I wrote this story about Jean Todd, a very interesting immigrant nurse from Scotland, for one of my classes while working on my master’s degree. After graduation, the story was published in the South Dakota Journal. Here’s a link (added August 2025) to the story. Pioneer Nurse Jean Todd: A Woman Professional on the Dakota Frontier. I’ve also included a few paragraphs from the introduction.

Wearing only light coats and shivering in the frigid air, the woman and child gazed in wonder at the small, rugged town on the prairie, snow piled high in the streets. Three weeks after boarding the emigrant ship and saying farewell to their native Scotland, mother and daughter had completed their journey, arriving in Dakota Territory on a bitterly cold winter day in December of 1887. A summons for help had decided the future for that small family, bringing them to the American frontier, to a train stop named Mitchell.

While waiting to be met, the woman worried about her sister Isabella, a recent widow with a farm to work and three wee bairns to raise after the terrible tragedy that struck her husband. Isabella’s letter told such a tale of woe. First, lightning killed Martin during a terrible storm. Next, hail destroyed the entire crop on their homestead, and then, Martin’s relatives back East demanded immediate payment of a three hundred dollar loan. Surely, reasoned the woman, this newly settled territory will welcome her skills as a trained nurse and midwife, allowing her to practice her profession and to help ease her sister’s burdens. As she followed Isabella through “narrow shoveled paths, down wooden sidewalks, past scattered wooden houses,” Jean Todd felt that she “had come to a world of new things and strange experiences.”

South Dakota History Journal 47-3: Pioneer Nurse Jean Todd: A Woman Professional On the Dakota Frontier

Here’s a profile I wrote about her for the Women’s Room Project: Jean Todd Profile