Politician or Diplomatist?
By Grace Raymond Hebard
(University of Wyoming)
The peaceful operation and the universal recognition of the XIX Amendment of our Constitution no longer commands the attention of the public. The hectic days of platform oratory are of the past. Universal suffrage has successfully met the challenge and women have adjusted themselves to the right of franchise more universally and intelligently than the most sanguine of supporters of woman suffrage had dared to hope.
Yet in face of these facts, it might be of interest to hear of the initial event, be it of a politican or diplomatist, that gave to the women of the Territory of Wyoming the right to vote, for it was in that territory at its first legislature in 1869 that unlimited franchise came to the women of Wyoming.
During the early days of the operation of the Union Pacific Railway into the West there came to Wyoming, from Peru, Illinois, a mother with husband and three sons. Wyoming was then largely an unknown and untried western frontier. The frontier woman's destination, South Pass City, was to be reached only by stage after leaving the railroad. To this gold mining camp situated in the thin fringe of civilization in the early days of the year 1869, came Esther Hobart Morris, bringing with her a breath of freedom, democracy and equality, her inspiration largely based on the eloquent and forceful appeals made by Susan B. Anthony for "equal sufrage." These convincing appeals had been heard and absorbed by Mrs. Morris after hearing Mrs. Anthony in New York and Illinois.
Into this remote mining camp of South Pass, hundreds of miles removed from railroads, surrounded by the crafty redmen, the highway robber, and the howling wolves and crying coyotes, came "the mother of woman suffrage for Wyoming." Mrs. Morris had an original style and out of the common order of conversational speech. Her son once said that his mother's abundant store of genial wit carried her through many a trying situation; she had courage to do what would have been easier to avoid; she scorned the static position adopted by the average woman; she was dynamic; she talked plain Anglo-Saxon—so easy of understanding.
In this typical mining camp were a handful of those people who enjoyed and relished conversation around the snap-
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