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WHEN Edith Ammons Kohl’s story of homesteading in early twentieth-century South Dakota first appeared in 1938, it presented a lively, readable account of the north-central Plains frontier. Almost half a century later, its appeal and historical value endure. Land of the Burnt Thigh pithily and engagingly draws the reader into the trials and triumphs of young Edith Eudora Ammons and her sister Ida Mary as they struggled to “prove up” homesteads in South Dakota. In 1907 they took up a claim midway between Pierre and Presho, South Dakota; a year later, the sisters tried their luck on another claim on the Lower Brulé Indian Reservation, the land known to the Sioux Indians as “Burnt Thigh” and to settlers as “The Strip.”¹

Kohl’s chronicle also posed a question that has bedeviled historians, librarians, and reviewers ever since. In her opening “Word of Explanation,” Kohl herself raised the issue of whether her yarn is autobiography or fiction. She noted that the story she told was not hers alone, but that of “the present-day pioneers, who settled on that part of the public lands called the Great American Desert, and wrested a living from it at a personal cost of privation and suffering” (p. ix–x). Her graceful style and use of quotes throughout the narrative lend credence to the view that her book is more fiction than fact. On the other hand, the story is told in the first person, its details perfectly fit those of the Ammons sisters’ lives, and it relates extremely personal events and emotions. In addition, the publisher’s advertising flyers and several of the book’s reviewers stressed the autobiographical nature of the work. It seems most likely that Kohl was simply trying to place her own experiences in the context of a larger historical trend, rather than denying the validity of the story she tells.²

Although Kohl saw her sister and herself as one small part of the “regiments” of men and women who “marched” as homesteaders into the South Dakota desert during the opening decade of the twentieth century (p. ix), she did not seem aware that they were also part of an army of women homesteaders, another phenomenon of that decade. This is not surprising. Indeed, “girl homesteaders,” as they were often called, have received only slight attention from historians. Yet land office data clearly demonstrate their existence. Records in Lamar, Colorado, and Douglas, Wyoming, for example, indicate that in the years 1887, 1891, 1907, and 1908, an average of 11.9 percent of the homestead entrants were women. The evidence further reveals that 42.4 percent of the women proved up their final claims while only 37 percent of the men did so.³

Despite their “male” actions in attempting to create farmsteads on the demanding Plains frontier, women homesteaders were not thought oddities in their own time. Spurred on first by the Homestead Act of 1862 that offered 160 acres and later by the Kincaid Act of 1904 that upped the stakes to 320 acres, women enthusiastically flocked to the Plains. They were seeking investments, trying to earn money to finance additional education for themselves, looking for husbands, or hoping to find a way to support themselves and sometimes several children after the loss of a spouse through death, divorce, or desertion. As the beneficiaries of a slowly liberalizing attitude toward women during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they were free of widespread criticism by their contemporaries. The emergence of a more egalitarian family form also helped legitimize the actions of women who supported themselves as homesteaders.

The letters, diaries, and reminiscences of women homesteaders on the Great Plains provide us with invaluable records of the activities, hardships, rewards, values, and attitudes of these female settlers. Ranging from a diary published in a state historical journal to an original handwritten letter in a local archive, the writings of women homesteaders also offer a context for Edith Kohl’s narrative. By contrasting their stories with those of the Ammons sisters, it becomes clear that the two young women were indeed part of a broad and ongoing historical movement.

Numerous young, single woman claimants were initially more intent upon establishing ownership of a piece of land in the West than spending their lives living on it and developing it. Like them, the Ammons sisters, both unmarried and in their twenties at the time, seemed to be looking for a wise investment for their futures as they made their initial homestead claim in 1907. They seemed to be afflicted by what Enid Bern, a member of a North Dakota homesteading family, later termed “Homestead Fever,” a “strange malady” that seized all types of people. Bern believed that the unmarried women and men homesteaders “formed an interesting segment of the population” and that “their presence added zest to community life, perhaps because of their youthfulness and varied personalities.”⁴

Although a large number of women homesteaders were young, single women like Edith and Ida Mary, there were many widowed and divorced ones as well. “Widow Fergus,” homesteading with her young son, was the first woman to visit the Ammons sisters and soon became one of their dearest friends (p. 21–22). Other examples abound. A widow with two small children became a homesteader in the early 1880s, when she learned that a number of her friends were leaving for Kansas to enter timber claims. She recalled, “I jumped up, saying, ‘I am going to Kansas.’ In a few minutes I left the door with my collar in my mouth and putting on my cuffs, and I was soon on the train to join the western party.”⁵ A divorced woman with a four-year-old daughter boarded a train for Montana, where she chose a 360-acre homestead, while another joined an Oklahoma land run to obtain a homestead to support herself and her four-month-old child.⁶

It was also not unusual for married women to retain and work their claims on their own after marriage. Although Ida Mary Ammons left her share of the claim to Edith after her marriage to Imbert Miller in 1909, many others wanted to add to a husband’s farm or ranch through their own homesteading efforts. Former Denver washwoman Elinore Pruitt continued to hold her Wyoming claim after she married cattle rancher Clyde Stewart in 1910. Because the boundary line of her claim ran within two feet of Stewart’s house, her claim shack was erected as an addition to his home. Despite this joint housing, Elinore Pruitt Stewart insisted that she did not allow her husband to help her with her claim, for she wanted the “fun and experience” herself.⁷

