- Goodale Sisters
-
Elaine Goodale Eastman (1863 - 1953) and Dora Read Goodale (1866 - 1953) were American poets and sisters, who published their first poetry as children still living at home, and were included in Edmund Clarence Stedman's classic An American Anthology (1900).
Elaine Goodale taught at the Indian Department of Hampton Institute, started a day school on a Dakota reservation and became Superintendent of Indian Education for the Two Dakotas by 1890. She married Dr. Charles Eastman (also known as Ohiyesa), a Santee Sioux who was the first Native American physician, and lived with him and their growing family in the West for several years. She collaborated with him extensively with writing about his childhood and Sioux culture; his nine books were popular and made him well known on a public lecture circuit. She also continued her own writing, publishing her last book of poetry in 1930, and a biography and last novel in 1935.
Dora Read Goodale published a book of poetry at age 21 and continued to write. She became a teacher of art and English in Connecticut. Later she was a teacher and director of the Uplands Sanatorium in Pleasant Hill, Tennessee.[1] She attracted positive reviews when she published her last book of poetry at age 75 in 1941, in which she combined modernist free verse with use of Appalachian dialect to express her neighbors' traditional lives.[2]
Contents
Early life and education
Elaine and Dora were born to Dora Hill Read and Henry Sterling Goodale, a farmer and writer in Mount Washington, Massachusetts. From 1876-1879 he served as a delegate to the Massachusetts State Board of Agriculture.[3] His poem "Does Farming Pay?", in the October 1880 issue of Harper's Monthly, was reviewed in the New York Times as a terrific piece of dialect verse.[4]
The Goodale sisters grew up on their parents' farm, known as Sky Farm. They had a brother Robert, and a sister Rose Sterling Goodale, who married James A. Dayton and preserved much of the family's history and manuscripts.[5] The entire family absorbed the New England Transcendental culture.
Elaine and Dora were precocious writers, starting poetry while young. Elaine publicized her poems at age eight in her Sky Farm Life, a monthly she published. Her first pastoral poem appeared in the Springfield Republican when she was twelve.[6] Friends helped collect the two girls' early writings; Elaine was fifteen and Dora twelve when their first book was published:
- Apple Blossoms: Verses of Two Children (1878)
- In Berkshire with the Wildflowers (1879)
- All Round the Year: Verses from Sky Farm (1880)
Beginning in 1881 they contributed to such periodicals as Scribner's Monthly, Harper's and Sunday Magazine.[2] In 1887 verses of both sisters began to appear in St. Nicholas Magazine, as well. As the biographer Theodore Sargent noted, both young poets were included in Edmund Clarence Stedman's classic An American Anthology, 1787-1900, published in 1900.[5]
Elaine Goodale Eastman
1911 novel by Elaine Goodale Eastman, illustrations by Angel De Cora and William Henry Dietz
In 1881 Elaine published The Journal of a Farmer's Daughter. Two years later she became teacher at the Hampton Institute, a historically black college in Virginia for the education of freedmen, where she taught a new group of students who were Native Americans from the West. In 1885 Goodale made a tour of observation through the Sioux Reservation, as she wanted to learn more about where her students came from.
Having become interested in the cause of Indian Reform, in 1886 Elaine Goodale received a government appointment to teach Indians at the White River Camp, where she set up a day school. She strongly supported educating children at day schools on the reservations rather than sending them away to boarding schools. In 1890 Goodale was appointed Superintendent of Indian Education for the Two Dakotas for the Bureau of Indian Affairs.[7]
In the aftermath of the Wounded Knee Massacre in December 1890, she cared for the wounded with Dr. C. A. Eastman, a Santee Sioux doctor of part Anglo-American ancestry. They fell in love and in 1891 she and Charles were married in New York.[8]
The couple had six children:
- Dora Winona Eastman, d. August 22, 1964, Northampton MA
- Irene Eastman, d. October 23, 1918, Keene NH
- Virginia Eastman, d. April 2, 1991, Amherst MA (She married a Mr. Whitbeck)
- Eleanor Eastman, d. May 2, 1999, Pittsford NY (She married a Mr. Mensel)
- Florence Eastman, d. December 30, 1930, Holyoke MA (She married a Mr. Prentiss)
- Charles Eastman Jr. (Ohiyesa), d. January 15, 1940, Detroit MI
The couple remained together for three decades, although they returned to Massachusetts to live in 1903. They had struggled financially after Eastman was forced out of two physician positions with the Indian Health Service. For a time they both worked at the Carlisle Indian School.[8] After Goodale Eastman started helping Eastman write his stories of childhood and Indian culture, he became well known and sought after for lectures. The family was based in Amherst as Eastman increasingly traveled for public lectures and other activities. Goodale managed his lecture tours and associated publicity, as he had about 25 lectures annually.[8] They also collaborated on writing, and he published eight books while they lived in Amherst; Goodale Eastman published three.[5]
In 1915 the family founded their own summer camp at Granite Lake, New Hampshire, where the adults and three oldest children all worked for several years. Their daughter Irene, a promising opera singer and Charles' favorite, died in the influenza epidemic of 1918, leaving both parents devastated and further straining their relationship.[5] In 1921, after allegations that Charles had an affair and an illegitimate child, the couple separated, although they never divorced or acknowledged the separation publicly. Eastman did not publish any books after their separation.[8]
Elaine Goodale Eastman wrote a memoir about her experiences as a Sioux school teacher called Sister to the Sioux. The manuscript, which is property of the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College, was published posthumously in 1978 by the University of Nebraska Press.
