The Gladys M. Garrison papers consist primarily of letters and postcards received by her and by her Garrison and Havens family members who resided in the Kansas communities of Salina, LeRoy, and Greeley from the early 1900s.

In this memoir, written on 304 numbered leaves, Rosa B. "Rose" Garrison Hawkins, born in 1870, recalls her early years on her parents' farm in McLean County, Illinois, her elopement and marriage at age fifteen, her life as a homesteader in western Kansas and southeastern Colorado, and her return to Illinois in 1890. Her account, extending from early childhood to 1896, details the many harrowing hardships which she and her husband endured as homesteaders and overland travelers.