“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