Forget Little House on the Prairie: What Homesteading Actually Looked Like

Imagine living in a one-room house made of dirt on the Dakota prairie. The nearest neighbor is at least a mile away. You're fourteen years old. Today, like every day, you'll work from before sunrise until after dark. Welcome to homesteading.

The Rules Homesteaders Brought With Them

Families moving to Kingsbury and Hamlin Counties in the Dakota Territories had clear ideas about who should do what:

Women's work meant cooking three meals a day from scratch. It meant baking bread several times a week. It meant preserving vegetables and meat for winter, washing clothes by hand, sewing and mending all the family's clothes, caring for children (often five or more), raising chickens, churning butter, making cheese, growing vegetable gardens, and keeping the house clean.

Men's work meant backbreaking labor to break up the tough prairie grass with a plow. It meant planting and harvesting grain, building houses and barns, putting up and fixing miles of fence, caring for horses and cattle, and growing wheat or corn to sell.

Children's work started young. Six-year-olds gathered dried buffalo chips or other dried animal dung for fuel, if available. They carried heavy buckets of water. They watched livestock for hours in the hot sun or freezing cold. They weeded gardens and collected eggs. By the age of ten or twelve, they worked alongside adults doing full-fledged farm labor.

The Butter and Egg Money That Kept Families Afloat

Here's something Little House doesn't emphasize enough. Women's "small" work often saved farms from failure. Historian Gilbert Fite said that "butter and eggs were primary cash products on the farmer's frontier, and the income from them often kept farms financially afloat during the difficult years."

Your mother's chicken operation wasn't a hobby. It was a business. The money she made selling eggs and butter at the store often bought the family's flour, sugar, coffee, and other necessities. This was especially true when the wheat crop failed or prices dropped. Some women sold beeswax, dried fruits, or homemade cloth. Others took in boarders or did washing for other families.

One South Dakota woman sold "butter, eggs, meat, vegetables, wild fruit, and garden flowers." She also found time to knit "socks and mittens for sale to nearby cowboys." Her daughter remembered that her mother's work actually supported the family while her father "was learning to farm."

When "Progress" Made Things Worse

Here's something strange: new inventions sometimes made women's work harder, not easier.

Got a sewing machine? Great! Now people expect you to make fancier clothes and more of them. Got better washing equipment? You still hauled water bucket by bucket. You heated it over a fire. You scrubbed clothes by hand. You wrung them out and hung them to dry. The equipment just raised expectations.

Women had to cook for entire threshing crews. In less than a week, one North Dakota woman "baked seventy-four loaves of bread and twenty-one pies, puddings, cakes, and doughnuts" for thirteen men. This wasn't unusual. Feeding threshing crews was simply expected of farm women. In addition to all their regular work.

And women had babies. Usually, they became pregnant every year and a half or two years, though often it ended in a miscarriage or stillbirth. Still, they continued with their regular work while pregnant and returned to their chores a few days after giving birth or losing the baby. Dying in childbirth wasn't unusual because midwives and doctors lived too far away to help.

Homesteading women helping with haying.

When Bodies Broke Down

The work never stopped. Eventually, some women simply couldn't continue. They developed what doctors called "neurasthenia" or "nervous exhaustion." A woman might suddenly be unable to get out of bed. She might freeze up and be unable to work. She might fall into deep depression.

Medical historian David Schuster found that this condition was especially common among women doing heavy labor while also managing households and having babies. Doctors said these women needed complete rest or months of light work.

However, here's the problem: most homestead families couldn't afford for the wife to stop working. Who would cook? Who would care for the children? Who would help in the fields? Some women never recovered. They struggled with exhaustion, pain, and depression for years.

A survey of six South Dakota farming counties in 1935 showed conditions hadn't improved much even decades later. At least three-fourths of the homes still had outside water supplies, which meant they were still relying on manual water hauling. Only one-fifth had electricity. Only one-eighth had central heating. Some counties still had log cabins in use. People still built and lived in sod huts.

"Why Didn't They Just Leave?"

You might be thinking: if life was so brutal, why didn't women just leave? Why didn't they go back East or move to town? The answer shows just how trapped many women were.

Legally, they had few options. 

During this period, married women had limited legal rights separate from those of their husbands. In many states, a married woman couldn't own property in her own name. She couldn't sign contracts. She couldn't keep her own wages without her husband's permission. The land was almost always in the husband's name.

Unmarried women could claim homesteads in the Dakota territories. However, after marriage, the land belonged to the husband. If their husband died, the closest male relative owned the land. This could be a cousin in Iowa she had never met, or her 2-year-old son.

