Review by Martha Quillen
Local history – May 1996 – Colorado Central Magazine
The Life Of An Ordinary Woman
by Anne Ellis
Copyright 1929
Houghton Mifflin Company paperback 1990
ISBN 0-395-54412-2
If you’re looking for a comfortable, old-fashioned Victorian tale about the folks who once lived in Colorado — The Life Of An Ordinary Woman isn’t it. Instead, this memoir by a woman who lived in the Wet Mountain Valley, Bonanza, and various other Central Colorado locations in the late nineteenth century, is a book full of presumably modern blights — like insensitive men, dysfunctional families, and negligent parents.
The back cover copy on my edition boasts, “She is not famous, she is not rich, she is not beautiful, she is not well educated. Yet she is a very great woman, one of character and endurance.”
That’s a nice, sentimental way of looking at it, but such copy refers to the author Anne Ellis, who in middle age wrote this memoir about her youth. After sixty-seven years, the book has become a classic of western history, but the young Anne Ellis in this book was not a “very great woman.” She was poor, unappreciated, and often desperate. In this book, Ellis’s chief accomplishment is survival. But all in all, that’s a lot — since it’s more than many of her associates managed.
Victorian works frequently mask reality. Victorian diaries often feature women plodding along frontier trails, worrying about backaches, cramps, and headaches, and wondering if they will make it. Then suddenly, after numerous daily entrees not even hinting at such a possibility, they spring an announcement. “Surprise, we had a son this morning, little Albert Horatio. We thank God he is well.”
By Victorian standards, pregnancy was not considered a polite topic. But such a PC sort of consciousness doesn’t burden Ellis. In many ways, her book seems to serve as a confessional for some of her youthful guilt. Ellis readily admits to dark thoughts.
She deeply resented her stepfather, who always had to have a room of his own to escape into — even though they usually lived in tiny shotgun shacks where Ellis and her mother and brothers and sisters often had to sleep in the kitchen.
Ellis resented the new siblings her mother produced, as she saw it, far too regularly. Although she later regretted it, Ellis freely admits no one in the family paid much attention as her mother lay dying at thirty-nine. There were, by then, six younger siblings to feed and clothe.
At the funeral of her first husband Ellis spent her time thinking about how grand she looked as a tragic, grieving widow. Soon afterwards, she left her two babies at home to go out dancing because she felt young and restless.
One suspects that most published diarists leave out the thoughts and actions that embarrass them, and that they tend to avoid those things that might serve to alienate straight-laced readers, but not Ellis.
At one point she writes:
By now I am expecting another baby, and am very sorry, as things are coming so hard. One day the mill catches fire, and I am the hardest fire-fighter (not to save the mill, however). I grabbed huge tubs of water and carried them up a steep path from the creek, using every ounce of strength and straining every nerve and muscle in my body each trip. Time and time again I did this, was dripping wet, my hair hanging down, and working in a frenzy. Finally I dropped, exhausted, and thought, “Well, if that don’t do it, nothing will.” No one spoke to me. The next day I felt fine, and Rosie said, with a knowing look, “Had all your work for nothing, didn’t you?”
Yes, thank God, I had. In those days I would have been a fine believer in birth control, but the older I get the less sure I feel about this. After a time I am reconciled to this child and am more care-free and happy than ever before, having reached a don’t-care state of mind.
Ellis’s life was hard, and her luck wasn’t good. In one chapter, Ellis is stranded in Nevada where strikes have crushed job opportunities. She’s weak from a miscarriage and grieving over the death of her younger daughter, while her older daughter is bedridden and recovering from diphtheria. But Ellis goes to work anyway because she feels she has to pay off the money she’s borrowed in order to send her husband back to Colorado to look for a job.
Things seldom went right for Ellis, and yet she tells her story with a surprising amount of humor. The Diary Of An Ordinary Woman is easy to read, often funny, always compelling, and at points harrowing. Ellis shares colorful stories about the people she knew in mining camps, and writes about some of our region’s enduring legends from a first-hand perspective.
In spite of all the talk today, Anne Ellis did not live in better times, not morally, not spiritually, and not financially. Yet Ellis manages to bring a lightness to her tale that reflects an appreciation of the good things, and an acceptance of life’s trials.
The prostitutes in Bonanza weren’t the misunderstood sorts with hearts of gold. They were profane, and tended toward brawling. People fought, drank, ripped off each other’s claims, and neglected their spouses and children.
Yet Ellis’s mother and stepfather regularly fed bachelor prospectors. When a man struck it rich or sold a claim, he bought gifts for all of his neighbors. Whenever people were sick, neighbors showed up to care for them. When Ellis’s first husband died, the other miners all gave her a week’s pay — even though their own families were not well off. In short, in spite of poverty, Ellis and her neighbors were generous.
Anne Ellis and her neighbors weren’t prim, simple, piously upright pioneers. Instead, they were flawed and imperfect, but profoundly human.
And we know that because Anne Ellis committed more to a memoir than a lot of her contemporaries. Ellis may have started out an “ordinary woman,” but she gave our region an extraordinary memoir. The Life Of An Ordinary Woman makes you think about life. It doesn’t lend itself to easy, hard and fast conclusions, but it definitely makes you think.
–Martha Quillen
There’s a small display on Anne Ellis at the Saguache County Museum in Saguache.