They stopped to rest at a farm, paid dearly for food, and prepared to travel again toward “some place we don’t know where.” A few days after September 17, Amelia gave birth to her eighth child, a boy they named Wilson. With a baby in her arms, she spent three harrowing days traveling with the rest of the family down the rushing Columbia River, using a skiff, canoes, and a flatboat. They arrived at their destination, greeted by rain, mud, and gloom. Food prices were “all too dear for poor folks,” she wrote (eggs cost one dollar a dozen), “so we have treated ourselves to some small turnips at the rate of 25 cents per dozen.”
Her husband traded two yoke of oxen for a half section of land (with half an acre already planted in potatoes) and a small, windowless log cabin. So, at last, after five months from Iowa to near Milwaukie, Oregon Territory, with her family’s future but a blank canvas, Amelia Knight again wrote in her diary, signing off, “This is the journey’s end.”
2
OH, GIVE ME A HOME
“I made a great effort to be comfortable upon very little, and simply had to do it.”1
—Frances Grummond, army wife, 1866
Outside Sacramento, California, Luzena Wilson’s wagon party met a man dressed in a clean white shirt. Luzena had not seen a clean white shirt for four months and now noted her own appearance with embarrassment. A ragged bonnet shaded her sunburned face. Her skirt bottom had worn to rags, showing her ankles, while the sleeves at her elbows hung in tatters. Without gloves, her hands had grown brown and hardened. The soles of her leather shoes flapped unattached to the uppers. Thus clad in raggedy splendor, the Wilson family arrived at their new California home.
After months on the overland trails, many settlers arrived in Oregon and California poor, ragged, thin, and sometimes disheartened, with little more than relief that they had survived the trip. “People say they would not have staid they would go right back,” wrote Martha Morrison Minto in 1844. “I would like to know how we could go back … we had no horses, nor cattle, nor anything to haul us across the plains; we had no provisions; we could not start out naked and destitute in every way.”2
Lucky travelers found families who had come before willing to rent them space until spring. Others continued housekeeping in wagons and tents, longing for real homes. At the very least, they wanted a roof overhead and a solid floor beneath their feet. Some people dug out hillsides and burrowed in, furniture and all, until better shelter could be built. In mining camps, flimsy shacks covered in tar paper sprang up overnight. Other primitive first homes included a hollow tree stump, a cave of hay bales, and an old corncrib.
Rough conditions ruled. Pioneers who’d abandoned so much on the trails arrived with few essential items to begin home life. One woman counted her possessions as a kettle, three knives, and two sheets. Another woman, who worked at a boardinghouse in California, complained of ankle-deep mud and described:
All the kitchen that I have is 4 posts stuck into the ground and covered over the top with factory cloth no floor but the ground…. I am scareing the Hogs out of my kitchen and Driving the mules out of my Dining room.3
Homesickness permeated the early months of settlement: “i wish I was home I would give all the gold in California,” lamented one woman, “i am so homesick I do not know what to do.”4 Life appeared different and harsh. Wrote Miriam Colt, “I have cooked so much out in the hot sun and smoke that I hardly know who I am, and when I look in the little looking glass I ask, ‘Can this be me?’”5
But despite crude conditions, many women remained hopeful. “I did not like it very well,” admitted one, “but after we have taken our claim and became settled once more I began to like it much better and the longer I live here the better I like it.”6
In western areas with plentiful trees, a log cabin became the first permanent home of many settlers. Early cabins, usually only one room, lacked glass windows or a wooden floor. Stones or sticks mashed together with clay built the fireplace chimneys and again served as chinking, packed in the spaces between the logs.
It wasn’t long, however, before the elements dried and shrank the chinking, allowing hot, dusty air to whistle through cracks in summer, followed by icy blasts in winter. A South Dakota woman complained that her log house “needed repair all the time” and solved the insulation problem by surrounding her home with piles of manure in the fall to keep it snug for winter. “When the smell got bad in the spring,” she noted, “we knew it was time to take the insulation away.”7 After the first year’s crop had sold, or the family business nurtured along, lofts, lean-tos, floors and window glass, as well an extra room or two, could be added.
Home on the Plains
From North Dakota down to Texas, the western plains wore a desolate and lonely face—open, arid, scoured by the wind. But the land early pioneers avoided grew more attractive with passage of the Homestead Act in 1862. The act allowed the head of a household to pay a small filing fee on a 160-acre claim at a government land office. If the family lived on the claim and farmed it for five years, the land was theirs. Many men—but also some single and widowed women—took up the challenge.
The Chrisman sisters, homesteaders in Custer County, Nebraska, outside a sod house, 1886. Nebraska State Historical Society
Women living on the Great Plains learned quickly what sort of house they’d now call home—one with no bricks, no wooden planks or logs. They had undertaken the mighty journey and left real homes behind for one-room houses made of dirt. One girl recalled her overwhelmed mother’s reaction:
When our covered wagon drew up beside the door of the one-roomed sod house that father had provided, he helped mother down and I remember how her face looked as she gazed about that barren farm, then threw her arms about his neck and gave way to the only fit of weeping I ever remember seeing her indulge in.8
Earth was the only real building material available in many parts of the plains. A sharp shovel cut sod bricks into strips about one foot wide, two feet long, and four inches thick. Each brick weighed about 50 pounds. They were stacked, grassy side down, to form the one-room house. Boards laid over door and window openings supported more sod piled on top. Loose dirt and mud filled in between the bricks. Overhead, a frame of poles covered with brush and more sod made a roof, while people trod a floor of packed-down earth underfoot.