Divorce was nearly impossible. 

You needed legal grounds, including proof of adultery, abandonment, or extreme cruelty. You also needed money for a lawyer. Most farm women didn't have any money since what they earned belonged to their husbands. Even if a woman got a divorce, she often lost custody of her children as courts awarded custody to the fathers. Why? Because men were seen as the breadwinners.

Where would she go? 

Most women had no money of their own. The little money they earned from selling butter and eggs was spent on necessities. Even if a woman moved to town, what would she do to earn a living? Common "women's work" options were domestic service, laundry work, or sewing. All were paid poorly and were required to work hard. In reality, not much different than what she left. A woman with several children had even fewer choices.

Social and religious pressure was intense. 

For early homesteaders, churches were often nonexistent. Families might go years without seeing a minister. However, most South Dakota homesteaders had a religious upbringing. The most common religions in the Dakota Territory were Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Methodist Episcopal, and Congregational.

These churches taught that marriage was permanent and that wives should submit to their husbands. A woman who complained too much might be seen as ungrateful or weak. Women who left their husbands were seen as failures and often shunned. Families back East might refuse to take in a daughter who had "abandoned" her husband.

By the 1890s, church building had boomed, and churches had become central to social life. This was especially true for Norwegian immigrants. One woman wrote in 1892 that "there have been 5 Norwegian churches built here this summer, 4 in the country and 1 in [Lake] Preston."

Churches also gave women one of their few social outlets. Ladies' Aid societies provided women with an opportunity to gather. They worked on projects together, such as quilting bees. They contributed money to their churches. This was one of the few ways they could have influence outside the home.

Many women didn't want to leave. 

This is important to understand. Despite the brutal work, many women took pride in their farms. After investing years of labor, they took pride in their role in building them. The land represented their future and their children's inheritance. As one woman homesteader put it, she "loved living on a homestead" despite all the hardships.

The question isn't really "why didn't they leave?" The better question is: "How did they survive?" And the answer is: through extraordinary toughness, practical flexibility about gender roles, and knowing that their work, though unrecognized and undervalued, was absolutely essential to their family's survival.

Homesteading child milking a cow.

Childhood? Not Really

If your family was poor (and most were), you worked like an adult by the time you were ten or twelve. Even at six or seven, your work mattered. Animals starved if you didn't care for them. The family would freeze without fuel. Everyone would go thirsty without water.

School? Maybe in winter, when farm work slowed down. Perhaps not at all during the most challenging years. Your parents needed you to work, not learning to read.

The Homestead Act of 1862 stipulated that families had to reside continuously on their homestead to qualify for their "free land". So you often lived miles from other children. No playdates. No birthday parties. No friends, except perhaps cousins, if relatives claimed nearby land. Just work.

Riley notes that in many families, "the labor of women and children was a necessity that often continued long beyond the settlement period." Children didn't get their childhoods back once the farm was established. They were needed workers for years.

The Price Everyone Paid

Women aged fast. Look at photographs. Thirty-year-old women look fifty. Forty-year-old women look ancient. The combined weight of housework, farm work, pregnancy after pregnancy, and not enough food during hard years literally wore them out. As one study described it: "their hair grew lifeless and dry, their shoulders early bent, and they became stooped as they tramped round and round the hot cookstove."

Men also did brutal physical labor. However, unlike women, they usually didn't have to do both farm work and household chores. Letters and diaries from this time repeat the same words over and over: tired, exhausted, sick, worn out.

The system worked, barely, because both husbands and wives understood their farms would fail otherwise. Survival mattered more than following society's rules about what was considered appropriate work for women and children.

As farms became more successful, life improved somewhat. Families could hire help. Better equipment reduced some labor. Improved houses made daily life less miserable. However, the basic reality—that everyone, even children, worked constantly—continued well into the 1900s.

Think about that the next time someone talks about "the good old days."

Woman chopping wood.

Sources:

Riley, Glenda. "Farm Women's Roles in the Agricultural Development of South Dakota." South Dakota History 13, no. 1/2 (1983): 83-121.

Lahlum, Lori Ann. "'Everything was changed and looked strange': Norwegian Women in South Dakota." South Dakota History 35, no. 3 (2005): 189-216.

Schuster, David G. Neurasthenic Nation: America's Search for Health, Happiness, and Comfort, 1869-1920. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011.

Fite, Gilbert C. The Farmers' Frontier, 1865-1900. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1966.

This comprehensive guide supports historical fiction writers and researchers interested in authentic details of frontier life and immigrant experiences on the Great Plains. All information has been verified through multiple historical sources and academic references.