Do you keep a journal or diary? If so, how long have you kept it?
I’ve kept a journal since age fourteen. It’s not always a daily journal. While in college, I wrote in it once a week with a recap of things I’d done, watched, and read. Sometimes life gets busy, and I revert to weekly entries instead of daily ones. It’s fun to read back over old journals and see what I was doing on this date years ago.
Mollie Dorsey Sanford kept a diary from 1857 to 1866, from the time she was eighteen years old and heading for the frontier with her parents and siblings, all the way to when she was a married mother of two and ran out of time for journaling. She left us an amazing record of many walks of life on the American frontier, including homesteading, gold-mining, and military life in the West during the Civil War.
But who was this remarkable woman?
Mary “Mollie” Dorsey was born in Indiana in 1838. Her family moved to Indianapolis in her childhood, where her grandfather ran a well-respected school. Mollie and her seven younger siblings attended there, and Mollie helped her mother at home with household tasks and childcare. By age eighteen, Mollie had received and rejected her first marriage proposal. That year, her father moved the family west, following relatives who had gone to Nebraska Territory and sent back glowing reports about all the opportunities to be found there. Mollie began keeping a journal so she could accurately remember the trip, which she wrote about with mixed feelings. On the one hand, it sounded like a wonderful new adventure, but she felt sad to leave her friends and extended family behind in Indiana.
All ten members of the Dorsey family spent four days on a train to get from Indianapolis to St. Louis. There, they boarded the steamship Silverheels, which took them on a ten-day trip down the Missouri River to Nebraska City. They settled on land Mr. Dorsey bought along the Little Nemaha River, built a small cabin, and set about homesteading. To bring in extra money while they started their farm, Mr. Dorsey traveled to Nebraska City to work as a carpenter whenever he could.
Women were scarce on the frontier, and Mollie received an offer of marriage within weeks of arriving. She turned the man down, along with many others to follow, and focused on learning to grow a garden, milk a cow, and kill the occasional trespassing rattlesnake. When the farm struggled to provide adequately for the family, she moved to Nebraska City and found work as a seamstress to help make ends meet. She had a secondary motive for the move: she had taken a liking to a New York native, Byron Sanford, a blacksmith and wagon maker. Mollie liked that Sanford had real, useful skills, unlike so many idle young men back in Indianapolis.
Mollie married Byron in 1860. They soon set out for Colorado and the gold strike at Pike’s Peak. At first, Byron found work in Denver, but the boom town was so wild and unruly the Sanfords moved to a mining camp near Boulder after Mollie got accosted in her own home and had to beat off her attacker with a broom. Byron worked as a blacksmith, and Mollie earned money cooking food for hungry miners. As the only woman in the camp, she felt lonely.
Byron and Mollie moved around Colorado for a year, trying to find the right job and a place to call home. Mollie gave birth to their first child, but it did not live long. By then, Mollie had some woman friends to comfort her during her grief.
When the Civil War erupted in 1861, Byron joined the Union Army and was commissioned as a second lieutenant in Company H of the First Colorado Volunteers. He fought in both the Battle of Apache Canyon and the Battle of Pigeon’s Ranch, both in New Mexico, and received an official commendation for bravery.
Being an officer’s wife entitled Mollie to a home in the officer’s barracks at Camp Weld in Denver. She gave birth to a son named Albert there in 1863. Once the war ended, Byron and Mollie lived in Denver, where Byron worked at the Denver Mint for forty years. Mollie gave birth to a daughter named Dora in 1865, and stopped keeping her diary soon after. But their son studied to be a mining engineer at the University of Denver and worked as an assayer. Their daughter married a Colorado National Guard officer.
Mollie left her diaries to a grandson, and he had selections printed in magazines in the 1920s and ‘30s. Her diaries were published as a whole in 1959 as Mollie: The Journal of Mollie Dorsey Sanford in Nebraska and Colorado Territories, 1857-1866. The title is a dry mouthful, but the writing isn’t. Mollie’s voice is fresh, intelligent, funny, and insightful. It gives us a lively window into the life of a city woman who became a pioneer, a military wife, and a mother. There were many frontier women like Mollie Sanford, and her diaries help us understand what their lives were like far better than a history textbook ever could.
