The girls built a one-room shack on the cemetery grounds and lived in it 24/7, guarding the property with shotguns. They put up a sign that said “Trespass at Your Own Peril.”

In some states, as many as one in five Homestead deeds were given to women. They had to be 21 years old and the head of their household, which allowed single, divorced or widowed women to claim land. “Any woman who can stand her own company, can see the beauty of the sunset, loves growing things and is willing to put in as much time at careful labor as she does over the washtub, will certainly succeed, will have independence, plenty to eat all the time, and a home of her own in the end.”

The campaign had been one of the nastiest and most grueling in presidential history. On one side, a former Secretary of … More

Everyone knows Nikola Tesla was a futuristic, visionary inventor and an electrical engineering genius. He worked for Thomas Edison and … More

Like many before me, my love affair with the American frontier started when I read Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House … More