A Homesteader's Portfolio

In 1911 Alice Day Pratt, single and nearing forty, boarded a train and left the east coast to file claim on 160 acres of land in the Central Oregon high desert. She was one among tens of thousands of people who took up homesteads in the arid West in the early twentieth century. Perhaps as many as 20 percent of these settlers were single women. Yet homesteading women are largely missing from the literature and histories of the West. The commonly held image of frontier women as powerless and dependent helpmates stems in part from the scarcity of written accounts by homesteading women. Alice Day Pratt’s powerful memoir presents a rare, fascinating account of the life of a woman homesteader and chronicles her single-handed efforts to overcome the obstacles that faced all homesteaders—men and women—in the dryland West. Pratt’s independent and adventurous spirit allowed her to hang on to her “homesteading dream” for more than a decade after most other homesteaders had packed their belongings and left the desert. By exploring the life she lived and the choices she made, Pratt offers an important glimpse into the social and cultural history of the American West.