Kate (Warthen) Searcy was an early homesteader in western Kansas, in addition to being a schoolteacher, author, and newspaper editor. This collection includes her family correspondence and some records related to her career, as well as photographs and other personal materials.

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.