Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888

Here is a woman who faced down wolves with nothing but a horse named Rollo and a scream. Frances Roe was twenty-three years old when she married a West Point officer in 1871, and what followed was nearly two decades of frontier garrisons scattered across what would become Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, Utah, Montana, and Wyoming. These are her letters home to upstate New York, and they constitute one of the most vivid, unpretentious records of Army life on the American frontier ever written. Roe writes about dances with cavalry officers, the tedium of remote forts, the grief of buried children, and the strange beauty of the Plains in winter. She is never self-pitying and rarely sentimental. She is funny, practical, and brave. The letters were published in 1909, but they read like something written yesterday by someone too interesting to be ignored.