Hungry wolves lunging at the door and windows lured by the smell of food in the cabin or dugout or soddy. Crop failure due to weather or locusts or stampedes. It is also the story of those who stayed, rather than including those who returned east for whatever reason.And there were plenty of reasons. As Stratton writes, 'This is an unusual history of the frontier, for it is written through the eyes and the words of the women who lived it.' One limitation is that these memoirs were written only by white homesteading women simply because the experiences of Indian and black women of the time, as well as the saloon girls and other marginal residents, were not recorded anywhere. That's what makes the book so fascinating. Schlesinger, Jr.Stratton used a collection of journals and letters from women who homesteaded in Kansas prior to the Civil War, and some memoirs from their daughters to tell what their life on the homestead was like. Stratton, with an introduction by Arthur M. It was published in 1981, authored by Joanna L. Since I've been so busy catching up with yard work, I feel like I've been reading this old book forever, but it was so good it was worth the time. “These voices are haunting” ( The New York Times Book Review), and they reveal the special heroism and industriousness of pioneer women as never before.

Their work was the work of survival, it demanded as much from them as from their men-and at last that partnership has been recognized. These were women of relentless determination, whose tenacity helped them to conquer loneliness and privation. Their personal recollections of prairie fires, locust plagues, cowboy shootouts, Indian raids, and blizzards on the plains vividly reveal the drama, danger and excitement of the pioneer experience.

Here are their stories: wilderness mothers, schoolmarms, Indian squaws, immigrants, homesteaders, and circuit riders. Never before has there been such a detailed record of women’s courage, such a living portrait of the women who civilized the American frontier.

From a rediscovered collection of autobiographical accounts written by hundreds of Kansas pioneer women in the early twentieth century, Joanna Stratton has created a collection hailed by Newsweek as “uncommonly interesting” and “a remarkable distillation of primary sources.”

Joanna l stratton