9 Women Who Crossed a Line: Canadian Single Women Homesteaders in the U.S. West

April 12, 2011

My 2011 lecture approached a question that had preoccupied me for a very long time: what on earth do place and gender have to do with one another? Does region or nation matter differently in the lived experiences of women and men? I had thought about place and gender for over thirty years, since I began to research western women’s histories. I had focused more recently on the difference national borders make, since I crossed one myself, and began thinking more about my grandmother and all the other women who left their homelands hoping for something better for themselves or their families.

History has usually dealt with public life and public events, while most women have lived their lives in private and domestic arenas and so have seen their own lives as historically insignificant. This too-simple separation of private life and public history posed a simple question: Why did the women cross the line?

That simple question was rooted in a body of scholarship on single women homesteaders in the United States. The Homestead Act of 1862 allowed single women to claim 160 acres of public land for homesteads in their own names, a policy that drew large numbers of women to the American West. Some of those women were Canadians.

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Sometime in the spring of 1884 a young woman named Mary J. Rushton left her parents’ home in Nova Scotia and traveled west to Manitoba. She turned south in May to cross the 49^th Parallel at Bottineau, Dakota Territory, and on June 16 declared her intention “to renounce forever all allegiance and fidelity” to “The Queen of England” and to become a citizen of the United States. In early 1885 she moved onto 160 acres in Bottineau County; almost three years later she filed a Homestead Application for her land. Swearing that she was a single woman “over the age of 21 years of age and have declared my intention to become a citizen of the United States,” she was, she said, already “residing on the land I desire to enter” and had “made a bona fide improvement and settlement thereon” that “commenced January 27^th 1885.” (In her final proof application, she would say she took up residence in April.) She had taken possession of a frame house and barn, for which she paid $150, had sunk a well, and had broken approximately ten acres; she estimated the total value of these improvements at $200. Two weeks later, on November 7, she paid her $14 filing fee on the northwest quarter section 28’ in Township 161 of Range 73, Bottineau County, under Section No. 2290, Revised Statutes of the United States.¹

Mary Rushton became a U.S. citizen on August 9, 1889. A year later, to the day, she filed her final proof statement to gain title to her land. She had, by then, claimed a second quarter section under the provisions of the Timber Culture Act of 1873, a statute that allowed homesteaders to claim a second 160 acres in the naive faith of the U.S. Congress that they could change the climate by planting at least forty of those acres in trees.²

Mary Rushton was putting down roots. She had, she said, lived on her claim continuously, in her two-room frame house. She had a sod and pole barn and had raised wheat and oats for four years on her ten acres of broken land, letting two to three acres lie fallow each summer; raised a garden each year and had dug a second well. She estimated that her homestead had grown in value to $235. Mary Rushton owned a horse, bed, bedding, table, chairs, stove, and cooking utensils. She had not been regularly employed, she reported, but “would help a neighbour occasionally” who lived three-fourths of a mile from her home. Exercising her new citizenship, she had voted once, she said, in the “last school election.” (North Dakota women won the right to vote in school elections in 1883 but did not exercise the full franchise until 1920.)³ Such are the barest facts of six years in the life of Mary Rushton, recorded in her homestead claim file, stored at the U.S. National Archives, together with those of all successful homesteaders.

Folded into thirds, slim yellowed sheets of flaking records, often fastened with rusty straight pins, have been fading largely untouched since some clerk filed them over a century ago. They include the files of thousands of women whose spare official forms offer glimpses into the hopes and labor they invested to claim homesteads in the U.S. West. Mary Rushton’s file was one of 121 women’s that I found in the records of the Devils Lake, North Dakota, Land Office, filed during the first decade it operated from 1883–1893.⁴

A frame house, 160 acres of semi-arid North Dakota land, a horse, two wells, some household furnishings. It might seem like a small gain for so much time living alone on the northern Plains. To this, Mary Rushton might have replied that if her home were modest, it was hers alone. The promise of land in their own names drew thousands of women to the U.S. West.⁵ They crossed international borders and social boundaries to pursue whatever dreams the land might promise. Unequal access to land forged gendered international borders that pulled and pushed women to a country they thought might offer them more than the nations they left. Among them were many thousands of Canadian women, for whom crossing the line to the United States meant that they could file for homesteads if they, like Rushton, were over 21, single or the head of a household, and willing to become naturalized citizens of the United States.

