Mary Alice was a Renaissance woman. Born in the mid 1800s, she was the offspring of an illiterate Gypsy girl and the black sheep of a prosperous family. Through the leading of the Holy Spirit and the kindness of a wealthy relative of her father, she was educated on many subjects. She married a reformed skirt chaser and they moved to Oregon, where he worked as a logger and she as a nurse/midwife. Alice, as she would become known, was a strong, intelligent and respected woman raising a family and rescuing lost souls while serving as the chief medical attendant in several logging camps in the mountains of northern Oregon.
