![]() ![]() Meanwhile, Eliza Farnham had moved from Illinois to New York in 1841, and was struggling to support herself and her children. Thomas Farnham was the author of several travel books: Travels in Oregon Territory (1842) Travels in the Great Western Prairies (1843) Travels in California, and Scenes in the Pacific (1845) A Memoir of the Northwest Boundary-Line (1845) and Mexico, its Geography, People, and Institutions (1846). In Santa Cruz, he joined the growing Yankee community and acquired land from a local Californio family in payment for legal services. ![]() He then turned to central California as a more promising site for his expansionist ambitions. In 1839 Thomas Farnham organized and took command of a an ill-fated invasion to drive out the British in the Willamette Valley of Oregon. For the next five years the couple lived on the Illinois prairie. In 1836, Eliza married lawyer and author, Thomas Jefferson Farnham, ten years her senior. In 1835 Eliza Burhans moved with her brother to Tazewell County, Illinois, where they joined a married sister, Mary Roberts. The aunt, she later recalled, raised her through “neglect and hardship.” As part of a continuing effort to free herself, young Eliza stole money from her aunt, convinced that it was owed her as compensation for her labor and the unfulfilled obligation to educate her. “This is my niece,” he lied when they returned together to the Hudson River Valley of her birth, “a wild girl, whom I have just caught in the forests of the West.” This is where My Early Days ends.Īt age 15 Eliza went to live with an aunt and uncle and briefly attended the Albany Female Academy. Largely self-educated, Eliza found solace in books and nature.įinally, after seven years under these conditions, she contacted a brother who came to bring her out of the wilderness. ![]() One of these is Tonewanta, a reference to her dark, Indian-like complexion, deepened by exposure to the sun and hard outdoor work. At the beginning of the book, Eliza is not even called by her real name but by hostile nicknames. The personal struggle described throughout the book reaches far beyond issues of gender. The only reading materials in their house were condemnations of religion and praise of reason, including Paine and Voltaire. Eliza worked as a servant for the Warrens, who were Quakers, yet thoroughly atheistic. Her book My Early Days (1859) is a record of her childhood, a portrait of relentless suffering among ignorant, brutal people. There she was placed in the home of the Warrens, a childless couple. Eliza’s mother died in 1820, after which five-year-old Eliza was separated from her father and siblings and exiled to a rural community in western New York State. Eliza Burhans was born on Novemin the Hudson Valley town of Rensselaerville, New York, the daughter of Cornelius and Mary Wood Burhans. ![]()
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