Countless women staked their time, energy, and scant resources in a wager with the United States government, which, as Senator William Borah famously quipped, bet homesteaders “160 acres against the entry fee of $14 that the settler can’t live on the land for five years without starving to death.”⁶ By some estimates, fewer than half of all homesteaders won that bet; more recent estimates suggest a 37–45 percent failure rate before 1900.⁷ Among those who made it for five years to win title to their land, a sizeable number were women, who, some studies suggest, were more successful than men in making final proof and winning title to their claims.

Since 1976, when Sheryll Patterson-Black published her pioneering article “Women Homesteaders on the Great Plains Frontier,” historians have found women constituting from 5–20 percent of homestead entrants in various times and places. They appear to have been fewest in the earliest years of homesteading, and to account for one homestead entrant in five later, through the 1920s. Patterson-Black processed data from the Lamar, Colorado, land office in 1887 and 1907, and from the Douglas, Wyoming, land office in 1891, 1907, and 1908. She found that 11.9 percent of the homestead entrants were women, and that 42.4 percent succeeded in getting final title to their land, compared to 37 percent of the men.⁸

H. Elaine Lindgren, whose book Land in Her Own Name was based on case studies of 306 North Dakota women homesteaders, found that many, like Mary Rushton, were young, and most—83 percent in her sample—were single when they filed their claims; 15 percent were widows. Lindgren generated her 306 case studies through a public appeal, supplemented by land office data from nine counties. Of her 306 women, 5 percent were Canadian. Two of her nine counties, Pembina and Burke, abutted the 49^th Parallel. The predominant ethnic groups among the Burke homesteaders were Norwegians, Swedes, and Danes; in Pembina County it was Anglo Canadians. Though ethnic Europeans did not settle the surrounding counties until the late 1870s and 1880s, a fur trading post was established in Pembina in 1797; the community was built by Pembina Chippewa and Métis settlers. Part of the Red River Settlement, it was thought, until 1823, to lie north of the 49^th Parallel. The Pembina Land Office operated from 1870–1874; some original Red River Colony settlers filed for homesteads there. Lindgren found that women constituted only 6 percent of all Pembina County independent homesteaders, a fairly typical figure for the first years that a Land Office operated.⁹

The Devils Lake Land Office records offer some contrasting data, based on the first decade of final proof statements after the Devils Lake office opened on August 21, 1883. Devils Lake handled claims for north central Dakota Territory, an area that became North Dakota after statehood was achieved in 1889. It covered Ramsey Country, where the Land Office was located, and Eddy, Wells, Benson, Pierce, McHenry, Bottineau, Rolette, Towner, and Cavalier counties—a territory with only sparse non-Indigenous settlement before the 1880s (see Figure 9.2).

Land opened for settlement there as American Indians were first pushed onto reservations, and then as their land was progressively alienated under the terms of the 1887 Dawes Act. Following the same assumptions that underlay the Homestead Act, the Dawes Act envisioned American Indians farming as patriarchal nuclear families on privately owned parcels of land. As tribal land became family farms, much reservation land was offered for homesteads or for sale. North Dakota contained all or part of five reservations, two of which lay within the territory of the Devils Lake Land Office: the Turtle Mountain Reservation in Rolette County, established in 1882, and the Devils Lake Sioux Reservation, now called the Spirit Lake Sioux Reservation, established in 1867, in Benson and Eddy Counties. As land around and in the reservations opened for homesteading in the 1880s, homesteaders rushed to the Devils Lake Land Office to stake their claims.

