March is International Women’s Month, a time that resonates deeply with me. I write about the strong women who have built – and continue to build – our world. The women homesteaders in my “On the Dakota Frontier” series came West to start new lives, facing challenges ranging from prairie fires and blizzards to outlaws and physical attacks. Yet, they all survived and thrived.
Currently, I am writing a non-fiction book about South Dakota’s women homesteaders. One chapter focuses on Edith Ammons. She and her sister, Ida Mary, inspired Charlotte and Elizabeth Ward in Medicine Creek Claim and Iron Horse Claim. Ammons’s semi-autobiographical book, Land of the Burnt Thigh, tells the story of the Ammons sisters on homesteads in Lyman County, South Dakota.
When fire razed their homes and businesses, Edith and Ida Mary didn’t give up. Edith wrote:
In less than thirty minutes the post office, the store with its supply of food, the print shop were gone. The harvest of long months of labor and storm, thirst and fire, vanished as though it had never been –gone up in clouds of heavy, black smoke. Of one thing we were sure. We would not go back home for help.
This passage from the book captures the grit, determination, and courage that women homesteaders exhibited:
Most of our neighbors were proving up, going back. But we realized, with a little shock of surprise, that we did not want to go back. Imperceptibly, we were a part of its life, it was a part of us. Its hardships were more than compensated for by its unshackled freedom.
As we reflect on these stories, here’s to all the women doing the work no one sees.