6 minute read
Mary Hallock Foote
A Cultural Icon In Boise, Idaho
BY MARY ANN ARNOLD AND DR. JANET E. WORTHINGTON
—Excerpt from Mary’s letter to lifelong friend, Helena DeKay Gilder, June 1887
If you think moving to Boise offers challenges for working women today, imagine moving from the civilized East to the western frontier in1884. When Mary Hallock Foote stepped off a light livery rig in Boise with her two young children, she was already a nationally-known illustrator and a budding author who, once again, was following her husband’s career path.
Mary Hallock (also known as “Molly”) was born into a Quaker family on a farm overlooking the Hudson River in Milton, New York, in 1847. Her interests in classic literature and acquaintance with notable house guests like Susan B. Anthony and Frederic Douglas expanded her world beyond family and the educational opportunities for females of the era.
At an early age, she displayed exceptional talent for art. In 1863, she attended the Poughkeepsie Female Collegiate Institute where she received her first instruction in drawing. The following year, she enrolled in Cooper Union School of Design for Women in New York City, specializing in illustrations.
COURTESY DR. STACEY GUILL
After graduating, Mary was commissioned to provide illustrations for famous authors. Her first endeavor proved to be the widely-acclaimed illustrations for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poetical works in 1874. A New York Times reviewer declared her drawings “as full of poetry and feeling as Mr. Longfellow’s lines.”
Mary was 26 years old and a rising illustrator when she met Arthur De Wint Foote, a visionary, ambitious young engineer. They were married on February 9, 1876, in a Quaker ceremony in Mary’s Milton home, after which Arthur immediately departed for work in California. Mary followed in July. Years later, she wrote in her memoir, A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West: The Reminiscences of Mary Hallock Foote, “No girl ever wanted less to go West with any man, or paid a man a greater compliment by doing so.”
In 1877, their first son, Arthur Burling Foote, was born in New Almaden, California.
150 years ago, motherhood and career were not often referred to in the same sentence, but Mary continued to work on illustrations for a special edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. In 1879, the Footes moved again, to another dusty, frontier town called Leadville, Colorado, where Arthur pursued another mining engineering job. Mary continued illustrating, and now writing. Her husband’s engineering career required a peripatetic life, but Mary continued to transform the challenges into artistic inspiration. An 1881 trip allowed Arthur to investigate a silver mine and Mary the chance to document her exotic surroundings in sketches and travel pieces.
Pretty Girls of The West, Mary Hallock Foote
In 1881, a daughter, Elizabeth Townsend Foote (Betty) was born just as Arthur found a new venture in Boise, Idaho—a visionary plan to irrigate the Treasure Valley. By 1883, Arthur had followed the sun west again, intent on turning the arid Idaho plains green while his wife’s first novel, The Led-Horse Claim: A Romance in a Mining Camp came into print. The next year, Mary and her two children stepped off a wagon in a dusty town named by a French Tapper who exuberantly exclaimed upon seeing an unlikely proliferation of trees in the desert. “Les Bois! Les Bois!” Boise, Idaho.
A recession forced the family to move upstream on the Boise River, ten miles beyond Boise, to watch over the irrigation equipment. Winter approached and Arthur designed and built his family the Stone House in the canyon that now leads to Lucky Peak via Highway 21. The $1,500 serialization fee for Mary’s second novel, John Bodewin’s Testimony, funded the project. The Stone House is memorialized in some of Mary’s illustrations, including her famed Pretty Girls in the West.
The Coming of Winter, Mary Hallock Foote
Daughter Agnes joined the family in 1886 and Mary kept writing. In 1889, the Foote family moved back to town and built the Mesa House at the site where Hillcrest Country Club stands today. Her artistic flow remained prolific, undaunted by mothering while also serving as first vice president of the Columbian Club, which recently celebrated its 130th Anniversary. This women’s group furnished the Idaho room at the 1893 World’s Fair and later secured a Carnegie Grant to build the public library in Boise.
The New York Canal project struggled during the recession and Mary’s stories, novels, and illustrations helped support the family throughout. The Chosen Valley (1892) recounts the Foote family’s experiences attempting to build an irrigation system that promised to transform Idaho into the agricultural state it is today. When the irrigation project failed to be viable, the family moved to Grass Valley, California. Mary went on to write nine more novels and penned her memoir, A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West (published posthumously in 1872). Her legacy includes 22 books and election to the National Academy of Women Painters.
Mary Hallock Foote saw the west through an artistic lens and passed a lovely glimpse on to future generations. Her illustrations offer a rare, female perspective of a rugged reality and hardships softened with beauty, talent, and resolve. The Coming of Winter, a graphite and ink drawing, is a time capsule of a bygone era that symbolizes a timeless scene between husband and wife: he with his rifle outside a rustic cabin, she in the door with a baby and washboard. Ironically, Mary Hallock Foote’s life still holds both a mirror and a high bar of accomplishment for women in the 21st century.
Dr. Janet E. Worthington, Retired Dean and Professor, Plattsburg State University of New York
Mary Ann Arnold, Retired Project Controls Engineer, Morrison-Knudsen, Inc., Boise, ID
