A Crossroads Resource

Unit VII: What, Then, Is This American? ca. 1865 - 1900

Question/Problem 4: What was the West like for miners, cattlemen, and homesteader?

Homesteaders' Reading #3
These solitary women, longing to catch a glimpse of one of their own sex, swept their eyes over the boundless prairie and thought of the old home in the East. They stared and stared across space with nothing to halt their gaze over the monotonous expanse . Sometimes the burning prairie got to staring back and they lost their courage. They saw their complexions fade as the skin became dry and leathery in the continual wind. Their hair grew lifeless and dry, their shoulders early bent, and they became stooped as they tramped round and round the hot cookstove preparing the three regular though skimpy meals each day. There was little incentive to primp and care for one's person. Few bothered much about brushes and combs. Hollow-eyed, tired, and discouraged in the face of summer heat, drought, and poverty, they came to care little about how they looked. Some begged their husbands to hitch up the team, turn the wagon tongue eastward, and leave the accursed plains which were never meant for human habitation on. They were willing to sell out for a song - anything to get out of the country. Letters from home during droughts and grasshopper years, telling of the good crops in the old home, accentuated this feeling.

How much of the retreat from the frontier from time to time was due to the women, is not known, but it is certain that many stayed until the prairie broke thin in spirit or body while others fled from the monotonous terror of it.

There was nothing to do or see and nowhere to go. The conversation each day was a repetition of that of the day before and was primarily concerning the terrible place where they had to live. Even the children felt the monotony of the life. One day in t he eighties in southwestern Kansas a little boy came into the house to this mother and, throwing himself on the floor in hopeless grief, exclaimed, "Mamma, will we always have to live here?" When she hopelessly replied in the affirmative, he cried out in desperation, "And will we have to die here, too?"

By no means were all the women crushed and defeated by the rude frontier. Many a member of the fairer sex bore her loneliness, disappointment, and heart aches without complaint. Brushing away the unbidden tears, she pushed ahead, maintaining her position n by the side of her hardy husband, a fit companion of the resolute conqueror of the plains. Together the two unclinchingly waged a winning struggle against the odds of poverty and loneliness.

From Evertt Dick, The Sod-House Frontier (Lincoln, NE: Johnson Publishing Company, 1954), pp. 234-235.

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