Essay Read by Constituting America Founder, Actress Janine Turner
Under the Homestead Act of 1862, any person age 21 or older who headed a household and filed for American citizenship was eligible to claim federal land. Although women seldom receive any recognition, many settlers were females. In fact, twelve to twenty percent of the homesteaders in Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, North and South Dakota, and Utah were single women.
These gutsy unmarried ladies crossed the country to acquire up to 160 acres of federal land in their name. Advances in travel helped. By the early 1900s, a woman could board a train with her belongings and make the sojourn in a few days instead of months. Then a government land locator took her to locate her claim by wagon or Model T.
Willa Cather, a celebrated author of the 1900s, was nine years old when her immigrant family left Virginia to settle on the dusty Nebraskan prairie. They struggled to adapt to this difficult and often unrewarding life in the desolate midland plains without a tree in sight. They ultimately left their homestead and moved into the tiny town of Red Cloud. Willa then delivered mail on horseback to many remote farms. These raw experiences as a pioneer child became the unique fodder for her novels, filled with vivid descriptions of the rural brown landscape of the Great Plains.
Florence Blake Smith, a bookkeeper from Chicago, learned about homesteading from a male friend. “If he could do it, I could, too,” she thought and saved her money to support herself for the required time on the claim. Then she persevered until the “free land” became hers. Her success was not unusual. Women homesteaders succeeded at the same rate as men.
Another woman from Chicago, Nellie Burgess, 31, answered the “call of the outdoors,” gave up her reporter’s job, and filed a claim near the Snake River in Idaho. She “proved up” her claim after homesteading the land for five years. In the meantime, she also developed into an accomplished hunter, gardener, and fisherwoman.
The three Chrisman sisters took advantage of the Homestead Act and similar laws, each filing independent claims for adjoining land acres in Custer County, Nebraska, starting in 1886. They relied on their own labor to build their houses from sod. When the fourth sister, Ruth, reached the appropriate age, the good land was taken. So, she became a teacher and then a practical nurse.
These unmarried sisters alternated from living together to establishing separate farms and living self-sufficiently on the prairie. Ruth recalled picking fruit during the summers. “I can remember how we used to gather wild fruit in the canyons. Such delicious plums and raspberries – and the grass would be over our heads. Summer months were beautiful, such wonderful rains – never heard of droughts those days. But the winters were quite severe.”
Ruth also recounted the Blizzard of 1888, nicknamed the Schoolchildren’s Blizzard. She was at school during the deadly storm. “We had no fuel to burn but corn stalks – so we had to ‘move out.’ We went with the storms to the nearest neighbor, a widowed lady. She was out of fuel, too – had to burn some old chairs to keep us warm.”
Since the government recognized husbands as the heads of households, women often delayed marriage so they could maintain their land claims. Although Ruth never married, her three older sisters did later. Thus, a successful life of homesteading and marriage was possible.
Some women preferred the single life, defying society’s expectations. For example, Alice Newberry cooked for a hired hand and taught in a country school in eastern Colorado. Then she wrote to her mother that marriage seemed unattractive because “cooking three meals a day, 365 days a year for the term of my natural life, is more than I can face.” A South Dakota homesteader told a reporter that her life felt empty in a huge house. “Now I have my 10×12 house, my yellow land and my freedom, and I think that life contains everything.”
Not all these unmarried women homesteaders were young. A 47-year-old divorcee, Geraldine Lucas, settled at the base of the Grand Teton in Wyoming in 1912 and became the second woman to climb its peak. Widows also used homesteading to support their families. Elinore Pruitt Stewart is the best-known due to her letters describing her pioneering life in Wyoming with her daughter. Atlantic Monthly first published them, and then they became a book, Letters of a Woman Homesteader.
With the unyielding perseverance of these pioneering women, it’s no wonder the Western states were the first to grant women the right to vote and give their consent in a growing republic.
Libby Carty McNamee is a speaker, lawyer, and award-winning author of “Susanna’s Midnight Ride,” “Dolley Madison and the War of 1812,” and “The Union Spymistress: The Story of Elizabeth Van Lew” and their Study Guides. She is also Co-Editor of “The Epic Story of 1776” and “The Epic Story of 1777-1779.”
Libby lives with her husband in Richmond, Virginia, with a son in college. She is a graduate of Georgetown University and Catholic University School of Law. She practiced law in firms and corporations and served as a major in the U.S. Army JAG Corps in South Korea, Washington State, Bosnia, and Germany.
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