In conditions arising from strife woman has but little place. She may indeed be present, and even be a part of the conditions which are inevitable in times of conquest; but she is there only as an accident, not as a requisite. The elimination of the influence of woman from the trend of present civilization would be fatal to all approach to any worthy goal; but in the time of the beginnings of our country's story woman was a hindrance rather than a help to progress, since by her presence and the consequent anxiety and by her weakness in physical prowess she enfeebled the fighting powers of the garrison or village. Even so, she had her part, and an honorable one, in the events which established white dominance in America; but it was one that was necessarily subordinate in the eyes of the chroniclers of those times, and so we hear but little of women in the flush of our country's dawn. It is not to be questioned that in the first colonies planted by England in the New World there were women--perhaps nearly as many as men. We are apt to forget, by the way, that Virginia was originally settled by the Spaniards under Menendez, the perpetrator of the terrible massacre in Florida by which his name is best remembered, and that the Latin races, both Spanish and French, long anticipated the English in colonization of our country. It is quite certain that in all these early Latin colonies there were women and that these bore no inconsiderable part in the events which were trending, though sometimes by devious paths, to the establishment of Caucasian empire in America; but their names are unknown to us and we are even ignorant of their place in the history of their time. The story of southern settlement, as far as this has any effect upon the present, begins for us with the settlement of Roanoke Island by Sir Walter Raleigh's ill-fated colony. The tale of its mysterious disappearance is too well known to call for recapitulation here; but before that sudden and final ending of its story we have chronicles which tell us that among these pioneer pilgrims were women, mostly wives of the men settlers, who bore their part in the burden and heat of the day,--and those days were toilsome and full of peril,--as well as their more active lords. Also to that lost colony belongs the honor of having reared the first alien child born on American soil, the forerunner of the race that was to make that soil its own,--Virginia Dare, the little maiden whose passing was as mysterious as her coming was ominous. The first of the enormous army of the conquering palefaces who were to overrun the land like locusts, she passed away into the mysterious silence of the woods as the standard bearer of the advance, leaving her name to be a shadowy record for all future ages and the very embodiment of the spirit of romance that was in the story of the subjugation of America. Had she lived the normal life of the woman pioneer, her memory would have lacked something of romance; but her