The Heroic Women of Early Indiana Methodism

ge and his salaries small, but that wife, that mother, was the chief of heroes. Bishop Bowman well said of her at her funeral: "She was a woman of no ordinary character, full of faith, patient, quiet, cheerful, happy."

Edwin Ray, though he died young, was a great hero. Eloquent, energetic and educated, he was second to none in everything which constituted a real hero. But when Sally Nolan, the belle of young Indianapolis, the tavern keeper's daughter, consented, at his request, to exchange her leadership of fashionable society in Indianapolis for the lot of an itinerant's wife, and to ride with him from Indianapolis to Madison on horseback to enter upon her life work, she showed a greater heroism than Edwin Ray ever did in his whole life; and when later she became his strengthening angel, when poverty and actual want stared them in the face, ministering by her heroic words when his own strong heart failed, and with her own hands making calash bonnets for her neighbors to prevent actual starvation, she