Early years

Mary Hallock was born November 9, 1847, in Milton, New York, of English Quaker ancestry. She was educated at the Female Collegiate Seminary in Poughkeepsie, New York, and the Cooper Institute School of Design for women, in New York City.

Hallock married a mining engineer, Arthur De Wint Foote, and moved to California when he took a job at the New Almaden mine near San Jose. They subsequently lived in Leadville, Colorado, Deadwood, South Dakota, Boise, Idaho (where Arthur originated a tremendous irrigation project, later completed by the US government) and then in Mexico and finally in Grass Valley, California, where Arthur installed the worlds largest Pelton water wheel at the North Star mine (subsequently becoming the manager of the mine), as Arthur pursued his career.

The couple had three children, a son, Arthur Burling Foote, and two daughters, Betty and Agnes.

Career

Along the way, Mary wrote stories and novels for publication, usually in The Century Magazine, and illustrated them with her own woodcuts and drawings. She is best known for her stories, in which, as in her drawings, she portrays vividly the rough picturesque life, especially the mining life, of the West. She also did commercial book illustrations for various authors.

Death and legacy

Mary Hallock Foote died June 25, 1938. She was 80 years old at the time of her death.

Wallace Stegner's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1971 novel Angle of Repose is directly based on Foote's letters, later published as the memoir A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West. Stegner's use of the outline of Foote's life (as well as uncredited passages taken directly from Foote's letters) was done with permission of members of Foote's family...with the provision that Stegner disguise the source...but generated some objections from within Foote's family after the novel was published. An opera by Andrew Imbrie based on the novel was performed in San Francisco in 1976.

A collection of prints by Foote is on permanent exhibit at the Boise Public Library.