Frontier women’s polish and cheerfulness required deliberate effort, not ease.

Evidence

This is the first settler’s house I have been in in which the ornamental has had any place. There is a door to each room, the oak chairs are bright with rubbing, and the floor, though unplaned, is so clean that one might eat off it. The table is clean and abundant, and the mother and daughter, though they do all the work, look as trim as if they did none, and actually laugh heartily. — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 200

Categorization

• XREF: Speaks to the reader’s interest in the daily life of women in the American West — decorum maintained under hard labor.
• FICTION: A settler household where the ornamental survives the frontier makes a vivid domestic scene for fiction about Western life.