For the women, diaries often held meticulous lists of life’s daily proceedings. A nineteen-year-old woman’s entry from 1891 typically details, “I sprinkled clothes, watered the cow, mixed bread, made fire, ironed, baked, took a bath and got things ready for supper.” A Kansas girl’s diary from 1896 revealed that in addition to domestic duties, she also fished, plowed, hunted, and explored the surrounding countryside. Mary Henderson, in the Oklahoma territory, kept her family’s financial account record in her diary. She recorded that she and her husband spent $5.75 to build their house with 500 bricks and 600 pounds of sand.
From what is known as “Indian Country,” my own grandmother, of Colorado’s Ute Nation, kept diary notes about World War II, since her first four sons were drafted at the same time, one being my own father. In addition to daily life, grandmother noted food and tobacco rationing numbers assigned to her and each of her 10 children, and she tracked her food storage items from the gifts of the garden and the sheep farm.
Letters offered more emotional writing, often communicating a sense of homesickness. From the west, a young bride begged her mother back in Arkansas for correspondence. She noted to her mother, “I am glad in my marriage, but if you was here, I would be satisfied for I don’t know anybody much, and I get awful lonesome”.
Scholars continue to compile and publish fascinating memoirs of women settlers. In vivid detail these women recounted the trials and tribulations of the making their homes in new country, and through their collective reflection rose a tone of triumph. Historian Joanna Stratton reports in her book, Voices from the Kansas Frontier , the sentiment of one woman who wrote, “Life made us miserable in so many ways…we were poverty stricken….We lived…on cornbread, cornmeal, coffee, gravy, sorghum for sweetening, and the men smoked grape leaves for tobacco, but life was worthwhile, even now.”
As the boundary of the American frontier pressed westward, women wrote. Their words, whether in diaries, letters or memoirs, provide us with a deeper understanding of the rich tapestry of the past on the High Plains and in the mountains. For HPPR I’m Debra Bolton in Manhattan KS.
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High Plains History is a production of High Plains Public Radio. Special thanks to Lynn Boitano for additional production assistance.
