page_6 < previous page page_6 next page > Page 6 such comments were typical of the time in which Abel wrote does not excuse the attitudes they reveal but it does force us to look beyond the offensive language to a view of Native peoples that is quite modern. No mere pawns of white men, the Indians portrayed by Abel make rational decisions based on the evidence they have available. Annie Heloise Abel was born in England in 1873. 18 At the age of twelve, she emigrated with her family to Kansas. She received her undergraduate and master's degrees from the University of Kansas and studied for a year at Cornell University. In 1893 she became the first woman to receive Yale's Bulkley Fellowship; Yale awarded her Ph.D. in 1905. Her dissertation, "The History of Events Resulting in Indian Consolidation West of the Mississippi," appeared in the Annual Report of the American Historical Association in 1906.19 In that year, she moved from her first job at Wells College to Women's College of Baltimore, now Goucher College, where she remained until 1915. While she was living in Baltimore, Abel had easy access to Indian Bureau records in Washington. She began to investigate the role of Indians in the Civil War, and published an article on the subject in 1910.20 In 1915, the year the first volume of Slaveholding Indians appeared, Abel moved to Smith College. She developed an interest in British policy towards Native peoples and in 1921 she went to Australia on her sabbatical to research aboriginal policy. Abel married while she was in Australia and resigned her position at Smith. She used her husband's name, Henderson, but after they separated permanently in 1927, she adopted a hyphenated surname, Abel-Henderson. She taught briefly at Sweetbriar College and the University of Kansas before retiring in 1930 and moving to Aberdeen, Washington, to live with her sister. When  < previous page page_6 next page >