Woman Who Lost Him and Tales of the Army Frontier, The.
McCrackin, Josephine Clifford. The Woman Who Lost Him and Tales of the Army Frontier. With an introduction by Ambrose Bierce. Pasadena, CA: George Wharton James, 1913.
8vo.; eight black and white plates; hinges tender; marbled paper-covered boards stamped in black and blue; spine lightly darkened.
First edition of the last of three collections of McCrackin’s stories. The first, Overland Tales, had been published in 1877, and Another Juanita, in 1893. Ambrose Bierce contributed a complimentary two-page introduction, and George Wharton James republished his extensive biographical sketch, which had originally appeared in The National Magazine. BAL 1130 (Bierce); Smith, American Fiction 1901-1925, M-92.
Josephine Woempner (1838-1920) emigrated from Germany with her family at the age of eight, settling in St. Louis. After her 1864 marriage to a Lieutenant in the United States Army, she was compelled to make several journeys in the United States that would provide material for her later short fiction. Their last trip together was by mule-drawn wagon from Kansas to Arizona, after which she left her husband, whose steadily increasing paranoia had made him a danger to her. She fled to San Francisco, where she had some relations, and supported herself by teaching German and writing. Bret Harte was so impressed by her submission to his Overland journal of her impressions of Washington during the war that he not only published it, but encouraged her to tap into the literary potential of her other travels, especially in the Southwest. Her stories began appearing regularly in Overland, Harper’s, and other periodicals, and were collected in three volumes beginning in 1877. Merrit Cross notes,
While Harte’s influence can be seen in her placing of melodramatic events in realistic Western settings, the theme of her tales reflects her own experience; most of her tales reflect her own experience; most of her heroines have fled bestial mates and must earn a living in a society which views with suspicion a woman separated from her husband. Mrs. Clifford had little literary talent, but in some of her frankly autobiographical sketches her feeling for desert scenery and her enthusiasm for military life overcame the literary conventions by which she was dominated. (NAW II, p. 455)
In 1882 Clifford married McCrackin, a southerner who had made a fortune on a gold mine and nurtured political aspirations. When they lost many precious redwoods on their ranch in the Santa Cruz mountains to fire, she turned her attention to conservation efforts—especially to the need for legislation governing lumbering practices. An editorial she wrote in 1900 was widely circulated, and generated a crusade that led to the organization of the Sempervirens Club of California, later the Save-the-Redwoods League, with McCrackin as Vice-President-at-large. “As a result of the club’s lobbying efforts,” Cross reports, “the state purchased 3800 acres of redwood forest in the Big Basin region of Santa Cruz County and established California Redwood Park” (NAW II, p. 456). The following year, McCrackin became the founder and president of the Ladies’ Forest and Song Bird Protective Association. After her husband’s death a few years later she was given a bungalow by a Santa Cruz woman’s club, and joined the editorial staff of Sentinel, where she remained an active journalist and conservation advocate until her death.
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