mary Ann's family lived in thatch, dugout, and adobe houses they built themselves. While still hardly more than a child, Mary Ann cut wheat with a sickle, gleaned cotton fields, made braided straw hats for barter, and spun and dyed cloth for her dresses. Always sustained by her faith in the church, she took part in a millenarian scheme that failed - a communal order - and entered a polygamous marriage, raising almost single-handedly a large family." "Mary Ann Hafen has left an authentic, matter-of-fact record of poverty, incredibly hard work, and loss of loved ones, but also of pleasures great and small. It is a unique document of a little-known way of life."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Originally published: Denver, 1938.
Table of contents: title: From Switzerland to Utah; title: Pioneer life in Southern Utah; title: A new home in Nevada.