I’m A Stranger Here Myself; Debra Gwartney
We have all had to make choices. We come to a choice and have to make a decision. Sometimes it is pretty clear which way is the best, especially in the short run; other times it seems like the toss of a coin. But whichever choice we make, at some time, usually, we will look back and try to determine if the choice we make was the best. Gwartney is at one of those times now. Her grandfather has died and she is returning to her family’s home in Salmon, Idaho where not only will she attend the services for her grandfather but will be forced to confront the life she has lived and has chosen to leave. Debra Gwartney is her own hero. The book she has written is the story of her own life and the critical choices she has made.
Gwartney’s family, both the father’s and the mother’s sides have lived in Salmon, Idaho for several generations. Her grandfather on her mother’s side owned the local newspaper and let her work the levers on the printing press. Her grandmother and grandfather on her father’s side owned the local hardware/implement store. The family owned land, kept horses. On weekends, they went to the dance at the local grange where she watched the local teenagers pick out their partner for the rest of their lives. Her family fit smoothly into the group of ranchers and small business owners who made up the local community. However, at a young age, she began to question the options available to her and didn’t like what she saw.
Grandmas Lois, her father’s mother, was a window into other worlds. She had taught in the local school for years and made sure that the students she taught, including her own grandchildren, knew about the world outside rural Idaho. It was at her house that Debra stayed during her trip home for her grandfather’s memorial service. Grandma Lois being long dead and now her grandfather gone also, the household was being broken up. Debra took a few things to help her connect with the grandparents she had loved, including some books from her grandmother’s small library, one of them being a biography of Narcissa Prentiss Whitman.
A well-known figure in the history of the settling of the West, Narcissa Whitman was an icon of the typical frontier woman. Not just because of her status as a missionary and a representative of the mission board back in Boston, but because of the circumstances in that part of the country at the time of her travels. She was the first Caucasian woman to cross the Rocky Mountains, the first white woman to give birth to a baby on the frontier and a missionary killed by the people she had helped to convert.
Gwartney decided to find out more about Whitman, perhaps recognizing something of herself in the choices Whitman was presented with and the results of her choices. Debra Gwartney is not an historian but she used the historian’s tools. She spent several years, both in the West where Whitman’s story played out and back east where it had begun. The resulting book, I’m a Stranger Here Myself is the result of this study. This book is well-written and insightful. I would recommend it to anyone who is questioning their decision-making, especially young people trying to decide between a known path and something different and new.
I’m a Stranger Here Myself is available from bookstores or directly from the University of New Mexico Press c/o Longleaf Services, Inc. To order, please call 1-800-848-6224 or visit www.unmpress.com.