While the need to improve their financial situations clearly attracted women of all ages and marital statuses to the Plains, they were also drawn by what Enid Bern called the “enchantment of the prairie” and Kohl described as the “wild adventure” of homesteading.⁸ Abbie Bright, a single homesteader in Kansas, claimed that her “desire to cross the Mississippi and a love of traveling” lured her to a homestead. In 1904, Martha Stoecker of Iowa enthusiastically accepted her brother’s invitation to join a party of homesteaders; after giving the matter more thought, she realized that the “thrill” of taking up land on her own fascinated her. She also thought that the undertaking was a great opportunity to see Dakota, “that awfully barren state we’d heard so much about in the song ‘Dakota Land’”—a dubious inducement, since the song ended with the lines, “We do not live, we only stay/We are too poor to get away.”⁹

The costs of homesteading seemed relatively modest to most women, although expenses naturally varied depending upon the region, era, improvement level of the claim, and expectations of the individual. The Ammons sisters figured that their land, claim shack, food, fuel, and other necessities would total approximately $300.00. They held costs down by claiming a “relinquishment” or “improved” homestead that a bachelor forfeited after building a claim shack on it because he could not endure the loneliness (p. 8). In 1887, twenty years before the Ammons migrated to South Dakota, homesteader Susan Carter paid only $21.75 for her Nebraska claim and its shack, including a stove and rudimentary furniture. She then spent another $5.10 on flour, groceries, and soap, $3.75 on dishes and a lamp, $3.00 on a cupboard and chairs, and $.35 on thread and needles, for a total capital investment of $33.95.¹⁰ Another woman’s homestead expenses in 1909 were about $15.00 for transportation to South Dakota, $14.00 for the initial filing fee, $4.00 an acre to have sod broken, $50.00 for a shack, and $80.00 in additional fees if proving up in fourteen months rather than in five years. It did not take her long to decide that the “five year plan” with its minimal proving-up fee was for her.¹¹ A Wyoming woman of the same period saved receipts showing that she paid $23.48 in claim filing fees, $.48 for a pound of bacon, $.15 for a container of milk, and $.15 for two Hershey bars.¹²

Once on their claims, women frequently discovered that the low costs and aura of adventure were more than offset by the hard work involved in their enterprises. Edith Kohl declared her sister and herself to be “wholly unfitted for the frontier” having “neither training nor physical stamina for roughing it” (p. 6). Yet they were far from alone in their predicament, for while many women homesteaders came from farm backgrounds, many also came from towns and cities. Despite their lack of preparation, the women rallied an unbelievable store of courage as well as a willingness to tackle chores and master new skills. One Nebraska woman learned to use a rifle, once killing a “pesky gopher” and another time “5 little birds to make broth of.”¹³ Anna and Ethel Erickson, sisters who homesteaded in North Dakota, not only learned to use rifles, but became adept at carpentry and hanging wallpaper as well.¹⁴

Women homesteaders turned to men for help when confronted by tasks that were beyond their strength or ability. The Ammons sisters relied upon neighboring homesteaders and cowpunchers for occasional aid while other women sought help from fathers, brothers, friends, and hired hands. Although Nebraska homesteader Susan Carter planted her own corn and beans, she hired a man to dig her well while her future husband broke sod for her.¹⁵ Similarly, Abbie Bright of Kansas planted her corn, hoed her beans and peas, and made improvements on her claim shack, but paid to have a dugout bored into a hillside and relied upon her brother Phillip to do the heavy work of the claim.¹⁶ Bess Corey of South Dakota had no male friend or relative to call upon, so she hired men to break sod, construct fencing, erect her frame shack, and build a dam.¹⁷

Primitive housing also presented a problem to women homesteaders. The Ammons sisters’ horrified reaction to their first claim shack was a common one among women homesteaders who were dismayed by the crude state of their homes and furnishings. Dimensions of these shacks were typically nine feet by twelve feet, twelve feet square, or twelve feet by fourteen feet. They ranged from frame shacks, covered inside and out with tarpaper or flattened tin cans (as protection from the harsh winds and cold of the Plains), to dugouts in hillsides or huts made of strips of sod ripped from the ground with plows. Furniture was wooden and often homemade; a cupboard made of wooden boxes, painted or wallpapered and hung with muslin curtains, was a universal feature. Bedticks were stuffed with cornhusks, hay, or slough grass while small cookstoves burned “cats” of twisted hay, buffalo “chips,” or scarce wood and coal. A precious clock, rocking chair, or mirror, carefully transported across the Plains by a determined owner, sometimes supplemented these sparse furnishings. The rooms were completed by curtains, a crucial household item for most plainswomen, who made them of muslin, petticoats, or old sheets. Other household items appeared as a result of women’s inventiveness: a table with two loose boards designed to serve as an ironing board or an old trunk placed outdoors to be used as a refrigerator.¹⁸

