The Wide Northwest: Historic Narrative of America's Wonder Land as Seen by a Pioneer Teacher

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U of Nebraska Press, Jan 1, 2005 - History - 286 pages
Leoti L. West (1851?1933) had longed for the opportunity ?to be west and grow up with the country.? In 1878, at the age of twenty-seven, West left her Iowa home to teach at a new school in Washington Territory. Undertaking the two-week journey alone, the young teacher arrived in a Northwest that was still very much a pioneer territory. The school that West opened was one of the first in the area and soon attracted students from all over the Northwest. By the end of West?s first term, her original class of seventeen had grown to nearly one hundred students housed in a small schoolroom. In 1881 the school was officially named the Colfax Academy. West taught in Washington for more than fifty years and influenced thousands of graduates. ø West?s reminiscences first appeared in the Spokesman-Review as a series of pioneer sketches that were later collected and published as The Wide Northwest. Her memoir of her adventures details not only an impressive teaching career but also the pioneer experience of a woman in the late nineteenth century. Brenda K. Jackson?s introduction for this Bison Books edition provides insight into the experience of female educators during the era.

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Contents

Section 1
v
Section 2
xvii
Section 3
9
Section 4
14
Section 5
25
Section 6
37
Section 7
47
Section 8
62
Section 14
112
Section 15
121
Section 16
132
Section 17
139
Section 18
146
Section 19
163
Section 20
174
Section 21
207

Section 9
70
Section 10
79
Section 11
88
Section 12
97
Section 13
104
Section 22
215
Section 23
225
Section 24
234
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About the author (2005)

Josephine Corliss Preston was the superintendent of public instruction for the state of Washington. Brenda K. Jackson is an assistant professor of history at Belmont University. She is the author of Domesticating the West: The Re-creation of the Nineteenth-Century American Middle Class(Nebraska 2005).

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