This book is probably the most amazing and engrossing memoir I’ve ever read. First published in 1938, it is Edith Eudora Kohl’s account of homesteading in South Dakota with her sister in the first decade of the 20th century. One point that she stresses in this book is that the American frontier lasted much longer that is usually acknowledged – a fact I’d noted before in the late setting of many Western novels by authors who lived at that time. The last wave of pioneers, one of the largest, continued right up until the U.S. entry in World War 1. This book is a story of those later homesteading days, which were every bit as challenging as the early ones.
Although it might seem surprising, young single women homesteading alone or in groups was not uncommon. Many different types of people – in fact you might say every type imaginable – filed on homestead claims, for a variety of reasons. The Ammons sisters’ reasons for leaving St. Louis for South Dakota, a combination of health and financial reasons, were common to many. For a number of young people, both men and women, homesteading was a temporary affair, a few months of holding down a claim to gain ownership of land that they could sell or mortgage to get a start in whatever life they had chosen. Others saw the value in the land itself, and with the industrialization of the East, land prices had become so high there that homesteading on the Western plains was their only opportunity. The more permanent settlers sometimes looked down on those who got their deed and left the land without improving it, calling them ‘landgrabbers.’
Suzanne Lieurance says
I love books like this. I'll have to get a copy. Thanks for the review.
jtwebster books says
What a wonderful read. I'm going to see if I can find a copy.