Notes From The Frontier

As early as the 1400s in Europe, creating hair art to memorialize the dead began, especially because epidemic and plagues took a high toll.

Pioneer survival depended on harsh realities and there was little room for sentimentality in food production.

Sacagawea is one of the most famous figures in American history. Nearly all American school children and adults recognize her name.

We all know the immortal names of Pocahontas and Sacagawea, native women who played important roles in the formation of our early nation.

The tradition of foot-binding, also called “lotus feet,” was a thousand-year-old tradition in China that was brought to the United States.

The truth about the real Katie Elder is far more spectacular than any Hollywood fiction.

Women have always worked but during the Industrial Revolution, they flocked to the cities in droves to work in factories.

Few legends in American history embody the power and poignancy that Pocahontas does.

In frontier America, quilts were a way for women to gain immortality.

It turns out that Angela Swedberg is one of the leading Tribally Certified Indian Artisans in the country.

The legend was a towering, six-foot-plus black woman named “Stagecoach Mary.” And she could drink, smoke, cuss, fistfight and shoot.

Calamity Jane, born Martha Jane Canary, is an enigma in Western legend. Much has been written about her, much of it fictional.

In 1800s America, corsets took a strange turn toward the bizarre, even the fetishistic. The smaller the waist, the more feminine the woman.

In 1881, a 17-year-old Irish immigrant girl named Kate Shelley risked her own life to save the lives of 200 souls on a midnight train.

Life was hard on the frontier, especially for women.

The "oldest profession" was one of the first to go West to the frontier, following the first mountain men, loggers and prospectors.

Under the Homestead Act of 1862, single women, widows, and divorced or deserted women had the right to claim 160 acres in their own name.

Both my mother and my mother-in-law grew up on Iowa farms and attended one-room country schools.