A Woman's Story of Pioneer Illinois
by: Tillson, Christiana Holmes; Milo Milton Quaife (ed.)

Hardcover. Chicago, The Lakeside Press, 1st, 1919, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, dark green cloth stamped in gilt, top edge gilt, 137 pages. Tight, attractive copy of this early "Lakeside Classic," the annual keepsake presented by this printer/publisher to friends and clients starting in 1903. Illustrated with two portraits of the author. So many pioneer stories were written at the request of a child or grandchild. What makes Christiana Tillson's humorous memoir different was her background. Tillson's story records the reactions produced upon a refined New England woman by an environment at once predominantly southern and wholly frontier. Her youth in 1822 and her parting from all that she had known in the East were common of many later Western migrants. But when she and her husband went out to try their fortunes, the "West" was what we today call the Midwest. It was still a wild, dangerous, and uncertain place to try to make a future. Clean, bright copy.