Land of The Burnt Thigh. Edith Eudora Kohl

      INTRODUCTION

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.”Скачать книгу