I did not determine how many people filed for homesteads without gaining title to their land, but 1,229 succeeded and filed their final proof statements in the Devils Lake office between 1883 and 1893. Among these were 121 women, or 9.7 percent, who achieved final title to their claims—the highest proportion of women I have seen during an early settlement period. And of these 121 women, 23, or one in five, were Canadian, four times the proportion in Lindgren’s sample. Another 25 were Norwegian; fewer than half—only 48—were native-born U.S. citizens.¹⁰

Collectively, American, Norwegian, and Canadian women predominated. The differences among the three nationalities suggest some of what pushed and pulled them to North Dakota homesteads. Proof statements are frustratingly short on personal information; they offer more clues than conclusions. Still, the statistical portrait that emerges provides some insight into the circumstances that drew at least twenty-three women to cross a gendered international border that separated their opportunities in the Canadian and U.S. Wests. I say “at least” because of twelve women, whose place of birth was not given, several, like Mary Rushton, renounced “allegiance and fidelity” to the Queen of England, but whether they were born in Canada, England, or another Commonwealth nation was not stated.¹¹

In most respects, the land policies of Canada and the United States were similar. Both surveyed and allocated public land using the grid system established in the U.S. Land Ordinance of 1785, dividing their western territories into townships six miles square. Each 36 square-mile section was, in turn, divided into half sections, and then into quarter sections of 160 acres, each identified by range, township, and section numbers. In both countries, two sections in each township were dedicated to supporting public education. The uniform grids took no account of terrain, climate, tree cover, water, or other essentials, but the system established a basic land survey, which could precede settlement, and insure verifiable property lines.

Both countries required homesteaders to live on the land and improve it. Both charged a filing fee—$14 in the United States, $10 in Canada. Under the terms of the U.S. Homestead Act of 1862, settlers could purchase the land for $1.25 an acre after they lived on it for six months, or they could “prove up” their claims if they lived on them at least seven months a year for five years, and improved them by building a house, planting crops, or otherwise putting the land to productive use. The Canadian Dominion Lands Act of 1872 differed in a few particulars. Seeking to attract settlers, it required only three years residence before a settler could claim final title to the land and initially allowed a settler to pre-empt a second adjacent quarter section.

There were two significant differences between these national land policies. The United States did not permit group settlements, but after 1886 Canada allowed agricultural colonies in some circumstances, a provision that made it possible for Ukrainians, Doukhobors, Mennonites, Hutterites, and Jews to found separate communities on the Canadian prairies. The second difference involved the definition of persons. In the United States, homesteads were offered to “any person who is the head of a family, or who has arrived at the age of twenty-one years, and is a citizen of the United States, or who shall have filed his declaration intention to become such . . ., and who has never borne arms against the United States Government or given aid and comfort to its enemies.” Personhood and the rights of citizenship remained contested in the United States as in Canada, but the Homestead Act clearly counted women among those persons who could claim land. The second section clarified in unusually gender-inclusive language: “That the person applying for the benefit of this act shall, upon application to the register of the land office in which he or she is about to make such entry, make affidavit before the said register or receiver that he or she is the head of a family, or is twenty-one year or more of age,” etc., “that such application is made for his or her exclusive use and benefit. . . .” (italics added)

The Dominion Lands Act of 1872 stipulated more simply that homesteads were open to “any person who is the head of a family or has attained the age of twenty-one years.” In practice, however, such persons included virtually no women. Single women were excluded. A woman could homestead only if she were widowed, divorced, deserted, or separated, and then only if she had a minor child living with her who was solely dependent on her for support. Not until the 1930s, when there was almost no land left, did women finally win the right to Canadian homesteads. The law was so strictly applied, and women candidates so scrupulously screened, that in 1916 only twenty-one women operated their own homesteads in western Canada, compared to thousands in the United States.¹² South of the border, women had only to swear that they were not married when they filed their claims, or, if married, that they were the sole support of their families, that they were “over 21 years of age,” and that they were or had declared their “intention to become” citizens of the United States.

By 1893, twenty-three Canadian women went to the Devils Lake Land Office and so swore. They resembled in many ways women homesteaders from other countries drawn to the same patch of earth. There were subtle differences as well, as fine as the small distinctions in two homestead laws that defined their rights to public land on either side of the 49^th Parallel. There were differences, too, among some Canadians and their individual paths to North Dakota homesteads.

