Frontier woman;: The life of a woman homesteader on the Dakota frontier
by Walker Demarquis Wyman
Category: Frontier and pioneer life

"The last American frontier lay in the dry region of the Dakotas and Montana, a land that had been invaded from the south in the 1880's and 1890's by the open range cattle and sheep interests. Into this dry region came the homesteaders from the Midwest and from Europe seeking free land. Known by the cattlemen as the "wool hat people" they swarmed west of the Missouri River after 1890, built their sod houses, plowed up the prairies, and planted their crops. Many of them failed because of drought and grasshoppers, or went back because of the struggle, the loneliness, the hard life. One of the thousands who moved to this dry frontier west of the Missouri was Grace Fairchild. She had grown up in Wisconsin, graduated from Platteville Normal with a teacher's certificate, and had gone to Parker, South Dakota (east of the Missouri) to teach school in 1898. There at Parker she married Shiloh Fairchild, a widower much older than she, and in 1902 the Fairchilds went west of the Missouri seeking a homestead. They took up a claim of 160 acres in the old Sioux Indian cession, not far from the present Philip. Married to a man not fitted to be a pioneer farmer, she took on increased responsibilities as the years went by, and finally separated from her husband. When she left the ranch, she owned 1440 acres of South Dakota land. This is the story of a strong woman who succeeded on a harsh frontier where failure was common. South Dakota State University recognized her in 1952 with the title of Eminent Homemaker and now her picture hangs in the Hall of Fame. Few books tell the story of a woman pioneer who was a mother, a manager, a creative force in the building of her part of the last frontier. This is Folk History told through the original notes of a Frontier Woman."--BOOK COVER.