Land of The Burnt Thigh. Edith Eudora Kohl
by strolling about in full native dress posing for pictures at fifty cents apiece. At the same time, Ida Mary became an adept trader and gained a reasonable knowledge of native dialects. And when the sisters were burned out in 1909, their native friends were among the first to bring corn, meat, shawls, blankets, moccasins, and other supplies (p. 109, 151, 181, 262).
Apparently, Edith and Ida Mary grew in many ways after their arrival in South Dakota in 1907. They demonstrated the ability to persevere despite overwhelming odds, to care effectively for themselves and their claims, to make money through a wide variety of jobs and enterprises, and to form fast friendships with people of all backgrounds, ages, educational levels, marital statuses, cultures, and races. They ceased pining for home; indeed, South Dakota became home to them. Their hearts belonged to the Plains and their feet were firmly planted on its sod. Yet the year 1909 was a turning point for the sisters. After a disastrous fire destroyed all they had achieved, they confronted the necessity of starting over again. Ida Mary decided to marry Imbert Miller. She moved with him to the Cedar Fork ranch and store, a small trade center outside the Lower Brulé Reservation gate. Here she briefly presided over a “real” four-room home and helped run the family business until she died in 1910 during the birth of the couple’s first child. Edith had more difficulty choosing a new direction for her life. Although Senator Francis E. Warren, impressed by her work with the Reservation Wand, offered to help her establish a newspaper farther west, Edith did not see herself as what she called a “career woman.” In her view, Ida Mary was serving the West the way women should: through “needles and thread and bread dough” and establishing a new home on the Plains. But after allowing herself to drift for a short while, Edith did accept an offer to work as a “locator” for a company intent upon colonizing Wyoming.44
Although Edith Ammons Kohl’s narrative ends with her decision to migrate to Wyoming, her life was a long one. She married an architect and inventor, Aaron Wesley Kohl, and moved with him to Denver around 1920. After his death in 1926, Edith Kohl continued to publicize settlement opportunities in South Dakota and to encourage potential homesteaders to take up western land. On her personal stationery, she characterized herself as “Western Farm Leader & Writer.” The latter claim stemmed from her work as a feature writer for the Denver Post and her growing reputation as a Colorado author and historian. Her popular poem, “Columbine,” inspired the adoption of the columbine as the state flower of Colorado. Of the books that she wrote, Land of the Burnt Thigh was the most widely read. When Kohl died in Denver in 1959 at the age of seventy-five, she had no immediate survivors, except perhaps the Land of the Burnt Thigh itself.45
As Kohl suggests in her opening “Word of Explanation,” the story that she tells is like a window offering a glimpse into the lives of Plains homesteaders. There is no doubt that the Ammons sisters were a part of one of the great events in the history of the United States: the opening and settlement of the Great Plains by thousands of determined women and men. But there was more to their story than even Kohl could see, for these young women were also part of a phenomenon known then as “girl homesteaders,” a trend that peaked during World War I.46 As would-be landowners who were also female, the Ammons sisters made the history during the first decade of the twentieth century that Edith would later preserve for us to learn from and enjoy.
GLENDA RILEY
The author would like to thank Nancy Tystad Koupal, editor of South Dakota History, for her aid and encouragement.
1 Kohl explained that the name “Burnt Thigh” came from a prairie fire that swept the region in 1815. Several native boys caught in the fire threw themselves on the ground and covered themselves with their robes. The boys escaped unhurt except for burns on their thighs, a circumstance considered so remarkable that this native group was called the “people with the burnt thigh,” a term later translated to “brulé” or “burned” by a French trader. Edith Eudora Kohl, Land of the Burnt Thigh (New York: Funk & & Wagnalls, 1938), 238–39.
2 Publisher’s flyer, Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1938, South Dakota State Historical Resource Center, Pierre; Walter A. Simmons, “Woman Pens History of Brule Territory,” Sioux Falls Argus-Leader, Oct. 5, 1938; Book Review Digest, 1938, 539; Saturday Review of Literature 18 (Oct. 8, 1938): 14. For a discussion of Edith Kohl as a novelist see Ruth Ann Alexander, “South Dakota Women Writers and the Blooming of the Pioneer Heroine, 1922–1939,” South Dakota History 14 (Winter, 1984): 298–99.
3 Sheryll Patterson-Black, “From Pack Trains to Publishing: Women’s Work in the Frontier West,” in Sheryll and Gene Patterson-Black, Western Women in History and Literature (Crawford, Nebr.: Cottonwood Press, 1978), 5–6. See also Sheryll Patterson-Black, “Women Homesteaders on the Great Plains Frontier,” in ibid., 15–31, and “Women Homesteaders on the Great Plains Frontier,” Frontiers 1 (Spring 1976): 67–88. Other historians who mention the prevalence of women homesteaders include Everett Dick, The Sod-House Frontier, 1854–1890 (New York: Appleton-Century Company, 1937), 129; Dick, “Free Homes for the Millions,” Nebraska History 43 (Dec. 1962): 221; and Mary W. M. Hargreaves, “Women in the Agricultural Settlement of the Northern Plains,” Agricultural History 50 (Jan. 1976): 182.
4 Enid Bern, “The Enchanted Years on the Prairies,” North Dakota History 40 (Fall 1973): 5, 11.
5 Serena J. Washburn, Autobiography, 1836–1904, Montana State University Library Special Collections, Bozeman. For other examples, see Cora D. Babcock, Reminiscences, 1880–85, and Fanny Achtnes Malone, “The Experience of a Michigan Family on a Government Homestead in South Dakota,” undated, both in South Dakota State Historical Resource Center; Mary Fox Howe, Montana American Mothers Bicentennial Project, 1975–76, Montana State Historical Society, Helena; Margaret Matilda Mudgett, Pioneer Memories Collection, 1975, and Ethel Hamilton, “Ethel Hamilton of Mountain View,” 1936, both in Wyoming State Archives, Museum, and Historical Department, Cheyenne; Martha Ferguson McKeown, Them Was the Days: An American Saga of the 70s (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961); and Kate Roberts Pelissier, “Reminiscences of a Pioneer Mother,” North Dakota History 24 (July 1957): 138.
6 Katherine Grant, Montana American Mothers Bicentennial Project, 1975–76, Montana State Historical Society, Helena; Henry K. Goetz, “Kate’s Quarter Section: A Woman in the Cherokee Strip,” Chronicles of Oklahoma 61 (Fall 1983): 246–67.
7 Elinore Pruitt Stewart, Letters of a Woman Homesteader (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961), 7, 77, 216.
8 Bern, “Enchanted Years,” 7; Kohl, Burnt Thigh, 6–7. See also “Prairie Pioneers: Some North Dakota Homesteaders,” North Dakota History 43 (Spring 1976): 40.
9 Glenda Riley, “The Memoirs of a Girl Homesteader: Martha Stoecker Norby,” South Dakota History 16 (Spring 1976): forthcoming. See also Sarah Schooley Randall, “My Trip West in 1861,” in Collection of Nebraska Pioneer Reminiscences (Cedar Rapids, Iowa: Nebraska Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution, 1916), 211, and Mary Price Jeffords, “The Price Girls Go Pioneering,” in Emerson R. Purcell, ed., Pioneer Stories of Custer County, Nebraska