These “soddies” offered protection and insulation against heat and cold, and they wouldn’t burn during a deadly prairie fire. But the houses’ damp mustiness was inescapable, and cleaning the dwellings seemed a fool’s work—how did you keep a dirt house clean? In rainstorms, the soddies dripped and ran with mud. Women tried tacking up yards of muslin to catch constant sprinklings of dirt from the walls and ceilings that drifted over furniture, food, and people. Mice, bugs, and snakes felt perfectly at home in these houses made of dirt. One girl remembered from her pioneering childhood,
Sometimes the bull snakes would get in the roof and now and then one would lose his hold and fall down on the bed, and then off on the floor. Mother would grab the hoe and there was something doing and after the fight was over Mr. Bull Snake was dragged outside.9
Railroad companies owned vast tracts of Western land and tempted settlers with advertisements promising, “Land for the Landless!” and “Homes for the Homeless!” Europeans arrived in the tens of thousands, each willing to face the risks for a chance to own land.
Plains weather often arrived in extremes, much like this dust storm over Midland, Texas, 1894. National Archives
Former slaves, freed after the Civil War, came too. Some established all-black communities like those in Nicodemus, Kansas, and Boley, Oklahoma. “In the earliest days,” recalled an African American pioneer woman, “each family was grateful for the help of each other family and ‘we were all on a level.’ However, later differences arose and sentiment against Negros developed.”10 Discrimination was not the only problem facing African American settlers. The plains proved a brutal challenge in themselves.
An African American family i
n Nicodemus, Kansas. www.legendsofamerica.com
Weather often arrived in extremes: withering heat, drought, wind and dust storms, downpours, hail, cyclones, bitter cold, and blizzards dumping drifts 40 feet deep. Invasions of mosquitoes, bedbugs, lice, and grasshoppers plagued families. For fuel, women continued burning dried buffalo chips or cow dung, or they gathered dried tumbleweed or twisted the tough prairie grass into sticks. Water for chores, drinking, and cooking proved in short supply. Women helped dig wells, melted snow, reused water for several tasks, and lugged it long distances from creeks or streams.
The lack of trees made life on the plains even more harsh and lonely. One woman, accompanying her husband to a distant stream to collect wood, threw her arms around a tree trunk and wept at her first sight of a tree in two years. Elizabeth Custer followed her soldier-husband General George Custer around the West and described the hardships in a land of constant glare and little shade. Nebraska author Willa Cather (1873-1947) wrote:
Trees were so rare in that country, and they had to make such a hard fight to grow, that we used to feel anxious about them, and visit them as if they were persons. It must have been the scarcity of detail in that tawny landscape that made detail so precious.11
The plains defeated some families, who gave up and retreated east. Others hung on, finding solace in sarcastic songs such as this Kansas ditty:
Ada McColl collecting chips in Kansas, 1893. Kansas State Historical Society
But Hurrah for Lane County, the land of the free
The home of the grasshopper, bedbug, and flea
I’ll sing her loud praises and boast of her fame
While starving to death on my government claim.12
However uninviting, Western lands meant financial security to many people. Both women and men put up with hard work and disasters for the mere hope of a better future. By 1910, at least 10 percent of plains homesteaders were single women. Some, divorced or widowed, had children to support. Others had never married and trekked west seeking adventure and the freedom to earn their own living.
“It Does Not Look Much Like Home”
In all corners of the West, the main job of any woman was preparing a home and caring for her family. With little to work with, Western women set to their task, creating homes from adobe bricks (a mixture of clay and straw), tar paper, sod, and logs. Wrote one Kansas woman,
The wind whistled through the walls in winter and dust blew in summer, but we papered the walls with newspapers and made rag carpets for the floors, and thought we were living well, very enthusiastic over the new country we intended to conquer.13
Homey touches made all the difference, even in a dirt house. A stack of books, colorful quilts spread over beds, or a prized musical instrument placed in a position of honor created the feeling of home. One woman insisted her family sit outdoors for a photographer, all of them posed around her ornate organ. She refused to have her sod house appear in the background!
Curtains seemed of special value in creating a civilized home, and some women sacrificed wedding dresses or fancy petticoats for the cause. Women lined packing crates with calico cloth to make dish cupboards. Wildflowers in crocks and pitchers graced tables, and geraniums coaxed to bloom on windowsills uplifted spirits. As Laura Ingalls Wilder remembered from the many moves of her pioneering childhood, when Ma’s red-and-white-checked tablecloth decked the table and her china shepherdess smiled from a special bracket Pa had made, the Ingalls family always knew they were home.
