ELLEN C. SABIN is the only frontier woman in this story. Born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, in 1850, she was the eldest of eleven and began teaching in a little country schoolhouse on the prairie. At age fifteen, she entered UW-Madison, which she left after three years. By nineteen she was Principal of the Fourth Ward School in Madison. Although she'd never graduated from a college, she was in her lifetime honored with the degrees of M.A., Litt.D., and LL.D. from UW-Madison, Beloit, and Grinnell. She presided over Downer and Milwaukee Colleges for over thirty years, retired at age seventy, and lived to be ninety-nine.

Sabin's outstanding vigor and rise in the world began to show when she was twenty-two. Her father moved the family to Oregon for the gold rush. Ellen, finding the Oregon school "a dilapidated building located in a sea of mud," recreated her frontier schoolhouse in the tough wharf district of Eugene.