Women expressed great pride in the improvements they added to their claim shacks, shanties, sod huts, and dugouts. Edith Kohl explained that “from the moment we began to make improvements, transforming the shack, it took on an interest for us out of all proportion to the changes we were able to make” (p. 27). In other words, women quickly began to invest part of themselves in these strange dwelling places, turning them bit by bit into homes that functioned as effective workplaces, sometimes even boasting a small touch of elegance. The things that could be accomplished by a determined woman within the walls of a diminutive claim shack were often remarkable. A Kansas homesteader of 1886 recalled that she dug a cellar under her twelve-foot-square shack where she stored her fuel “to keep it from blowing away,” furnished her abode with a bed, trunk, bookcase, wardrobe, cookstove, and cupboards made of “goods-boxes,” and on one occasion entertained twenty-two people with a dinner of boiled ham, baked beans, brown bread, pickled eggs, potato salad, and cake.¹⁹

Homelike as they may have become, homesteads still presented a number of inconveniences and even threats to their owners’ safety. Ida Mary Ammons feared that deadly rattlesnakes were “taking the country” (p. 136). These snakes were a potentially lethal nuisance for all women homesteaders who soon learned to carry weapons and exercise great care in picking up anything. Bess Corey depicted her South Dakota claim as “a regular rattle snake den,” insisting that “it’s nothing to kill half a dozen just crossing it.”²⁰ A Nebraska woman “formed the habit of taking a garden hoe” with her whenever she walked “since it was an unwritten law that no rattler should be allowed to get away.”²¹ Martha Stoecker had a particularly sobering contact with rattlers on her claim when she fell asleep outdoors: “When I awoke there was a big rattler coiled up on top of the bank of dirt thrown up against the shack rattling like fury, about 10 or 12 feet away. I was frightened, got up and went inside and loaded my rifle. I took aim and fired, hit it in the middle, and how it rattled and hissed. I waited a little while until I was calm and quit shaking and then fired again and blew its head to bits. I took the hoe and chopped the rattles off. There were nine. I still have them.” Stoecker never slept outdoors again.²²

A myriad of other problems faced women homesteaders as well. One Nebraska woman of 1909 recalled with distaste “gumbo mud,” scarce water, and torrential spring rains.²³ Others disliked the scorching sun, the drying effect of the wind and hard water on their faces, the high prices, the lack of flowers and trees, and the ever-present dust that no amount of housecleaning could remove.²⁴

Edith Kohl particularly sympathized with homesteaders terrorized by searing droughts, and she plaintively described the experience (p. 268–79). People were forced to keep close watch over their combustible crops and to haul water for drinking, cooking, and washing over long distances, either in pails attached to ill-fitting wooden neck yokes or in barrels on cumbersome water sleds. As debates raged concerning the possibilities of irrigation or the fallowing method of planting, women and men worked together burrowing holes deep into parched soil in hopes that it would yield water. Like the homesteaders Kohl portrayed, settlers all over the Plains prayed fervently, searched the skies in desperation for a sign of rain, and, when it finally appeared, ran out into the downpour to literally drink it in.²⁵

Even more dramatic and impressive is Kohl’s vivid depiction of the prairie fires that resulted when homes, out-buildings, and fields became parched. These huge conflagrations turned the sun red, whipped the wind into a deafening roar, and sent blinding billows of smoke over the land.²⁶ Fires posed a menace to crops, stock, and farm buildings as well as to homes, children, and small animals. One North Dakota man cried aloud in 1889 when he saw his barn and horses destroyed by fire, while his wife fought in vain to save the cows and chickens.²⁷ The Ammons sisters struggled valiantly and unsuccessfully to salvage part of their claim, businesses, and home from the raging fire that wiped them out in 1909, just as they were to finalize their claim on the Lower Brulé (p. 253–67).

Fierce rains and snowstorms were another scourge of Plains living. Torrential downpours, floods, and blizzards often caught women alone in homes or in schoolrooms with small children to protect. Edith Kohl remembered simply as “The Big Blizzard” a furious storm that caught her and Ida Mary without adequate fuel, forcing them out on the snowswept Plains in search of help (p. 185–98). Others wrote of rain, hail, snowstorms, and cyclones that knocked down stovepipes, broke windows, caved in roofs, flooded houses, ruined furniture, destroyed gardens, killed chickens, quickly reduced scanty stocks of food, and even froze brothers, husbands, sons, and grandfathers to death.²⁸

Perhaps the most common problem, however, one that plagued homesteaders of all genders and marital statuses, was raising the cash necessary to hold on to and prove up their claims. Husbands frequently sought employment away from their claims as farm hands, railroad laborers, or construction workers, while their wives and children “held down” the family farm by living on it and often actually farming it themselves. Because land was difficult to conquer but also crucial to family survival on the Plains, women may have felt unusual pressure to demonstrate that people could endure, and perhaps even prosper, on a Plains farmstead. In order to prove that “farming was as good as any other business,” Laura Ingalls Wilder of South Dakota and many other plainswomen lived alone or with their children on isolated farms for months on end.²⁹ Another example was Christine Ayres, a German woman who not only stayed alone on the Wyoming homestead held by her and her husband, but raised pigs and horses, “broke” eighty acres, and planted all the crops.³⁰

