Chapter 6: Pioneer Women

During the long hours herding cattle, Grace had no one to talk to and nothing to do with her hands. She was bored. One evening as she watched Mama piecing together squares of calico for a quilt top, she asked for some pieces of cloth to sew while she was herding. Mama said she was too young, but Grace promised to do a good job. Mama finally said she could have four little squares to stitch together. "But you'll have to do neat work and fasten the ends of your thread good," she said, "for I can't afford to waste thread and pieces on you if you don't."

Grace stitched carefully so that her mother would give her more fabric. "I knew that Mama's needlework was extra fine, and that it wouldn't be easy to learn to sew as well as she did. But it was during those days, when I worked so hard to keep my stitches even and the block corners matched, that I began to dream of the time when I could make quilts even finer than Mama's, finer than any others in the world."

Grace never complained to Mama about herding. She knew her mother wanted her to be ladylike and not do outside work. Pioneer daughters often clashed with their more genteel mothers about their behavior. Many mother-daughter battles focused on the sunbonnet. Little girls would throw off the hot, awkward headgear. Those with light skin would tan and freckle, upsetting their mothers who believed, as did other white-skinned American women at that time, that a smooth untanned face was a sign of beauty. Mama insisted on sunbonnets. Florry always kept hers on and did not mind when Mama rubbed buttermilk on her face to soften her skin. Grace wore her hat only to please her mother but in spite of buttermilk and bonnets, her skin still turned brown.

Some homesteading women wore corsets and high-heeled shoes while they worked. Not Mama. She liked to look stylish, but she was also practical. She always wore an apron over her loose black dresses, which helped keep them clean. She could wash and iron an apron more easily than a dress. And aprons were useful. She could wipe her hands on them, take hold of a hot pan, dry a dish, and gather eggs by holding the corners to create a carryall.

Pioneer women preferred sturdy calico dresses for everyday wear, but many still liked to know what was fashionable. They subscribed to women's magazines like Godey's Lady's Book and received mail-order catalogs like Montgomery Ward's that showed the latest styles. Many were very clever at sewing copies of them to wear for special occasions and for church.

Even though they lived in primitive houses, pioneer women were also interested in home decorating. They brought flower seeds, feather pillows, quilts, and lace tablecloths from their former homes. They copied the popular styles of the day, such as the Victorian preference for covering every surface with a different pattern. They also enjoyed reading and rereading works of classical literature they had brought with them. The first baby born in a soddy near Dodge City, Kansas, was named Childe Harold after a character in a poem by Lord Byron. Most women were determined to not give in to the roughness of their lives. Some served every meal on the good china they had brought west with them. They trained their children to use proper table manners and tolerated no swear words.

Still, Mama and other pioneer women lived very differently from their own mothers. When necessary, they helped their husbands in the fields and barns. When husbands took outside jobs, women often did all the chores and cared for crops. Women sometimes took outside jobs as well, working as cooks, housekeepers, seamstresses, and schoolteachers.

Women started schools, churches, libraries, and missionary societies, and they helped their neighbors. The Midwest could not have been settled without them; yet women were usually viewed as "helping out" their husbands. Within the family, they were expected to obey the men. Pioneer life was physically hard on them. A 29-year-old pioneer wrote in a letter, "I am a very old woman. My face is thin, sunken, and wrinkled, my hands bony, withered, and hard."

As an adult, Grace observed, "Early marriages, big families, and years of hard work turned most of the women I knew old long before middle age." She saw this with her mother. Mama was never very strong, and having babies was very hard on her. Like most women at that time, however, she probably knew nothing about how to plan the number of children she wanted. She was so modest about the human body that Grace figured "she probably never in her life saw all of her own body at once"--which would have been typical of women in the late 1800s. She would not have discussed family planning with a doctor, nor would she have discussed the facts of life with her daughters. Like many other children, Grace and her sisters had to figure out for themselves where babies came from.

