Grace Raymond Hebard (July 2, 1861 – October 1936) was an American historian, suffragist, scholar, writer, political economist, and noted University of Wyoming educator. Hebard's standing as a historian in part rose from her years trekking Wyoming's high plains and mountains seeking first-hand accounts of Wyoming's early pioneers. Today, her books on Wyoming history are sometimes challenged due to her romanticization of the Old West, spurring questions regarding accuracy of her research findings. In particular, her conclusion after decades of field research that Sacajawea (participant in the Lewis and Clark Expedition) was buried in Wyoming's Wind River Indian Reservation is questioned."Sacajawea legend may not be correct," by Sandy Mickelson. The Messenger; Fort Dodge, Iowa. The reporter recounts the findings from "Also Called Sacajawea: Chief Woman's Stolen Identity," by Thomas H. Johnson. Johnson argues that Hebard had the wrong woman when she relied upon oral history that an old woman who died and is buried on the Wyoming Wind River Reservation was Sacajawea, the Shoshone woman who participated in the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Other research claims that instead, Sacajawea is buried at Fort Manuel on South Dakota's Standing Rock Indian Reservation.
Hebard served as the first female on the University of Wyoming Board of Trustees, where she exercised authority over the university finances, its president, and faculty."Wyoming University: The First 100 Years, 1886-1986," by Deborah Hardy. University of Wyoming, 1986. Her University of Wyoming role extended to establishing the university's first library. Hebard served as a professor for 28 years. She was also the first woman admitted to the Wyoming State Bar Association (1898);American Women Historians, 1700s - 1990s; by Jennifer Scanlon, Shaaron admitted to practice before the Wyoming Supreme Court (1914); and appointed by her peers as vice president of the National Society of Women Lawyers.
She was active in Wyoming political life, giving speeches, organizing historical associations, conducting citizenship classes for immigrants, participating in the local and national suffragist movement, lobbying for child-welfare laws, serving as a Red Cross volunteer, and selling war bonds during World War I.
Background
Grace Hebard was born in the Mississippi river town of Clinton, Iowa, on July 2, 1861, to Rev. George Diah Alonzo Hebard (1831–1870) and Margaret E. Dominick Hebard (Marven). Her family soon moved to Iowa City where her father, a missionary and a later territorial legislator, built a new Presbyterian church. Hebard took her B.S. in what is now civil engineering at the University of Iowa in 1882. She was a member of Pi Beta Phi Women's Fraternity. Hebard became the first woman to "be graduated from the Civil Engineering Dep(artment) of the University," according to documents at the University of Iowa Library. In later years, Hebard reflected in a 1928 letter to a colleague on her singular experience as a female engineering student:
"I met with many discouragements and many sneers and much opposition to my enrolling in the scientific course, which was then entirely a man's college. ... All kinds of discouraging predictions were made that I would fail, that it was impossible for a woman to do the kind of work I was undertaking.""Grace Raymond Hebard: The Independent and Feminine Life; 1861-1936," by Virginia Scharff. From "Lone Voyagers: Academic Women in Coeducational Universities. 1870 - 1937." Edited by Geraldine Joncich Clifford. The Feminist Press at the City University of New York. New York 1989. Scharff's claim that Hebard's historical accounts were short on hard evidence is contradicted by the record that shows that Hebard conducted extensive field research and gathered and transcribed oral history for her book on Sacajawea. Hebard's body of evidence also includes citations gleaned from conducting international archive searches.
Hebard later resumed her studies by correspondence and earned an M.A. from the University of Iowa in 1885. Finally, again by correspondence, she received her Ph.D. in political science from Illinois Wesleyan University in 1893.
Hebard made her way west in 1882 to Cheyenne, eight years before Wyoming became a state in 1890. Hebard arrived at the future capital city in the company of her mother and brothers; Fred, Lockwood, and her sister, Alice. She became part of the social scene with other young people at the newly constructed Cheyenne Club, where cattle barons, often wealthy Europeans, held sway over Cheyenne. Yet general violence and roughness were still common. Rowdy cowhands wearing guns in the saloons and prostitutes openly plying their trade in brothels made for a sometimes raucous downtown."The Wyoming Lynching of Cattle Kate: 1889," by George W. Hufsmith. High Plains Press, Glendo, Wyo.; 1993. Citizens were known to hand out their own form of retribution, however, if things got out of hand. For example, in 1883 a crowd lynched an accused murderer, leaving him hanging from a Cheyenne telephone pole.
Hebard's college education distinguished her from such local citizens. The young engineer found work at the surveyor general's office, where she served as the only female draftsman in the city, according to the University of Wyoming archives. Hebard rose to the position of deputy state engineer, reporting at first to Elwood Mead. Mead made his mark drafting Wyoming Territory water laws and later as head of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation."Twenty Thousand Roads," by Virginia Scharff. University of California Press, 2003.