Women homesteaders, however, had to rely upon their own labor to bring in the necessary money. Ida Mary, like thousands of others, became a schoolteacher. So also did Martha Stoecker, who began teaching in 1904 in a single room furnished only with “a fine, big hard coal stove, old rickety table, a chair, two planks and four boxes.”³¹ When Ida Mary decided to establish a post office and store, she was pursuing another popular way to try to raise money. Even Edith’s newspaper work was not highly unusual. Kansas homesteader Abbie Bright wrote for the Wichita Tribune; other women became skilled typesetters and printers.³² Of course, Edith Ammons Kohl did display an extra measure of grit and talent in producing a newspaper. When Edith took over the McClure Press, a recently founded local paper largely composed of public notices that were necessary to prove up a claim, she worked for western newspaper magnate Edward L. Senn, known as the “Final-Proof King.” Kohl later described Senn as having helped tame the West “with printer’s ink instead of six-shooters.” She used the experience she gained in working for Senn to establish and publish her own newspaper, the Reservation Wand, after she moved to the Lower Brulé in 1908.³³ The difficulties involved in homesteading overwhelmed some women who, like Edith and Ida Mary in their early days, could think only of returning to their former homes. One woman explained that she was fond of life on the Plains, but was not able to secure an adequate living from her land. With her old job awaiting her in Chicago, she reluctantly proved up her claim as a future investment and left South Dakota. Assessing her homesteading years, she later wrote: “From a business standpoint the whole venture was a losing game, since I did not realize enough from my holding to cover what I had spent. But I have always considered it a good investment … I had a rested mind and a broadened outlook. I always say—and mean it—that I would not give up my pioneering experience for a fortune.”³⁴ Others simply felt that life on the Plains was too different from the homes and lives they had known. In 1911, Anna and Ethel Erickson decided that they did not want to live permanently in North Dakota: “It’s too much of a change.” Although the sisters liked the state, they longed for all the amenities of their Iowa home.³⁵

In spite of the difficulties, many other women clung to their dreams and slowly discovered numerous aspects of the home-steading experience to enjoy and cherish. They waxed eloquent concerning the beauty of the Plains, remarked upon the friendliness of their neighbors, and emphasized the opportunities available to them. Many found the comradeship involved in homesteading to be especially satisfying. Myrtle Yoeman, a 1905 homesteader in South Dakota, was pleased that her grandmother’s, father’s, and aunt’s claims all lay within a few miles of her own.³⁶ Mary Culbertson and Helen Howell, friends homesteading together in Wyoming in 1905, settled on adjoining claims and built one house straddling both pieces of land in which they both lived, each sleeping on her own side of the property line.³⁷ The Ammons sisters also recognized the importance of such collegiality. They undertook their land gamble in “west-river” South Dakota, that is, west of the Missouri River, as a team. When they felt disillusioned and despairing upon first viewing their “improved” claim with its ten-foot-by-twelve-foot tarpaper shack, they found their spirits buoyed and their resolution restored by other women homesteaders in the area. These women seemed to have little interest in self-pity (p. 2–7, 12–13, 21–23).

The Ammons sisters also came to recognize the many advantages offered women by homesteading. Soon after they arrived in South Dakota, they realized that although women homesteaders worked hard, they also led satisfying lives, took delight in the countyside, and frequently lost their desire to return to their former homes. Edith and Ida Mary began “making friends, learning to find space restful and reassuring instead of intimidating, adapting our restless natures to a country that measured time in seasons” and sinking their own roots into “that stubborn soil.” Although the Plains environment was demanding, Kohl came to believe that a woman “had more independence here than in any other part of the world.” When she was told, “The range is no place for clingin’ vines, ‘cause there hain’t nothin’ to cling to,” she felt she was learning to meet the challenge. For her, the hardships of life on the Plains “were more than compensated for by its unshackled freedom … The opportunities for a full and active life were infinitely greater here … There was a pleasant glow of possession in knowing that the land beneath our feet was ours” (p. 27, 38, 65, 84).

A number of studies of women homesteaders have unearthed more evidence of the rewards women reaped by homesteading: expanded responsibilities and power within the family and community, a rapidly improving standard of living, great possibilities for future economic gains, and greater equity, new friendships, and mutual reliance between women and men. As a result of these opportunities, large numbers of women participated in such land runs as those staged in Oklahoma during the 1890s and early 1900s and described by Kohl when the Rosebud Indian Reservation was opened to white settlement in 1908. Despite the incredible tension and even violence associated with these contests, women participants were numerous and hundreds of their names appear in the lists of claimants later registered in the land offices.³⁸

Edith and Ida Mary Ammons typified women homesteaders in many ways, including their responses to the numerous American Indians they encountered after they moved to their claim on the Lower Brulé Indian Reservation in 1908. Edith related sentiments that today seem naive, racist, or totally laughable. Yet, placed in the context of their time and other women’s reactions to native peoples, the Ammons sisters’ emotions were not at all unusual.

There were few frontierswomen who did not feel a shiver of dread regarding their first contact with American Indians. When Edith and Ida Mary moved to their claim on the Lower Brulé Reservation, neither had ever seen an Indian except as a performer in a Wild West show. Terrified when a group of natives approached on horseback, they locked themselves in their shack, peering in fright through a crack in the blind. They heard “savage mutterings,” including the phrase “How kill ’em?” Finally, the sisters emerged from their hiding-place to confront the “savage-looking creatures” who, it turned out, wanted to trade a horse for sugar, tobacco, and other staples (p. 105–6). Obviously well-schooled in the alarmist rumors, titillating captivity narratives, and terrifying stories of scalping that abounded in the nineteenth century, these two young women could hardly have reacted sensibly. Women similarly steeped in anti-Indian prejudice and wild tales of Indian “atrocities” shared their generalized feeling of terror. For example, Allie Busby, a young woman visiting the quiet Mesquakis at the Tama Agency in Iowa in 1886, well after the end of the region’s frontier period, admitted that when she saw what were her “first” Indians, “Wild visions of tomahawk or scalping knife arose, while the Indian of romance disappeared altogether” from her mind.³⁹

