Emma Wagner Giesy

Emma Wagner Giesy was a German-American pioneer associated with the Bethel and Aurora communal settlements founded under the leadership of Wilhelm Keil. Born in Pennsylvania in 1833, she married Christian Giesy in Missouri and in 1853 became the only woman in the small advance party sent west to locate a new home for the community. Pregnant during the journey, she crossed the continent with the scouts and lived in the difficult Willapa settlement in Washington Territory.

Christian Giesy died in 1857, leaving Emma to support and protect her children in an isolated frontier community. In 1861 she moved from Willapa to the newer Aurora Colony in Oregon, where relatives later joined her and where she became closely associated with the communal society’s domestic and social life. She formally joined the colony in 1874 and remained linked to Aurora after its dissolution. Local historical tradition remembers her as an unusually resilient pioneer and skilled quilter. She died in 1916.

In Jane Kirkpatrick’s A Clearing in the Wild, in the Bethel Colony of 1850s Missouri, Emma Wagner Giesy resents the obedience expected of women and openly challenges the growing authority of communal leader Wilhelm Keil. In Jane Kirkpatrick’s A Mending at the Edge, Emma Giesy enters Oregon’s Aurora Colony as a mother, estranged wife and woman still uncertain whether a communal life can hold space for her gifts. Personal grief and old conflicts follow her, yet work among other marginal members of the settlement offers a route back towards purpose. In Jane Kirkpatrick’s A Tendering in the Storm, Emma Giesy is left pregnant and alone in the forests of Washington Territory, responsible for children and property while grief strips away the confidence that once sustained her.