Yet engineering was not to be Hebard's calling. Instead, after nine years in Cheyenne, she left her family and ventured 50 miles west across a boulder-strewn mountain range to the railroad town of Laramie. This small town in Southeastern Wyoming, which began as a tent city mid-1860s, was home to a fledgling university when Hebard arrived in 1891. Laramie's scruffy prairie campus became the locale from which Hebard launched a storied career in higher education, devoting more than 45 years (1891–1936) to the University of Wyoming.
University trustee In 1891 Grace Hebard parlayed the recommendation of Republican U.S. Senator Joseph M. Carey of Cheyenne, whom she had known since childhood into an appointment by acting Governor Amos Barber as a salaried secretary to and member of the University of Wyoming Board of Trustees. The 30-year-old woman found herself in uncharted territory as she navigated the male-dominated world of university governance. She soon learned that her administrative journey through the halls of higher education would not be without hazards. Yet from the beginning, Hebard wielded her position as trustee with considerable force, serving until 1903 but continuing as secretary until 1908. Hebard dominated the university administration for 17 years, exercising "all pervasive" influence.
She administered from a position of strength, ranging from setting university policy to managing its finances. Hebard directed the university's finances with near independence, excluding an annual review, from any administrative oversight of the daily expenditures she authorized. Hebard later remarked that "The Trustees gave me a great deal of power, and I used it."
The university struggled financially during the recession years of the mid-1890s. The six high schools in sparsely populated Wyoming in 1894 could muster but eight graduates from which the university could seek to enroll freshman students. The under-funded university relied upon federal research grants to its Agricultural Experiment Station. The president of the board of trustees, with Hebard as secretary, chaired this important arm of the university. Hebard consolidated her position with the Agricultural Experiment Station, as she had with the trustees, into one of decision-making authority.
The influence that Hebard exercised over the university finances, its president, and faculty was considerable. Rumors emerged that conflict with Hebard and her oversight of faculty appointments prompted President A. A. Johnson to resign. Her "iron rule" of campus invariably revolved around her authority over finances, including expenditures of federal grants. Questions about the use and perhaps misuse of federal funds arose, sparking increased scrutiny of the board of trustees, all of whom were Republicans.
Democratic furor at the "Republican regime" played out in the local newspapers where 1907 charges of graft and partisan awarding of university printing contracts and improper expenditures of federal grants brought fierce criticism of Hebard's authority and domination, according to university historian Deborah Hardy. The state's Democratic press piled on. One sharply worded account claimed: "It's a standing remark in Laramie that no professor or employee of the institution can hold his job without being branded 'OK' by Miss Secretary Hebard, and whenever she decrees it the president's head will fall in the basket." Yet despite the uproar, a governor-appointed investigative commission found "that there had been no interference by Miss Hebard." Nonetheless, still under attack from the press and internally at the university, Hebard resigned as secretary to the trustees.
The end of Hebard's university administrative career in 1908 marked the beginning a rich phase in her teaching, writing, and field research. In 1908, the same university board which had been under the harsh spotlight of public criticism during Hebard's tenure as trustee appointed her as full professor. Hebard held the post until she died 28 years later.
Author Grace Hebard continued breaking new ground when she became the university's first librarian. Hebard assumed the role of librarian, without pay, beginning in 1894. She established a library from some "sacks of books" that she found in a small locked room at the university. Hebard received appointment as the university's first official librarian in 1908. Hebard continued serving as librarian until 1919. The catalogued collection of books had grown to 42,000 volumes by the end of her tenure. Hebard launched her formal career as a classroom teacher when she received an appointment in 1906 as the university's head of the Department of Political Economy.
Hebard extended her academic activities to include serving on an advisory board for the Wyoming Historical Association. This affiliation helped point her towards her new research pursuit, spearheading trail marking in Wyoming for the Oregon Trail and other pioneer routes. Hebard's work included mapping old trails in Wyoming, particularly the Oregon Trail. However, she contributed more than cartography. Hebard began collecting historical documents and other materials regarding Wyoming history.
Moreover, she traveled the state, seeking interviews with Old West pioneers and spent several summers among the Shoshone Indians of Wyoming. Prior to 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. Her often romanticized view of the Old West shaped the books that she wrote on Wyoming history. Hebard's published works include: The Government of Wyoming (1904), The Pathbreakers from River to Ocean (1911), The Bozeman Trail (1922), co-author with E.A. Brinninstool (collaboration done entirely via correspondence) Washakie (1930), Sacajawea (1933)