The Ammons sisters fell into another common trap when they let the joshing and frightening stories of a cowhand called Sourdough convert their fears into outright panic. Imploring him to keep watch outside their door, they spent a miserable night awaiting certain scalping and death. In the morning, with hair intact, they ventured outdoors only to learn that Sourdough had laughingly abandoned them and ridden off to watch his herd instead (p. 107–9). Traveler Cyrus Hurd, noting such storytelling and “jokes” all across the frontier, became disgusted with it all: “It will do in the States to tell those stories for fun, but when you come to the spot it ain’t so pleasant.” Some years later, in 1864, Mallie Stafford lamented the enthusiasm of story-tellers gathered around a flickering fire in the heart of Colorado’s “Indian Country.” She explained that “the conversation naturally, under the circumstances, centered on Indian stories, Indian attacks, crossing the plains, etc., and as the night wore on they grew more and more eloquent—it seemed to me they were gifted with an awful eloquence on that particular subject.”⁴⁰

Once intimidated, women were often unable to make wise decisions regarding American Indians. In their fright, the Ammons sisters accepted a corral full of debilitated horses—“the lame, the halt and the blind,”—in trade from the Indians they were so sure were about to attack them (p. 109). They were not the first frontierswomen, made vulnerable by their own anxieties, to discover the business acumen of Indians. Westering women quickly learned that good bargains were not particularly easy to find, for many natives had as strong a streak of Yankee cunning as the Yankees themselves. “Though you may, for the time[,] congratulate yourself upon your own sagacity,” Catherine Haun noted on her way to California in 1849, “you’ll be apt to realize a little later that you were not quite equal to the shrewd redman.” A woman who moved to Montana in 1864 claimed that the Indians with whom she traded not only recognized the difference between “coin” and “greenbacks,” but would only “take the latter at 50¢ on the dollar.”⁴¹

When women got over the worst of their initial agitation, they often began to find Indians dirty, annoying, and devoid of a sense of responsibility. The Ammons sisters were no exception. They were especially irritated by native women who bore little resemblance to the slim and beautiful Indian maidens they had read about in the novels of the time (p. 107–11, 135, 181). Frontierswomen frequently described Indians as picturesque but filthy. One woman became firmly convinced that “the romance of Indian life will not bear a closer inspection—they are neither more or less than filthy savages.”⁴² Other women, who evidently neither understood native conceptions of hospitality nor questioned why once proud and self-sufficient Indians were in such economic straits, scathingly indicted them for being too lazy to do anything but beg from whites.⁴³

Gradually, however, women began to see another side of the American Indians as they came to know and sometime even to like them. Repeating a pattern that emerged all over the West, the Ammons sisters realized that Indians did not want to harm them, the problems faced by Indians were not all self-induced, and many Indians were kind and generous. From an educated Indian who spoke English proficiently, Edith learned that rather than saying “How kill ’em?” the Indians were offering the greeting “How Kola.” She seemed tickled to see Indian men working the land-run crowds in a spirit of “white” enterprise by strolling about in full native dress posing for pictures at fifty cents apiece. At the same time, Ida Mary became an adept trader and gained a reasonable knowledge of native dialects. And when the sisters were burned out in 1909, their native friends were among the first to bring corn, meat, shawls, blankets, moccasins, and other supplies (p. 109, 151, 181, 262).

Apparently, Edith and Ida Mary grew in many ways after their arrival in South Dakota in 1907. They demonstrated the ability to persevere despite overwhelming odds, to care effectively for themselves and their claims, to make money through a wide variety of jobs and enterprises, and to form fast friendships with people of all backgrounds, ages, educational levels, marital statuses, cultures, and races. They ceased pining for home; indeed, South Dakota became home to them. Their hearts belonged to the Plains and their feet were firmly planted on its sod. Yet the year 1909 was a turning point for the sisters. After a disastrous fire destroyed all they had achieved, they confronted the necessity of starting over again. Ida Mary decided to marry Imbert Miller. She moved with him to the Cedar Fork ranch and store, a small trade center outside the Lower Brulé Reservation gate. Here she briefly presided over a “real” four-room home and helped run the family business until she died in 1910 during the birth of the couple’s first child. Edith had more difficulty choosing a new direction for her life. Although Senator Francis E. Warren, impressed by her work with the Reservation Wand, offered to help her establish a newspaper farther west, Edith did not see herself as what she called a “career woman.” In her view, Ida Mary was serving the West the way women should: through “needles and thread and bread dough” and establishing a new home on the Plains. But after allowing herself to drift for a short while, Edith did accept an offer to work as a “locator” for a company intent upon colonizing Wyoming.⁴⁴

