Stratton writes of the woman left to maintain and protect the family homestead when a husband had to be away for long periods. \u201cIn those lonely circumstances, she fought the wilderness with her own imagination, skill, common sense and determination.\u201d<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Stratton also describes how one woman, when overwhelmed by the vast unbroken prairie, went out to stretch out on the earth among her sheep to find comfort in their company. But animals weren\u2019t always a source of solace. A mother and son came under siege by gray wolves during a time when they\u2019d taken in a sick woman to be nursed at their sod house. Hungry wolves tried to get in through windows, door frames, and by scratching through sod walls. Only shooting guns and wielding axes kept the predators out.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Women and men became lonely for familiar things as well as people. Stratton recounts one woman who asked to accompany her husband on a trip of some miles to get wood, \u201cShe hadn\u2019t seen a tree for two years, and when they arrived at Little River she put her arms around a tree and hugged it until she was hysterical.\u201d<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

I\u2019ve also recently dipped into John Fraley\u2019s latest book, Rangers, Trappers, and Trailblazers: Early Adventures in Montana\u2019s Bob Marshall Wilderness and Glacier National Park.<\/em> His chapter on Lost Paola Ranger Station intrigued me because it\u2019s about a couple who married in 1923. They set up housekeeping in Glacier National Park. \u201c\u2018Well, Paula was considered a very isolated station,\u2019 Clyde noted in an interview much later.\u201dMy wife didn\u2019t see any women for several months.\u2019\u201d Marie took the train to Kalispell for the births of their first two sons. Otherwise, the family stayed at the ranger station full time and year round.\u201cBusy on patrols, Clyde said he never got lonely. But he suspected that Marie did.\u201d<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Eventually, when Clyde was reassigned to Two Medicine station, Marie was able to live in a house in East Glacier near women both ordinary and colorful. She never again lived far from the company of other women in a place as remote as Paola Ranger Station.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Willa Cather writes about the Nebraska prairie and the people, a mix of Swedish, Bohemian, French, and German who settled there beginning in the 1870s. O Pioneers,<\/em> the first novel in her Prairie Trilogy, tells of Alexandra, a strong woman with the appearance of a Swedish goddess. The oldest and smartest child in the family, she has to take on the responsibility of making their farm prosper after her father\u2019s early death. She has a love for the land, and the foresight and organizational ability to make it productive.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Alexandra has everything by the time she is in her prime, everything but soul mates. The dull and bigoted, including her brothers, have no appeal for her. She acknowledges her loneliness, but copes until there are at last, not just people around her, but enough of them so she finds one who is a soul mate.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Loneliness visited women who settled the frontier in mountains and prairies. They used all the qualities and techniques they could summon to survive. They valued those who eventually joined them and shared their stories.<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday I picked up Pioneer women: Voices from the Kansas Frontier, by Joanna L. Stratton. It\u2019s a study of the challenges met by frontier settlers, wives and mothers who lived on America\u2019s open prairies in the late nineteenth century. Because I\u2019ve been reading Willa Cather of late and noted isolation threaded through her work, I went straight to Stratton\u2019s index and looked up \u2018loneliness.\u2019 Stratton writes of the woman left to maintain and protect the family homestead when a husband had to be away for long periods. \u201cIn those lonely circumstances, she fought the wilderness with her own imagination, skill, common sense and determination.\u201d Stratton also describes how one woman, when overwhelmed by the vast unbroken prairie, went out to stretch out on the earth among her sheep to find comfort in their company. But animals weren\u2019t always a source of solace. A mother and son came under siege by\u2026<\/p>\n

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