Goodale Eastman continued to write, publishing four books after her separation from Charles: in 1928 it was The Luck of Old Acres, a novel about a summer camp. She published her last book of poems, The Voice at Eve, in 1930; it included a biographical essay entitled "All the Days of My Life." In 1935 she published both her best novel, One Hundred Maples, and a biography of Richard Henry Pratt, founder of the Carlisle Indian School.[8] She also published numerous articles, letters and book reviews published in a variety of journals.[5]
Legacy
- In 1950 Goodale Eastman donated her papers to Smith College, where she had earned her undergraduate degree. (She had removed most of the references to Charles Eastman.)[5]
After her death in 1953, she was buried in Florence, Massachusetts, near where her daughter Dora and her family lived.[5]
Bibliography
Poetry:
- Elaine Goodale and Dora Read Goodale. Apple-blossoms: verses of two children, G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1878.
- ______________________. (and illustrated by William Hamilton Gibson). In Berkshire with the wild flowers, G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1879.
- _____________________. All Round the Year: Verses from Sky Farm, G.P. Putnam's Sons, (1880).
- Goodale, Dora Read. Heralds of Easter (1887).
- Eastman, Elaine Goodale. The Voice at Eve, collected poems (Unknown Binding - 1930).
Non-Fiction:
- Eastman, Elaine Goodale. Journal of a Farmer's Daughter, (Unknown Binding - 1881).
- ________________. The Senator and the School-house ([Indian Rights Association. Publications. 1st ser.]), (Unknown Binding - 1886).
- ________________. Indian Wars and Warriors, (Unknown Binding - 1894)
- ________________ & Charles A. Eastman. Smoky Day's Wigwam Evenings: Indian Stories Retold, Little, Brown and Company, 1910.
- _________________. Pratt The Red Man's Moses, 1935. (biography of Richard Pratt, founder of the Carlisle Indian School
- ________________. Western Sentiment on the Indian Question, (Unknown Binding - 1946)
- ________________. Sister to the Sioux: The Memoirs of Elaine Goodale Eastman: 1885-1891, Kay Graber, editor, University of Nebraska Press, 1978.
Fiction:
- Eastman, Elaine Goodale. Little Brother O' Dreams, Houghton Mifflin Company, February 1910.
- ______________. Yellow Star: A Story of East and West, Little, Brown and Company, 1911. (Goodale Eastman described these first two novels as "potboilers".[8])
- ______________. The Eagle and the Star,: American Indian Pageant Play in Three Acts, (Unknown Binding - 1916)
- ______________. The Luck of Oldacres (1928), New York: Century Company[5]
- ______________. Hundred Maples, Stephen Daye Press, 1935.
- This article incorporates text from an edition of the New International Encyclopedia that is in the public domain.
Dora Read Goodale
After graduating from Smith College, Dora published her first independent book of poetry in 1887, Heralds of Easter. She became a teacher of art and English in Reading, Connecticut, which her mother's family had settled.[1] She never married, but she and her sister Elaine exchanged numerous letters over the decades in which they examined the various alternatives for women.[5]
Later in life Dora worked as a teacher and director of Uplands Sanatorium in Pleasant Hill, Tennessee. In 1941 she published Mountain Dooryards, her last book of poetry, a work that was written in modernist free verse and used the dialect of the people of the Appalachians and expressed their traditional but changing world.[2]
Works
References
- ^ a b "Eastman-Goodale-Dayton Family", Sophia Smith Collection: Women's History Archives, Smith College, Northampton, MA, accessed 3 February 2011
- ^ a b c d Paula Bennett, Nineteenth-century American Women Poets: An Anthology, Wiley-Blackwell, 1998, pp. 351-352, accessed 3 February 2011
- ^ History of Berkshire County, Vol. 1, accessed 3 February 2011
- ^ "Fresh Magazines. Harper's Magazine", New York Times, 18 September 1880, accessed 3 February 2011
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j Theodore D. Sargent, The Life of Elaine Goodale Eastman (Women in the West), University of Nebraska Press (2006), accessed 3 February 2011
- ^ "The Bride of an Indian: Miss Elaine Goodale Married to Dr. Eastman", New York Times, 19 September 1891, accessed 3 February 2011
- ^ "Elaine Goodale Eastman", Only a Teacher: Schoolhouse Pioneers, Public Broadcasting Company (PBS), accessed 3 February 2011
- ^ a b c d e f Ruth Ann Alexander, "Elaine Goodale Eastman and the Failure of the Feminist Protestant Ethic", Great Plains Quarterly, Spring 1988, accessed 3 February 2011
Further reading
- Carol Lea Clark. Charles A. Eastman (Ohiyesa) and Elaine Goodale Eastman: A Cross-Cultural Collaboration, University of Tulsa, 1994.
Categories:- 1863 births
- 1953 deaths
- American educators
- American poets
- People from Berkshire County, Massachusetts
- People from South Dakota
- American poet, 19th century birth stubs
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