Although Edith Ammons Kohl’s narrative ends with her decision to migrate to Wyoming, her life was a long one. She married an architect and inventor, Aaron Wesley Kohl, and moved with him to Denver around 1920. After his death in 1926, Edith Kohl continued to publicize settlement opportunities in South Dakota and to encourage potential homesteaders to take up western land. On her personal stationery, she characterized herself as “Western Farm Leader & Writer.” The latter claim stemmed from her work as a feature writer for the Denver Post and her growing reputation as a Colorado author and historian. Her popular poem, “Columbine,” inspired the adoption of the columbine as the state flower of Colorado. Of the books that she wrote, Land of the Burnt Thigh was the most widely read. When Kohl died in Denver in 1959 at the age of seventy-five, she had no immediate survivors, except perhaps the Land of the Burnt Thigh itself.⁴⁵

As Kohl suggests in her opening “Word of Explanation,” the story that she tells is like a window offering a glimpse into the lives of Plains homesteaders. There is no doubt that the Ammons sisters were a part of one of the great events in the history of the United States: the opening and settlement of the Great Plains by thousands of determined women and men. But there was more to their story than even Kohl could see, for these young women were also part of a phenomenon known then as “girl homesteaders,” a trend that peaked during World War I.⁴⁶ As would-be landowners who were also female, the Ammons sisters made the history during the first decade of the twentieth century that Edith would later preserve for us to learn from and enjoy.

GLENDA RILEY

The author would like to thank Nancy Tystad Koupal, editor of South Dakota History, for her aid and encouragement.

1 Kohl explained that the name “Burnt Thigh” came from a prairie fire that swept the region in 1815. Several native boys caught in the fire threw themselves on the ground and covered themselves with their robes. The boys escaped unhurt except for burns on their thighs, a circumstance considered so remarkable that this native group was called the “people with the burnt thigh,” a term later translated to “brulé” or “burned” by a French trader. Edith Eudora Kohl, Land of the Burnt Thigh (New York: Funk & & Wagnalls, 1938), 238–39.

2 Publisher’s flyer, Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1938, South Dakota State Historical Resource Center, Pierre; Walter A. Simmons, “Woman Pens History of Brule Territory,” Sioux Falls Argus-Leader, Oct. 5, 1938; Book Review Digest, 1938, 539; Saturday Review of Literature 18 (Oct. 8, 1938): 14. For a discussion of Edith Kohl as a novelist see Ruth Ann Alexander, “South Dakota Women Writers and the Blooming of the Pioneer Heroine, 1922–1939,” South Dakota History 14 (Winter, 1984): 298–99.

3 Sheryll Patterson-Black, “From Pack Trains to Publishing: Women’s Work in the Frontier West,” in Sheryll and Gene Patterson-Black, Western Women in History and Literature (Crawford, Nebr.: Cottonwood Press, 1978), 5–6. See also Sheryll Patterson-Black, “Women Homesteaders on the Great Plains Frontier,” in ibid., 15–31, and “Women Homesteaders on the Great Plains Frontier,” Frontiers 1 (Spring 1976): 67–88. Other historians who mention the prevalence of women homesteaders include Everett Dick, The Sod-House Frontier, 1854–1890 (New York: Appleton-Century Company, 1937), 129; Dick, “Free Homes for the Millions,” Nebraska History 43 (Dec. 1962): 221; and Mary W. M. Hargreaves, “Women in the Agricultural Settlement of the Northern Plains,” Agricultural History 50 (Jan. 1976): 182.

4 Enid Bern, “The Enchanted Years on the Prairies,” North Dakota History 40 (Fall 1973): 5, 11.

5 Serena J. Washburn, Autobiography, 1836–1904, Montana State University Library Special Collections, Bozeman. For other examples, see Cora D. Babcock, Reminiscences, 1880–85, and Fanny Achtnes Malone, “The Experience of a Michigan Family on a Government Homestead in South Dakota,” undated, both in South Dakota State Historical Resource Center; Mary Fox Howe, Montana American Mothers Bicentennial Project, 1975–76, Montana State Historical Society, Helena; Margaret Matilda Mudgett, Pioneer Memories Collection, 1975, and Ethel Hamilton, “Ethel Hamilton of Mountain View,” 1936, both in Wyoming State Archives, Museum, and Historical Department, Cheyenne; Martha Ferguson McKeown, Them Was the Days: An American Saga of the 70s (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961); and Kate Roberts Pelissier, “Reminiscences of a Pioneer Mother,” North Dakota History 24 (July 1957): 138.

6 Katherine Grant, Montana American Mothers Bicentennial Project, 1975–76, Montana State Historical Society, Helena; Henry K. Goetz, “Kate’s Quarter Section: A Woman in the Cherokee Strip,” Chronicles of Oklahoma 61 (Fall 1983): 246–67.

7 Elinore Pruitt Stewart, Letters of a Woman Homesteader (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961), 7, 77, 216.

8 Bern, “Enchanted Years,” 7; Kohl, Burnt Thigh, 6–7. See also “Prairie Pioneers: Some North Dakota Homesteaders,” North Dakota History 43 (Spring 1976): 40.

9 Glenda Riley, “The Memoirs of a Girl Homesteader: Martha Stoecker Norby,” South Dakota History 16 (Spring 1976): forthcoming. See also Sarah Schooley Randall, “My Trip West in 1861,” in Collection of Nebraska Pioneer Reminiscences (Cedar Rapids, Iowa: Nebraska Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution, 1916), 211, and Mary Price Jeffords, “The Price Girls Go Pioneering,” in Emerson R. Purcell, ed., Pioneer Stories of Custer County, Nebraska (Broken Bow, Nebr.: Custer County Chief, 1936), 74.

