Boosters for new railroad towns in Dakota Territory in the early 1880s knew their frontier communities could not grow and thrive without women. Newspaper editors wrote the news, not just for the local residents, but for prospective ones as well, both men and women. Recognizing that single men would outnumber single women, and that married men would need to convince their wives to move, the editor shrewdly included items of interest for the ladies. A woman reading the March 31, 1883, issue of the Plankinton Dakota Free Press would be reassured that sewing machines were available from a local merchant, that churches held regular services, that the town boasted good hotels, that her children could be educated at a local high school, that two doctors were busy saving lives, and that she could purchase feminine items at a local millinery store.
Reassured or not, women came to settle Dakota Territory. While they called that place home, those women played a fundamental role in the development of community within their neighborhoods, their churches, their towns, and their kinship networks. One such woman was Sarah Breiner Page.
As her husband Hiram neared the end of his three-hundred-mile trek to a new homestead in Dakota Territory, Sarah gave birth to her eighth child in Greene County, Iowa. Hiram, travelling by lumber wagon, a dairy cow hitched behind, reached his destination on March 1, 1882. One week later, he drove to the land office and registered a homestead of 160 acres in Dudley Township, Aurora County.
Later that year, Sarah, aged thirty-five years, boarded a train headed west, keeping a close eye on her seven children, Huldah, Sara, Mary, Lottie, Lida, Steward, and baby Emma. One daughter had died three years earlier. The oldest was only thirteen years old. Almost derailing the Pages’ effort to establish a new life, the railroad company lost the train car loaded with the family’s household possessions and farm supplies. Lacking the items that she had packed, and living sixteen miles from the nearest town, Sarah set to work turning her new house, built from stones gathered in the fields, into a home.
In the next eight years, Sarah gave birth to another daughter and three more sons. In the winter months, when her husband, trained as a blacksmith, augmented the family income by traveling the country and setting anvils, Sarah managed the home and farm by herself.
Surviving terrible blizzards, searing heat, dusty windstorms, crop-destroying hail, and a fire that destroyed a barn and part of the house, Sarah raised her children, socialized with her neighbors, and provided leadership in her community. She served as midwife for other neighbors, kept the custom of inviting the minister, neighbors, and local bachelors for Sunday dinner, and helped to charter a new church, serving on its first board. Setting a priority on music, the family traded a horse and an organ for a Kimball brand piano in 1898.
Life was not without loss. Two of her daughters and her oldest son died as young adults. Her older daughters married and moved to Vermont, Canada, and Sioux City, Iowa. Her youngest daughter married and moved to a town twenty-five miles from the family homestead. After her husband died in a farm accident in 1906, Sarah continued to live on the farm with her three sons. Later, the two youngest married and moved to their own farms, only a few miles away. Almost eighty-five years old, Sarah died in 1932, honored by her children, beloved by her grandchildren, and held in high esteem by the members of her community.
Compiled by her granddaughter in the 1970s, based on family lore and newspaper accounts, Sarah’s story epitomizes the legend of the hearty pioneer woman, capturing the joys and sorrows of a woman’s private and public life amid the challenges of rural life on the frontier. Sarah’s experience, that of a married woman moving from one Midwest farming community to another, arriving in the early years of settlement, and remaining until she died, is only part of the history of women in that area.
Responding to a national westward movement, those women left their homes for an unknown environment during an era when the country was advancing in industrialization and urbanization. They came to a place where the buffalo once roamed to establish a compatible society in an incompatible land with an unpredictable climate, devoid of trees, mountains, and rivers. They said goodbye, maybe forever, to parents and siblings, adult children, and lifelong friends. They left behind comfortable homes in established communities to live in barely adequate homes in towns or on farms that only recently had been untouched grasslands.
Some of those women, whether married, single or widowed, native-born or European immigrant, lived there only briefly. Others stayed many years before moving on, and some remained until the end of their lives. While their primary role was that of mother, daughter, or sister, regardless of their marital status, their ethnic origins, or how long they stayed, women in rural communities also assumed public roles, individually and collectively, to build a close community of shared values as they settled Dakota Territory, from 1880 to 1920. Survival required community on that new frontier.
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It Happened Right Here: A Pioneer Woman, by Ruth Page Jones. Published in the South Dakota Mail, Plankinton, South Dakota, January 28, 2016.
RPJ Histories - Ruth Page Jones 