Most places were small, poor, and cheap, but as one woman proclaimed, a two-room, tar-papered shack could seem like a palace. “For was it not my home,” she asked, “after six months spent in an ox wagon?”14 Later, some Western homes rivaled houses east of the Missouri River in style and comfort: frame farmhouses, Victorian homes with all the fancy trimmings, and the grand mansions of mine owners.
Army Life
While most women strived to set down roots, army wives faced the hassle of constant transfers from fort to fort. As a new bride, Elizabeth Custer wrote to her husband, George, “I had rather live in a tent, outdoors with you than in a palace with another. There is no place I would not go to, gladly, live in gladly, because … I love you.”15
Mrs. Custer lived in army forts from North Dakota to Texas during her 12-year marriage. Newlywed Frances Roe cried herself sick on learning of another move. She resented leaving behind her belongings and a cherished pet dog. Often army families could not afford to cart all of their household possessions to their next posts. Other women helped out, buying friends’ dishes and other goods that there was no room to pack. Confided Elizabeth Custer to a friend:
Had I ever had any housekeeping desires they would long have been quenched, so frequently do we move. What things we retain from our many moving are put down in quarters never in remarkable repair.16
Army houses ranged from tents to drafty, leaky, cramped structures, infested with pests like ants and rattlesnakes. Like other Western wives, army women set to work improving the comfort of their homes with what little they had. Any items needed to spruce up their quarters, even a yard of canvas, had to be supplied by the post quartermaster, a typically stingy man who “controlled all supplies, and could make us either comfortable or the reverse, as he chose,” explained Frances Boyd.17
Elizabeth Custer with George, her husband (seated), and Tom Custer, her brother-in-law, around 1866. Elizabeth authored three books about her army life in the West. Both men died at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, June 25, 1876. Library of Congress
But just when quarters seemed homelike, an army wife might face the perils of “ranking out.” When a new officer arrived at a fort, he claimed the best quarters his rank allowed, forcing officers of lower rank into other housing. Frances Boyd, stationed in New Mexico with her husband and three little children, was bumped from a four-room house into one room by the arrival of an unmarried captain. While the captain generously allowed the Boyds a four-week grace period because the children were ill, another army wife had only three hours to vacate her home.
As an added insult, an officer’s low pay had to cover food, travel, moving expenses, and other necessities. With eggs (when available) selling for two dollars a dozen at the fort’s supply store, butter for $2.50 a pound, and kerosene fuel at five dollars a gallon, army families remained poor and hungry. Fresh fruit, vegetables, and dairy were nearly unheard of. “The cookbooks were maddening to us,” wrote Elizabeth Custer, “for a casual glance at any of them proves how necessary eggs, butter, and cream are to every recipe.”18 The Boyds existed on bacon, beans, flour, rice, coffee, tea, and sugar, with dried apples as a treat.
There were officers who felt a woman had no business on the military scene, and some enlisted men disliked the extra work required when a woman traveled with the regiment. The women tried hard not to burden anyone, and Elizabeth Custer claimed proudly that she could bathe and dress in seven minutes and be ready to march. Frances Boyd, while traveling in New Mexico, recalled her greatest praise came from a captain who said she’d “never caused one moment’s delay or trouble.”19
But officers’ wives resented military regulations and protocols that ignored them completely. Elizabeth Custer complained that the regulation book went into great detail about every little thing, even the number of hours that bean soup should boil, so that “it would be natural to suppose that a paragraph or two might be wasted on an officer’s wife!”20 What really riled the well-bred, educated women married to officers was the fact that the army looked upon them as camp followers, the same as laundresses, or worse, prostitutes. The strict military separation between an officer and his men carried over to the army wives, and an officer’s lady did not socialize with an enlisted man’s wife or a company laundress.
All military wives shared the same fears for their husbands’ and their families’ safety in the Western wilds. They often lived in “hostile” country surrounded by Native Americans fighting to keep their homelands. Though the army wife wat
ched her husband march out to heroic tunes and the sentimental strains of “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” Elizabeth Custer noted that “no expedition goes out with shout and song, if loving, weeping women are left behind.”21
“Very Little Female Society”
Most women, especially during the early months of pioneering, missed female companionship. Many echoed Frances Grummond’s joy at learning four other women lived at her new army fort: “Here we were again among women…. Hope sprang up!”22 A rancher’s wife described her California home as beautiful but lonely. “We are miles from our nearest neighbor,” she wrote, “and they only men. I was alone with my children most of the time for the first four months, my husband being away attending to business interests.”23 Another woman welcomed the railroad reaching into her area, connecting her with the life and family she had known before she went west.
Sometimes months passed between visits with another woman—a white woman, that is. Native American women lived throughout the American West, and Mexican and Spanish women had lived in the Southwest for over a century. But white women, carting old prejudices and fears to the frontier, were not always ready to befriend the women who already called the West home.
For many hardworking women, the lack of females in their new Western homes blossomed into economic opportunity. In the California mining camps especially, women’s skills flourished under a wave of high demand. As one California pioneer excitedly planned, “A woman that can work will make more money than a man, and I think now that I shall do that.”24
Women of the Frontier Page 4