Mary Hallock Foote was one of the leading women illustrators of her day in America. Perhaps best remembered as a novelist and short-story writer of the American West, in the late nineteenth century she enjoyed equal fame in art and publishing circles for her black-and-white woodcut illustrations, especially of local-color western life and scenery.

Mary Anna Hallock was born on 19 November 1847 on a remote farm on the Hudson River near Milton, New York, the youngest of the four children of Nathaniel and Ann Burling Hallock. The family, devout Quakers, were loving and close. Molly, as she was called, learned gentility and refinement from her mother; from her father she gained her lifelong love of literature. The Hallocks were learned, serious people. Various relatives were involved in social causes-abolition, woman suffrage, and the like-so while family life was insular, for Molly it was also nurturing and stimulating. Because an...