10 Susan Ophelia Carter, Diary, 1887, Nebraska State Historical Society, Lincoln.

11 Paul Corey, “Bachelor Bess: My Sister,” South Dakota Historical Collections 37 (1974): 12.

12 Susan Strawbridge, Papers, 1913–28, Iowa State Historical Department, Division of Museum and Archives, Des Moines.

13 Carter, Diary.

14 Enid Bern, ed., “They Had a Wonderful Time: The Homesteading Letters of Anna and Ethel Erickson,” North Dakota History 45 (Fall 1978): 15, 17, 19.

15 Carter, Diary.

16 Abbie Bright, Diary, 1870–71, Kansas State Historical Society, Topeka.

17 Corey, “Bachelor Bess,” 15, 18. For other examples see Mrs. William Bangs, “My Homesteading Days,” undated, Montana State Historical Society; Monroe Billington, ed., “Pothook Pioneer, a Reminiscence by Ada Blayney Clarke,” Nebraska History 39 (Mar. 1958): 45, 50–52; and Ella Martfeld, “Homesteading Days,” undated, Wyoming State Archives, Museum, and Historical Department.

18 Babcock, Diary; Bangs, “Homesteading Days”; Washburn, Autobiography.

19 Washburn, Autobiography. See also Angel Kwolek-Folland, “The Elegant Dugout: Domesticity and Moveable Culture in the United States, 1870–1900,” American Studies 25 (Fall 1984): 21–37.

20 Corey, “Bachelor Bess,” 16.

21 Billington, ed., “Pothook Pioneer,” 54.

22 Riley, “Memoirs of a Girl Homesteader.” See also Elizabeth Ruth Tyler, Reminiscence, 1954, Montana State Historical Society.

23 Billington, ed., “Pothook Pioneer,” 46, 48–9. See also Frances Jacob Alberts, ed., Sod House Memories (Hastings, Nebr.: Sod House Society, 1972), 6, 51.

24 Bess Cobb to “Dear Helen,” July 31, 1907, State Historical Society of North Dakota, Bismarck; Bern, ed., “They Had a Wonderful Time,” 6, 8, 28; Charley O’Kieffe, Western Story: The Recollections of Charley O’Kieffe (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1960), 26; Roger L. Welsh, Shingling the Fog and Other Plain Lies (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1972), 126. See also Glenda Riley, “Farm Women’s Roles in the Agricultural Development of South Dakota,” South Dakota History 13 (Spring/Summer 1983): 55–62.

25 See also Myra Waterman Bickel, Lydia Burrows Foote, Eleanor Schubert, and Anna Warren Peart, Pioneer Daughters Collection, c. 1850–1955, South Dakota State Historical Resource Center; Bertha Scott Hawley Johns, Pioneer Memories Collection, 1975, Wyoming State Archives, Museum, and Historical Department; Barbara Levorsen, “Early Years in Dakota,” Norwegian-American Studies 21 (Northfield, Minn.: Norwegian American Historical Assn., 1962), 167–69; and Katherine Newman Webster, “Memories of a Pioneer,” in Old Timer’s Tales Collection, Volume II, Part I, 1971, Nebraska State Historical Society.

26 Florence Marshall, “The Early Life and Prairie Years of a Pioneer Wife and Mother,” undated, Kansas State Historical Society; Meri Reha, Pioneer Daughters Collection, South Dakota State Historical Resource Center.

27 Emily Stebbins Emery to “Dear Sister Lizzie,” Dec. 31, 1889, State Historical Society of North Dakota.

28 Mrs. R. O. Brandt, “Social Aspects of Prairie Pioneering: The Reminiscences of a Pioneer Pastor’s Wife,” Norwegian-American Studies 7 (1933): 5, 9, 26–30; Venola Lewis Bivans, ed., “The Diary of Luna E. Warner, a Kansas Teenager of the Early 1870’s,” Kansas Historical Quarterly 35 (Autumn 1969): 296; Ida Kittelson Gullikson, Jennie Larson, and Mary Louise Thompson, Pioneer Daughters Collection, South Dakota State Historical Resource Center; Carolyn Strong Robbins, Journal, 1887–88, Kansas State Historical Society.

29 Laura Ingalls Wilder, The First Four Years (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 17. See also “Mother’s Trip West in 1856 to Omaha,” undated, Bruner Family Papers, Nebraska State Historical Society; Dorothy Kimball, ed., “Alone on That Prairie: The Homestead Narrative of Nellie Rogney,” Montana the Magazine of Western History 33 (Autumn 1983): 55; Mae Waterman, Huntley Project Homesteading, 1968, Montana State University Library Special Collections, Bozeman; and Laura Ingalls Wilder, These Happy Golden Years (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1943), 114–22.

30 Lille Goodrich, Interview, Sept. 19, 1979, University of Wyoming American Heritage Center, Laramie.

31 Riley, “Memoirs of a Girl Homesteader.” See also Bangs, “Homesteading Days”; Bern, ed., “They Had a Wonderful Time,” 4–31; Bright, Diary; Carter, Diary; Corey, “Bachelor Bess,” 14, 36, 46; Catherine Wiggins Porter, “Sunday School Houses and Normal Institutes: Pupil and Teacher in Kansas, 1886–1895,” Kansas State Historical Society; Tyler, Reminiscence; Anne Wright, “Mary Alice Davis, Pioneer Woman,” 1957, Wyoming State Archives, Museum, and Historical Department.

