WINTER IN THE TERRITORY — STATE LEGISLATURE. 188 
would suppose, from reading these, that all the women had given 
up all the duties of life usually assigned them, and armed with 
rifles and revolvers, with bravado and threats, were ready at all 
times to resent injuries by an appeal to the former. Whereas, with 
the exception of a dozen ladies, more or less, who have busied 
themselves in making cartridges, most of us have had sufficient 
employment in the accumulated duties of our own households, in 
preparing for an unwonted number of guests. Some, far removed 
in the country, have manifested their sympathies by busily engag¬ 
ing in the baking of bread for the soldiers. 
Lawrence and vicinity, numbering some fifteen hundred inhabit¬ 
ants, boasts many fair ladies; more who combine the advantages 
of personal beauty with intellectual merit, than in any place 
I ever lived. Our friends east need have no fears that in this 
“ roughing it,” not only with the necessary inconveniences, and 
inelegancies, of a new country, but with the tyrannous acts of a 
vile administration’s tools, that they have lost any of the instinct¬ 
ive gentleness or modesty of woman. Firmness and a purer love 
of justice have been the gain of many. The acts of one woman 
here have probably given rise to the false impression which has 
gone over the country. Sheriff Jones made the arrest of a resident 
of Lawrence, after a previous unsuccessful attempt, Mrs. B. threat¬ 
ening to shoot the sheriff if he attempted to arrest her husband, 
and with pistols cocked gave sufficient proof of her sincerity in 
this determination; enough certainly to satisfy the sheriff, who 
was effectually cowed, and, amid the laugh of the by-standers, 
turned away muttering, he “ had rather face an army of men than 
one furious woman.” During the war, too, she had evinced her 
boldness on several occasions. 
Statements of this kind have, probably, in the minds of many, 
given a wrong coloring to the actual character of the womanly 
element here; when, on coming, they might expect to meet a real 
Amazon, or Joan of Arc, they would be disappointed to see still 
uppermost the native refinement, sensibility, and modest dignity 
of a true woman. 
22d. — No attack yet made upon us. In spite of all the talk, 
and all the marshalling of armed men in the border towns, we 
