Account of a South American Journey, 1898

Abstract

An adventuresome human experience unfolds in telling the life story of Granville Stuart, a genuine pioneer of the American West and United States minister to Uruguay and Paraguay from 1894 to 1898. Three years after his birth in Virginia in 1834, Stuart's parents moved to Iowa where he grew up in a frontier community. His father went to California in the first year of the Gold Rush, returned to Iowa in 1851 and the next spring the senior Stuart and two of his sons, Granville and James, crossed the continent to the Pacific gold fields where they mined with indifferent luck until 1857 when Stuart's sons decided to return to Iowa. The “ Mormon War ” diverted then? progress across the Great Basin, causing them to detour north into Southeastern Montana where they mined for a while and became part of that wave of settlers that pushed back the frontier in the Rocky Mountains. Stuart's first wife, an Indian woman he had married in 1862, died in 1887, leaving him with several grown children. Three years later he married Mrs. Allis Brown Fairfield, a Montana school teacher, nearly thirty years his junior, and who, like himself, had been born in Virginia and reared in Iowa. Miss Brown's parents had moved to Montana in 1879 after she had attended Sioux City (Iowa) public schools; she later studied at Vassar College and Northern Indiana Normal School, and before her marriage to Granville Stuart she taught in several one-room rural Montana schools.