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Notes for SARAH ELIZABETH GARRISON:
Sarah Elizabeth was "considered to be a great beauty. Far from being resigned, like her mother Electa, she was fanatically rebellious and uninhibited. Being congenitally fearless, and having passionately espoused the cause of temperance, she had, before she was twenty years old, already become famous for storming saloons everywhere at all hous of the day and night, and with the aid of an expertly wielded hatchet, smashing everything smashable within each establishment before rolling beer kegs into the street and while their diabolical contents gurgled into the gutter, delivering herself of fanatically emotional attacks uon the proprietor and his astounded clients. She always signalized her departure with a shower of leaflets and tracts (written by herself, and printed at Tom Garrison's expense), whose fiery imprecations should have set ablaze the pools of liquor in her wake.
She met all objections to her conduct with the statement that she was 'working for the Lord,' and from the canadian border to the Gulf of Mexico she was known as very devout and very 'cracked.'... when she was long past fifty, she went to Minnesota to work among the Swedes, met there a Swedish Lutheran minister named Cederhold, and to the unbounded amazement of all who knew her, married him. Time failed to mellow her virulent antagonisms and she was relentlessly crusading when death subdued this intractable prototype of Carrie Nation."
Source: Breasted, Pioneer to the Past, p. 7-8.
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