Mary Hallock Foote

Born into a Quaker farming family in Milton-on-the-Hudson, Mary Hallock studied at the Cooper Union School of Design for Women in New York, where, in the late 1860s, she formed the deepest friendship of her life with a fellow student, Helena de Kay. The two young women's letters — preserved in the Stanford archive — are among the most intimate documents of nineteenth-century American women's friendship.

In 1876 she married the mining engineer Arthur De Wint Foote and followed him to the mining camps of New Almaden, Leadville, Boise, and Grass Valley. From those remote outposts she produced a remarkable double career: a stream of illustrations for Scribner's and The Century, and a long shelf of novels and stories — The Led-Horse Claim, The Chosen Valley, Coeur d'Alene, The Ground-Swell — that gave Eastern readers their first serious literary portrait of the engineering West.

Her decades of letters to Helena passed continuously through the Gilder household, and many of her finest illustrations appeared in Richard Watson Gilder's Century. Wallace Stegner drew on her memoirs and correspondence for his Pulitzer-winning novel Angle of Repose (1971), bringing Mary Hallock Foote's voice — and, by reflection, Helena's — back into American literary memory.