32 Bright, Diary; Lucie Emma Dickinson Lott, Reminiscences, undated, and Jeanne L. Wuillemin, “A Homesteader’s Letter,” undated, both at South Dakota State Historical Resource Center.

33 Edith Eudora Kohl, “Frontier Crusader,” Rocky Mountain Empire Magazine, Nov. 23, 1947, and Burnt Thigh, 36–45, 89–98. For more information on Edward L. Senn see Florence Dirks Anderson, “History of Lyman County, South Dakota” (Master’s thesis, University of South Dakota, 1926), 77–78; Lawrence K. Fox, ed., Fox’s Who’s Who among South Dakotans (Pierre: Statewide Service Company, 1924), 178; and Robert F. Karolevitz, “With a Shirt Tail Full of Type: The Story of Newspapering in South Dakota,” 42, 53, South Dakota State Historical Resource Center.

34 Billington, ed., “Pothook Pioneer,” 56.

35 Bern, ed., “They Had a Wonderful Time,” 28.

36 Myrtle Yoeman to “Dear Grace,” June 24, 1905, South Dakota State Historical Resource Center.

37 Lottie Holmberg, “Experiences of Mary Culbertson,” 1939, and Mrs. Ashby Howell, Biographical Sketch, 1936, both at Wyoming State Archives, Museum, and Historical Department. See also Bern, ed., “They Had a Wonderful Time,” 6, 10–11, 14, 17, 25; Corey, “Bachelor Bess,” 65; Martfeld, “Homesteading Days”; and Martha Suckow Packer, Memoirs, Sept. 20, 1880, to Jan. 21, 1970, Montana State University Library Special Collections.

38 Katherine Hill Harris, “Women and Families on Northeastern Colorado Homesteads, 1873–1920” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Colorado, Boulder, 1983), 257–64, and “Sex Roles and Work Patterns among Homesteading Families in Northeastern Colorado, 1873–1920,” Frontiers 7 (1984): 43–49; Lonnie E. Underhill and Daniel F. Littlefield, “Women Homeseekers in Oklahoma Territory, 1889–1901,” Pacific Historian 17 (Summer 1973): 36–47; Kohl, Burnt Thigh, 143–63. For other descriptions of women participating in land runs see B. B. Chapman, “The Land Run of 1893, as Seen at Kiowa,” Kansas Historical Quarterly 31 (Spring 1965): 67–75; Goetz, “Kate’s Quarter Section,” 246–67; Charles Moreau Harger, “The Prairie Woman: Yesterday and Today,” The Outlook 70 (Apr. 26, 1902): 1009; Lynette West, “The Lady Stakes a Claim,” Persimmon Hill 6 (1976): 18–23.

39 Allie B. Busby, Two Summers among the Musquakies (Vinton, Iowa: Herald Book and Job Rooms, 1886), 75. See also Glenda Riley, Women and Indians on the Frontier, 1825–1915 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984), 83–126, and “The Specter of a Savage: Rumors and Alarmism on the Overland Trail,” Western Historical Quarterly 15 (Oct. 1984): 427–44.

40 Margaret S. Dart, ed., “Letters of a Yankee Forty-Niner,” Yale Review 36 (June 1947): 658; Mallie Stafford, The March of Empire Through Three Decades (San Francisco: George Spaulding & Company, 1884), 126–27.

41 Catherine Margaret Haun, “A Woman’s Trip across the Plains, from Clinton, Iowa, to Sacramento, California, by way of Salt Lake City,” 1849, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif.; Katherine Dunlap, Journal, 1864, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, Calif.

42 Mrs. G. B. Ferris, The Mormons at Home (New York: Dix & Edwards, 1856), 68. See also Ellen Tompkins Adams, Diary, 1863, and Mary Pratt Staples, Reminiscences, c. 1886, both at Bancroft Library; Mary Jane Guill, “The Overland Diary of a Journey from Livingston County, Missouri, to Butte County, California,” May 5 to Sept. 5, 1860, and Sallie Hester Maddock, “The Diary of a Pioneer Girl,” 1849, both at California State Library, Sacramento; Annie M. Zeigler, Interview 10088, Volume 101, Indian-Pioneer Papers, University of Oklahoma Western Heritage Center, Norman.

43 Riley, Women and Indians, 135–38.

44 Kohl, Burnt Thigh, 287, 289–96; Barbara Authier, “Reflections from Days Gone By,” Lyman County Herald (Presho, S.Dak.), Apr. 19, 1978.

45 Edith Eudora Kohl to “Gentlemen” of the State Historical Society of South Dakota, Oct. 3, no year, and Edith Eudora Kohl, Biography, South Dakota Authors’ File, both at South Dakota State Historical Resource Center; Obituary of Edith Eudora Kohl, Mitchell (S.Dak.) Daily Republican, Aug. 3, 1959.

46 For media images of women homesteaders during World War I see Harriet Joor, “The Winning of a Homestead,” Craftsman 27 (Jan. 1915): 436–40; “Women Farmers,” Breeder’s Gazette 67 (Apr. 29, 1915): 853–54; “The Lure of the West for Women,” Sunset 38 (Mar. 1917): 61; and “She Farms Alone,” Country Gentleman 83 (Aug. 10, 1918): 36–7.