Ruth Gaines

Ruth L. Gaines graduated from Smith College in 1901, where she wrote for the Smith College Monthly. Though she contributed a few pieces to Poetry, she was a writer of prose. In the year of her first contribution to Poetry, she published “Little Light (Lucita): A Child’s Story of Old Mexico” (1913). Her travels to Japan before World War I are recorded in Treasure Flower: A Child of Japan (1916) and City-Royal: A Memory of Kyoto (1953). From 1917 to 1919, she served with the Smith College Relief Unit in France (which operated independently of the Red Cross until late 1918). While there, Gaines wrote A Village in Picardy (1918), an account of the work performed by that unit. She also wrote Helping France: The Red Cross in a Devastated Area (1919, 2002) and Ladies of Grécourt: The Smith College Relief Unit in the Somme (1920). Later she explored and documented the history of indigenous peoples in the United States with Books on Indian Arts North of Mexico (1931) and a local pioneer history of California in Gold Rush: The Journals, Drawings, and Other Papers of J. Goldsborough Bruff, Captain, Washington City and California Mining Association, April 2, 1849 – July 20, 1851 (1949), which she co-edited with fellow Smith Unit volunteer Georgia Road. Together they also co-wrote The Village Shield: A Story of Mexico (1917, 1928). Her letters, diary, and other materials from the war are kept in the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College.