At least part of what drew all the women was clear: they wanted to own land. What pushed them might in part be equally clear: it was harder, where they came from, for a single woman to become propertied.

Two of the Norwegian women had lived in North Dakota, two in Minnesota before claiming land, but most were recent immigrants.¹³ Forty-one percent of all Norwegians who came to the United States in the 19^th and 20^th centuries were women. Population growth in Norway pushed thousands of peasants off the land. Thousands of young women left rural communities for cities that offered them only low-paid work as domestic servants, in the needle trades, or as sex workers. Women were the most impoverished Norwegians throughout the 19^th century: in 1860 two-thirds of the poor in Kristiania (as Oslo was known at the time) were women, many of them single mothers. Prostitution was widespread. After 1905 Norwegian immigrants were canvassed about why they left. Two-thirds of the women said they were leaving either to make more money or because they had no income; the remaining third said they were going to relatives. Land ownership was a powerful draw for women with such narrow options, and for families forced from the Norwegian countryside.¹⁴

Similar circumstances may have drawn the American and Canadian women, who would have had little hope of inheriting family farms, and whose job possibilities were limited and poorly paid. The American women, like most U.S. homesteaders, came predominantly from nearby agricultural states; over half had lived in Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, or North Dakota. Although few gave their previous occupations, five of the nine who did said they had been farming before filing for their land.¹⁵ We might guess that the land they farmed was poorer, or that they had worked on family farms as daughters or sisters.

What drew the Canadian women to stake their claims south of the border is also, for most, a matter of guesswork and inference. Among the twenty-three Canadians, four had French surnames; several were Métis. Sparse statistics and a few brief portraits suggest their collective stories and particularities. Six (26 percent) were still under thirty when they gained title to their land; over half were under forty. Eight—over a third—were over fifty. Although proportionately fewer American or Norwegian women filed for land in their early twenties, more made final proof in their thirties, and the Norwegian women included many fewer women over fifty, suggesting that they fit the pattern of young women pushed out of the Norwegian countryside, who perhaps spent a few years working before they could leave. The Canadians’ age distribution separated the majority who came to the United States expressly to claim land and a smaller group who seized the option after living awhile south of the border. When they filed for land, they fell roughly into three groups: very young single women, middle aged single women, and widows.¹⁶

Mary Rushton was the youngest; she filed for her homestead at the earliest opportunity, shortly after her twenty-first birthday. Margaret Belgarde (or Margaret Belgairde or Marguerite Belgard) was easily the oldest. Born Marguerite Dufort in Red River Colony in 1794, she married Alexis Joseph Belgarde from Quebec in 1814. The Belgardes had some thirteen children before immigrating to the United States; they entered through Pembina in 1844 and apparently stayed there. Alexis was listed on the 1850 Pembina census but died two years later. A census taker found Margaret there in 1880, but she moved to a farm in Rolette County—perhaps one of her children’s—before filing her intention to become a U.S. citizen in 1884 and moving onto her claim. Her final proof papers, filed in August 1889, listed her age as 106, but she was likely only a youthful 95, living in a log house with her daughter on her farm in Bottineau County. She was able to enjoy her claim for four years before she died at Turtle Mountain February 12, 1893, at age 99.¹⁷

Most of the Canadian women seem, like Mary Rushton, to have come to the United States expressly to claim land for themselves. I don’t know much about their lives before that: at least one came from Manitoba, one from New Brunswick, one from Quebec, one from Nova Scotia, one from Ontario. Their entry points may indicate their origins: two entered the United States in New York, one in Boston, nine came through Michigan, suggesting that about half had roots in the Maritimes or central Canada. Another nine entered through Pembina, or just across the Red River in St. Vincent, Minnesota, or Bottineau, Turtle Mountain, or St. John in north central North Dakota. Six had entered the United States before 1880, but most came after 1881, likely with the intention of homesteading.¹⁸ Their trajectories support historian Walter Sage, who argued in 1928 that there was a North American frontier of settlement that crossed and recrossed national borders, but their movements do not fit Sage’s continuous east-to-west wave-like pattern of cross-border settlement.¹⁹ Four entered through New York or Michigan before 1880; then, from 1879–1885 thirteen entered through North Dakota, Minnesota, or Michigan; the last four entered through Detroit, Port Huron, or Boston in 1886–1887 and headed straight west to stake their claims. These complex trajectories illustrate myriad patterns of cross-border migrations, in search of what we can only guess.

