Album--Daughters of the Utah Pioneers and Their Mothers

Salt Lake City: The Western Album Publishing Company, 1915. 1/4 leather. Very Good. The very scarce 1915 1st edition. Oblong quarto in its 1/4 burgundy (or wine-red) leather over matching cloth. Bright gilt-titling at the front panel, decorative floral endpapers and pastedowns. Corners of the covers gently rubbed, small losses from ends of leather backstrip; still though, solidly VG, attractive and very presentable. Richly illustrated work on the pioneer women of Utah in the epic Mormon migration, containing close to 450 biographical sketches and portraits. The Western Album Publishing Company was incorporated for the sole purpose of publishing this work, which would be the only book they would produce. The album echoes the style and aesthetic of Frank J. Esshom's "Pioneers and Prominent Men", published 2 years before and seemingly more common than "Daughters of the Utah Pioneers and Their Mothers". (Flake/Draper 4311). (From the 6th paragraph of his Introduction, Jas. T. Jakeman wrote: "Others have sounded the praises of the men of the pioneer bands, let it be ours to tell of the glorious pioneer mothers. Men can brave the wilderness. Their natures are rougher, and their desires less refined. Their lives have been spent in the open, and thus the wastes do not appeal. With women, the desire is for the sheltered place of life, for the firesides, and the thousands of refinements, that make their lives worthwhile. Yet there were women in those bands that crossed the trackless plains, as we have said before, and their voices rose as clear by the campfire, singing the songs of Zion, as they did in those Eastern homes that were now so far away. They put aside the discomforts and the dangers of the joiurney; the desires of their natures were stilled, and buoyed up by love and hope they stood by the men of their families, as fearless, and as devoted as they.