There is no record of any individual heroines among these women of the pioneers of western civilization, unless it be of purely local limit, nor do we even know much of the story of these women in the mass. We hear no little of the sufferings, privations, and perils of the men who beat back the Indian from his hunting grounds, chased the grizzly bear to his lair in the Rocky Mountains, and turned barren prairie into fruitful field; but of their wives and daughters, who bore the larger share of those privations and suffered more terror in those perils, we are given no record save in the most general terms. Perhaps the chroniclers who tell in terms of admiration of the endurance and courage of the pioneers and forget to mention those of their wives unconsciously pay the latter, and womanhood through them, the greatest of homage, in taking such qualities for granted in women and, hence, too natural to call for record. However this may be, we know, from acquaintance with the general facts, that with the ever-encroaching frontier of our country's western limit of habitation there always advanced the foot of woman, braving all perils in her love for her husband, her children, and her home. It was the presence of this gallant band, as well as their courage and endurance, which assures us of one of the most predominant traits of the most distinctive American womanhood in those days. That trait is the love of home. It was to seek a home, a habitation and spot of ground that should be their very own, that the pioneer and his wife dared the perils of the wilderness; and in this search the wife was at least as instrumental as the husband. To have a home was the ambition of every American woman of those times; and, if she could not compass this by ordinary methods, she had recourse to extraordinary ones. If she could not find a home among the habitations of her fellows, if her good man could not give to her this one desire of her heart, then she urged her husband forth into the barren fields of the unknown West, where danger and death might await them, but where at least there was promise of the home,--the Mecca of her every wish.