Louise Bryant - Early Life

Early Life

Bryant was born Anna Louisa Mohan in San Francisco, California. Her father, Hugh Mohan was a coal miner from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who made his way west with the Railroad crews. Her mother remarried Sheridan Bryant and Louise took her stepfather's name. The family moved to Nevada where Louise was a student at the University of Nevada. She later moved to the University of Oregon in Eugene. Her senior thesis was about the Modoc Indian War of Southern Oregon and was completed in 1908. Bryant returned to San Francisco to become a journalist after graduation but was soon nudged, for financial reasons, to teach "school" in Salinas, California in her words "in a remote area, forty miles from a train station". She also wrote that "Mexicans and Spaniards are my students." She moved back to Oregon and became involved with the Suffrage Movement in Portland, worked for the Spectator, and married Paul Trullinger.