Grace Raymond Hebard

Grace Raymond Hebard (1861-1936) was a prominent historian of the native Americans, a noted suffragist, pioneering bibliographic scholar, prolific writer, political economist and a highly respected educator from Wyoming.

Hebard was born in Clinton, Iowa, on July 2, 1861. She took her B.S. at the University of Iowa in 1882 and her M.A. at the same institution in 1885. A paper in the collection states that she was the first woman to "be graduated from the Civil Engineering Dep(artment) of the University." She received her Ph.D. in political science through correspondence from Illinois Wesleyan University in 1893.

Hebard found her way west to Cheyenne, Wyoming, where she worked as the only female draftsman in the city, according to the University of Wyoming archives. cite web |url= http://ahc.uwyo.edu/onlinecollections/exhibits/hebard/introduction.htm|title= The History and Romance of Wyoming: Grace Raymond Hebard |accessdate=2008-04-01 |work= American Heritage Center] Yet it was not until Hebard ventured some 50 miles further west, crossing a mountain range, and then descending into the high Laramie Valley where she took up residence that she found her calling as an educator.

Hebard subsequently spent more than 40 years associated with the University of Wyoming in Laramie. Remarkably, Hebard's first posting was as a member of the University of Wyoming Board of Trustees. She continue her pioneering ways when she became the university's first librarian. During her tenure, she built the library from scratch. The former draftsman launched her formal career as an educator when she received an appointment as the university's head of the Department of Political Economy.

She extended her academic activities to include serving on an advisory board for the Wyoming Historical Association. It's this association that eventually helped direct Hebard towards a new academic pursuit, researching the Oregon Trail in Wyoming. Hebard began her new venture by involving herself in the mapping of the old trail in Wyoming. However, Hebard didn't limit herself to cartography. She began collecting historical documents and other materials regarding Wyoming history. Moreover, she traveled the state, seeking out interviews with Oregon Trail pioneers. Upon her death in 1936, Hebard bequeathed her collection to the University of Wyoming. Her papers, characteristically, included her own maps, publications, field books, and writings. Books that she wrote on Wyoming history included:
*"The Bozeman Trail",
*"The Government of Wyoming",
*"The Pathbreakers",
*"Sacajawea",
*"Washakie"

In 1924, Hebard helped established Pi Gamma Mu, the honor society in social science. She served as sponsor of the University of Wyoming chapter of Pi Gamma Mu which she also founded, and was the honor society's national vice-president from 1924 until her retirement from teaching in 1931. Hebard also gained admission to the Wyoming bar and authorship of several historical monographs and textbooks

Of all Grace Hebard's accomplishments, she reportedly valued her Americanization work as “perhaps most precious.” Leading scholar Frank Van Nuys notes that a "Wyoming News" testimonial expressed in 1935 that Dr. Hebard's “certificates of preparation for naturalization were accepted by the United States District Court in lieu of examinations for citizenship.” That sort of clout suggests that Grace Hebard's Americanization enterprise beginning in 1916 deserves some scrutiny. While the evidence of her work is fragmentary, it nonetheless places Hebard within an essentially progressive tradition of qualified optimism about immigrants’ ability to assimilate to Anglo-American cultural norms. At the same time, her long-held ideological assumptions about immigrants, especially the “new” immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, led her to express extreme concern—altogether typical of American opinion makers and political leaders during the World War I era—about speeding up the assimilative process.

While Hebard's involvement with Americanization in Wyoming began relatively late in her career, evidence of her interest in educating immigrants dates from at least 1896, when she published an article titled “Immigration and Needed Ballot Reform” in "The Illinois Wesleyan Magazine". “The danger which threatens us”, she warned, “is the growth in our population of a large foreign element whose habits of thought and behavior are radically different from those which the founders of the nation hoped to establish.”

This contention that “Southern and Eastern Europeans” lacked the necessary requisites to simply ease into the American social and economic order without somehow disrupting it, according to Van Nuys, constituted conventional wisdom in the 1890s. Notably, Hebard cited the famed economist and statistician Francis Amasa Walker, whose writings during that decade gave intellectual credence to nativists for years to come. She expressed as well the very common alarm that this class of immigrants, while certainly possessed of some desirable individuals, had a tendency to produce anarchists and rebels. Yet Hebard, convinced of the transforming powers of education, suggested a means to forestall otherwise inevitable and irrevocable damage to the republic. Van Nuys further notes that Hebard's sentiments in the mid-1890s coincided with a growing movement, centered in the big cities of the northeast and midwest, to indeed assimilate immigrants through intensive education in American history, politics, and ideology.

Hebard also had a passion for marking, preserving and commemorating historical places and events with organizations such as the Daughters of the American Revolution. As State Historian of the D.A.R., she helped mark such historic places as the Oregon Trail and Fort Laramie.

In addition to her teaching and administrative duties, Hebard was active in many civic and public affairs. She campaigned for women's suffrage, supported American troops in World War I, and helped immigrants become American citizens. After she retired from teaching in 1931, she continued to research and collect historical material in her home, affectionately known to students and colleagues as "The Doctors Inn". Hebard lived in this house with her close friend and colleague Dr. Agnes M. Wergeland until Wergeland's death in 1915. Grace's sister Alice then lived there until her death in 1928.

Hebard died in October 1936 at the age of 75. The University of Wyoming held a memorial program in her honor later that month. The tributes and eulogies that were delivered by colleagues, students and friends formed the nucleus of a vast university collection that still bears her name to this day.

ee also

* Oregon Trail
* University of Wyoming
* Ezra Meeker

Notes

References

*Hartmann, Edward George. "The Movement to Americanize the Immigrant". New York: Columbia University Press, 1948.

*Hebard, Grace R. "The Pathbreakers from River to Ocean: The Story of the Great West from the Time of Coronado to the Present."

*Hebard, Grace R. "Washakie : Chief of the Shoshones".

*University of Wyoming, American Heritage Center, "Grace Raymond Hebard Collection".

*Van Nuys, Frank. "My One Hobby: Grace Raymond Hebard and Americanization in Wyoming".