Land of The Burnt Thigh. Edith Eudora Kohl
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