One pioneer girl who was playing house with her brothers secretly slipped a baby doll into the doll bed. "My little brothers were so surprised to see an addition to the family. "Just like grownups," she explained in a superior way. "You just wake up some morning and there's a new baby."And one morning Grace and Florry and Stella woke up to find they had a new sister lying next to Mama. Although the girls were disappointed she was not the brother they wanted, they were still very pleased with her. But they were surprised, because they had not known the baby was expected. Mama always wore loose-fitting dresses, so they had not noticed anything. Mama said their new sister would be named Florence Ethel, but right away they all started calling her Dovey because Mama said the little noises she made were like the cooing sounds of a dove.

When Dovey was just a few days old and Mama was still bedfast, a terrible summer storm blew in. Poppie was watching it from a window when he saw lightning strike a haystack by the barn, setting the hay on fire. They ran outside to put out the blaze. As they returned to the house, they saw smoke coming from the bedroom. Poppie ran into the smoke-filled room and quickly doused a little fire that had started when a candle had fallen over. Mama was fighting for breath. They had come just in the nick of time: "Mama . . . was almost unconscious and the baby had nearly quit breathing."

Soon after that, Grandma McCance, Poppie's mother, came to help out. Grandma had raised nine children. She was feeling at loose ends on her farm in Missouri. This was her first visit to Nebraska, and she liked it. She told Poppie that if he could get a good farm for her nearby, she would move. Grace and Florry thought that would be wonderful. They loved Grandma McCance, who was little and wiry and always busy with something. By the time Grandma left, she had been there a month, and they were sorry to see her go.

A week later a letter arrived from Grandma Blaine announcing that she was coming for a visit. This was a different matter. "Mama held the letter in her hand a long time, a stricken look on her face." She was still weak, so Poppie arranged for a hired girl to help out until Mama was satisfied that the house was as clean as it could possibly be. Everyone helped. "The whitewashing, scrubbing, and dusting went on right up to the minute Poppie left for Cozad to meet the train."

Then Mama "turned on Florry, Stella, and me and scrubbed us almost to the quick--as if she hoped to wash off our sunburn and scratches--and hustled us into clean clothes from the skin out."

Grandma Blaine's visit was hard on Mama. She wanted her mother to think well of her life. "Poor Mama," Grace said later. "She knew how raw and bare our prairie home would seem to her mother, and she overtaxed her frail strength trying to make it seem better than it was. But Florry and I, scarcely remembering anything different, or better, were proud to show Grandma around. And Grandma, rustling and dainty in her silk dress and many petticoats, smiled at us and smoothed our wind-roughened hair with gentle fingers."

Late that summer, after Grandma Blaine was gone and Mama felt better, Poppie finally started the well. The best location would require carrying water uphill, but nobody cared. "Mama said that just having a well on the place, after three years of hauling water and never having enough to take more than a spit bath in, would seem heavenly," Grace recalled.

Every day that Poppie worked on the well, they worried about him. They had heard stories about two neighbors who had been killed while digging their wells. One had fallen into the well shaft; the other died in a cave in. Poppie worked on the well whenever he could, stopping only to take care of farm duties and to haul water. A neighbor helped. One man climbed into the hole to dig while the other pulled up buckets filled with dirt. As they dug, they built a wood casing to keep the well shaft from collapsing.

On a great day in September, they struck water at a depth of 150 feet—about the distance from the roof to the basement of a 13-story building. Poppie hitched up Old Peg, the mule, to the pulley and she did the work of a windmill, pulling water buckets to the surface where Poppie could empty them into a water tank for the livestock or into the water barrel for the house. Grace noted, "Old Peg was the first automatic power we ever owned."

During the heat of the summer when water was scarce, the family could look outside on moonlit nights and see various wild animals drinking from the watering tank. Later Poppie built a windmill, which could lift hundreds of gallons of water a day. But windmills did more than harness the wind. These tall structures dotting the landscape also helped people locate a specific homestead. Since trees were scarce and the base of the windmill was always cool and shady, it was a favorite spot for summer picnics. Nobody minded the racket of thumps and squeaks the windmill made, for those noises represented life-giving water.

The well changed everything for the McCances. No more hauling barrels of water. No more sharing bathwater. No more worrying if there would be enough water to put out fires.

That first day with water, Mama took a long drink of the delicious, cold liquid--and then began scrubbing everything in sight. Grace was not a bit surprised when she started with the children's dirty faces.