Pioneer Woman

Duane's take

Here's my telling of what the official marker has to say about the Pioneer Woman of Denton County. Now, some markers give you a name, a date, a deed, something you can point to on a map and say, there, that's where it happened. This one does something harder.

It asks you to hold still for a minute and think about a whole category of human being that history has a long habit of passing right over. The pioneer woman. The unsung saint of the nation's immortals (that's not my phrase, that's carved right into the stone).

She was marking a trail in a pathless wilderness. No road, no guide, no guarantee of what waited on the other side of the next rise. And she pressed forward; unswerving courage, the marker says, and it means it; meeting each untried situation with a resourcefulness equal to the need.

Each one. Not the easy ones. All of them.

But here's what stops me cold about this particular telling. It doesn't just honor the grit. Plenty of monuments get around to the grit.

What this one says is that she brought her homeland's cultural heritage to that frontier family, and she brought it with a glad heart. Think about what she left behind to do that. Think about what she carried forward anyway.

And then, delicate spiritual sensitiveness, the marker calls it, she took the dullness of routine and the loneliness of isolation, two things that could hollow a person out entirely, and she illumined them. With beauty. With an awareness of her own value to civilization, even when civilization was a long way off and not particularly paying attention.

The marker was placed in 1936, and it bears the name Jessie H. Humphries, the one who saw fit to put these words down and make sure they lasted. Unsung saint of the nation's immortals.

I'd say someone finally got around to the singing.

What the marker says

Marking a trail in a pathless wilderness, pressing forward with unswerving courage, she met each untried situation with a resourcefulness equal to the need. With a glad heart she brought to her frontier family her homeland's cultural heritage. With delicate spiritual sensitiveness she illumined the dullness of routine and the loneliness of isolation with beauty and with awareness of her value to civilization. Such was the pioneer woman, the unsung saint of the nation's immortals. Jessie H. Humphries