Royce, Sarah Bayliss

views updated

ROYCE, Sarah Bayliss

Born 2 March 1819, Stratford-on-Avon, England; died 23 November 1891, San Jose, California

Wrote under: Sarah Royce

Daughter of Benjamin and Mary Bayliss; married Josiah Royce, 1845

The Bayliss family emigrated to New York when Sarah was six weeks old. She was raised and educated in Rochester, New York, in true Victorian style with a reverence for religion, family, and education. Royce met and married Josiah Royce (born in England, brought up in Dundas, Canada) in Rochester, and in 1848, with their first daughter Mary, they traveled to Iowa; in the spring of the following year they joined the other hopeful migrants on the overland trek to the California goldfields.

During that grueling journey and in her early years in California, Royce wrote intermittently in her "Pilgrimage Diary" of the hardships, events, and impressions she experienced. Nearly 30 years later, she would use the diary to write a narrative account of the "family odyssey" at the request of her son, Josiah Jr. (Harvard professor of philosophy), for his history of the early American period in California. The manuscript of A Frontier Lady: Recollections of the Gold Rush and Early California (1932) was prepared not for publication but for her son's interest and instruction and quite probably as a defense of religious faith, which the philosopher was questioning.

Royce's book is one of the more literate personal narratives we have of a pioneer woman's experiences, but it is also a sensitive record of personal growth. The first night on the trail she silently faced the "chilling prospect" of months without house or home. In the morning, she felt "mildly exultant" at having "kept silent through a cowardly fit, and finding the fit gone off."

The desire for and importance of a home are ideas recurring frequently in Royce's narrative. Her uncomplaining acceptance of keeping house in tents, half-built cabins, and boardinghouse rooms (briefly described) offers a clearer picture of the deprivations and fears a pioneer woman faced than most works on the subject. Male accounts of the goldfields often stress the excitement, freedom, or camaraderie of the day; Royce's view "etches in a few strong lines the sordidness of the mining camps," so unlike anything a gently bred woman of the period could even imagine.

True to her Victorian upbringing, Royce's work is permeated with prescriptive and descriptive moral messages; it gives today's reader valuable insight into Victorian values. Royce relinquished the necessary trappings of what was considered a civilized society, but she refused to compromise even minimally society's moral codes for herself or her fellow pioneers.