Trials of the Earth by Mary Mann Hamilton

…It was a cold gloomy morning in January 1896 when I started with my two little girls, my sister Lucy, and my brother Johnny to what was to us a new world, the Mississippi Delta. The Hamiltons recently have buried a son, Oswald, accidentally poisoned by a physician. They travel down the Mississippi to his latest logging site, which juts into the big river from its east bank. This excerpt, adapted with permission from Little, Brown, begins with Mary and companions, including daughters Nina and Leslie, trying to connect with Frank, who has been away working in Missouri. That venture’s success led to a contract with Little, Brown, which in 2016 published its edition of Trials of the Earth. Hamilton self-published an edition by the same title. The family took legal action to establish ownership of the material. To much fanfare-but without the Hamilton family’s permission-the university published the memoir as Trials of the Earth: The True Story of a Pioneer Woman. In 1991, Davis’s children came upon the Hamilton manuscript and submitted it to the University of Mississippi Press.

The publisher rejected Hamilton’s recollections. In 1933, Hamilton handed Davis a 150,000-word manuscript that Davis edited and sent to Little, Brown. Davis urged Mary Hamilton to Photograph of Mary Mann Hamilton believed to have been taken on her wedding day. Toward the end of her life Mary Hamilton resided in Philipp, Mississippi, where, in 1931, Helen Dick Davis, a writer and neighbor with a family link to Hamilton, found the older woman’s tales of pioneer life charming. As Frank Hamilton’s career carried him around the Mississippi Delta, then in its frontier days, Mary accompanied him, boarding and feeding work gangs and moving with her children and other kin from forest to forest, often separately from her husband. Her family operated a boarding house where she was working in 1884 when she met and married Frank Hamilton, an older Englishman with a mysterious past who managed logging camps.

Roughing it along the Mississippi River through the eyes of a woman who lived it MARY MANN was born around 1866 in Arkansas. Mary Mann Hamilton: Delta Pioneer Woman Close

Trials of the Earth by Mary Mann Hamilton