Daughter of the Regiment: Memoirs of a Childhood in the Frontier Army, 1878-1898
Daughter of the Regiment: Memoirs of a Childhood in the Frontier Army, 1878-1898
Synopsis
Excerpt
MARY LEEFE LAURENCE, called "Mamie" by her family, offers the reader a rare view into the domestic and family aspects of the post--Civil War frontier army. Her memoirs are the most extensive and detailed recollections of an army child of the nineteenth century, focusing on the period of her sixth to twenty-sixth year, roughly 1878 to 1898.
In 1944 she began the original manuscript, entitled "A Rainbow Passes," at Port Washington on Long Island, New York, completing it just prior to her death in the summer of 1945. Her friend, Major General Guy V. Henry Jr., wrote the preface to the manuscript. Like her, Henry spent his childhood in the frontier army, the son of a famous cavalry officer of the Indian Wars. Like her, he left his own vivid memoirs, although in much briefer form.
The odyssey of the manuscript written by Mary Leefe Laurence offers an insight to the sometimes oddly circuitous path of the historical process. Shortly after her death, Stanley Vestal began to edit the typescript for publication. Vestal, professor of writing at the University of Oklahoma . . .