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Frontier Teachers: Stories of Heroic Women of the Old West
Tombstone is a historic western city in Cochise County, Arizona, United States
Among the many short news articles included in the October 5, 1886, edition of the Daily Tombstone was the announcement of a new teacher to the well-known Arizona town. Miss Sarah Herring, her four siblings, and mother, Mary, arrived in Tombstone in 1882 to join her father, mine owner and lawyer Colonel William Herring. Born on January 15, 1861, in New York, Sarah acquired her father’s desire to teach. The colonel was employed as a public schoolteacher for many years prior to moving his family West. She believed teaching children reading, writing, and arithmetic was crucial to providing stability and opportunity to their lives, and by extension bringing respectability to wild frontier communities. A year prior to Sarah riding into Tombstone, the boomtown witnessed its most notorious event, the gunfight near the O.K. Corral. She was convinced Tombstone’s rough and rugged reputation would improve by educating the youngsters who lived there.
Sarah was among several aspiring teachers summoned by the Board of School Examiners in December 1885 to take a test to determine their qualifications. She was one of four teachers that day who obtained a territorial certificate necessary to work at the school. Sarah began her career at the Tombstone school teaching first grade. The February 21, 1886, edition of the Tombstone Daily Epitaph included a brief note about her accomplishment. “Miss Herring is an excellent teacher,” the article read, “who has been tried in this city, and in her selection the Board of Trustees have acted wisely, and their appointment will be approved by every parent in this city.”
The Tombstone school board provided Sarah with the books she was to use in her classroom. Among the limited materials supplied were Appletons’ School Readers, the Elementary Spelling Book by Noah Webster, and Ray’s New Primary Arithmetic.
If not for the sudden tragedy that struck Sarah and her family in October 1891, she might have been content to remain an educator for the rest of her life. To learn what caused Sarah to leave the teaching profession, pursue another endeavor, and make history read Frontier Teachers: Stories of Heroic Women of the Old West.
