Christine C. (chris9212) reviewed An Army Doctor's Wife on the Frontier: The Letters of Emily McCorkle FitzGerald from Alaska and the Far West, 1874-78 on
Emily FitzGerald was one of the first white women o live in Alaska, less than a decade after the United States purchased it from Russia. In 1874 she accompanied her husband to Sitka, where he was surgeon at an army post. These letters to her mother in Philadelphia describe the rigors of raising children and making a homem on the frontier, the social life of an army wife, and the long waits for steamers to bring mail and supplies. After the FitzGeralds were transferred to Fort Lapwai in present-day Idaho in 1876, Emily witness the Nez Perce War. Her letters during this period reflect the terror and dread she shared with other families at an isolated army post under siege. First publish nearly a century after they were written, the letters of Emily FitzGerald are a valuable and vidid record of Day-to-day life on rugged northern and western frontiers by a young mother and military wife who acquired the strength and courage of a true pioneer woman.
