William Worthington Fowler (1833-1881) was an American prose-writer; born in Middlebury, Vt.. He was the author of 'Ten Years in Wall Street' (1870); 'Fighting Fire' (1873); 'Woman on the American frontier' (1877); 'Twenty Years of Inside Life in Wall Street' (1880). Fowler notes that the history of our country "is the record mainly of men's achievements, in war, in statecraft and diplomacy. If mention is made of woman it is of queens and intriguing beauties who ruled and schemed for power and riches, and often worked mischief and ruin by their wiles. "The story of woman's work in great migrations has been told only in lines and passages where it ought instead to fill volumes. Here and there incidents and anecdotes scattered through a thousand tomes give us glimpses of the wife, the mother, or the daughter as a heroine or as an angel of kindness and goodness, but most of her story is a blank which never will be filled up. And yet it is precisely in her position as a pioneer and colonizer that her influence is the most potent and her life story most interesting. "The glory of a nation consists in its migrations and the colonies it plants as well as in its wars of conquest. The warrior who wins a battle deserves a laurel no more rightfully than the pioneer who leads his race into the wilderness and builds there a new empire. "The movement which has carried our people from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean and in the short space of two centuries and a half has founded the greatest republic which the world ever saw, has already taken its place in history as one of the grandest achievements of humanity since the world began. It is a moral as well as a physical triumph, and forms an epoch in the advance of civilization. In this grand achievement, in this triumph of physical and moral endurance, woman must be allowed her share of the honor. " Contents: 1. A Woman's Adventures on the Platte River. 2. On a False Trail, and What it Led To. 3. Over a Precipice, and Down a Thousand Feet. 4. All Alone on the Face of the Mountain. 5. Mrs. Hinman's Extraordinary Situation. 6. Swinging Between Heaven and Earth. 7. What a Loving Wife Will Do. 8. Living or Dying Beside her Husband. 9. A Night on the Edge of a Precipice. 10. Out of the Jaws of Death. 11. The Two Fugitive Women of the ChappareL 12. A Secret Too Dreadful to be Told. 13. The Specters of the Mountain Camp. 14. Maternal Sacrifice and Filial Love. 15. The Cannibals of the Canon. 16. The Insane Hunter and his Victims. 17. A Woman's Only Alternative. 18. Female Endurance vs. Male Courage. 19. Mrs. Donner's Sublime Devotion. 20. Dying at her Post of Duty.