Only a few specified where they lived prior to filing their claims, but most came directly from Canada. Only six, including Margaret Belgarde, said that they had lived in the United States before filing for land. Three of these early migrants appear to have been either French Canadian or Métis; two had lived in North Dakota, one in Minnesota, one in Michigan, and one, Eulalie Gauthier, had worked in a New Hampshire factory before emigrating to North Dakota with her husband Arcade and their two sons. Arcade located a quarter section of land, built a house and stable, and the family moved onto the claim in 1883. Arcade became a citizen, voted, and filed a tree claim before he died in 1888. As his heir, Eulalie filed her final proof statement in 1889, though her title was delayed until she became a naturalized citizen in 1891.²⁰

Mary Boyd, too, was widowed and had lived in the United States for some years before filing for her land, having emigrated from Quebec in 1865. Her husband died three years later, leaving her, at age 35, alone with four children. It is not clear how she supported them; she said that before she moved to her homestead in 1883 she had been “living with my income” in Michigan. Though she considered herself a head of family, none of her children lived with her; three were married and they all had homes of their own. She had no trade, she said, but worked “for myself only,” making her claim “[her] home and farm for [her] exclusive use and benefit.”²¹

Frizine Sayer, a 32-year-old unmarried woman, entered the United States at the port of St. John, Turtle Mountain, in June 1879 and apparently lived briefly in Minnesota before moving onto her homestead claim in 1883.²² Forty-year-old Ida Williams was single when she filed her proof statement in 1889. She had, she said, worked as a servant in Canada and for two years in Dakota Territory before moving onto her homestead claim in Eddy County.²³ Belgarde, Williams, Gauthier, Sayer, and Boyd all moved onto their land as soon as the Devils Lake office opened in 1883. Two were widowed; two were single women moving quickly to grab the land that offered them a chance to make a home. The Gauthiers’ homestead offered a chance to leave the New Hampshire factories.

Jennie Draper Garver, the remaining Canadian with prior U.S. residence, was much younger and, more than any other Canadian-born woman, most clearly resembled the single American women homesteaders. Jennie Draper entered the United States with her family in 1870 when she was only eight years old. She filed for her homestead in November 1884. A month later she married and had one child before gaining title to her land.²⁴ Like her, about a third of the U.S. women married before filing their proof statements, many of them shortly after filing their homestead claims. For a significant minority, their claims allowed them to bring land to a marriage or to increase total family holdings. Whether that changed their status in their marriages we can only guess.

But while 35 percent (17) of the American-born women and 32 percent (8) of the Norwegians married between when they filed their claims and when they gained title, that was less the pattern for the Canadian women. As their ages might suggest, most were either single or widows. Eight—almost 35 percent—were still single when they got title to their land; five had married between filing their claims and gaining title. Another eight were widows; the marital status of one woman was not recorded. Sarah Boyd’s husband had deserted her and their three-year-old child in December 1885, ten months after he filed for their Rolette County homestead. She achieved final proof in her own name in November 1891. More native-born Americans (35.4 percent) and Norwegian immigrants (32 percent)—about a third of both—married before they made proof; more Norwegians (48 percent) and fewer Americans (19 percent) were still single; and fewer Norwegians (20 percent) were widows (see Figure 9.3).

Fourteen of the twenty-three Canadians said they had families at the time they made final proof; twelve had children, including seven of the eight widows, three of five married women, one single woman, and the deserted wife, Sarah Boyd. In other words, the Norwegian women were younger, and more were single when they came to the United States, reflecting the demographic and economic pressures that pushed them from their native land.

All evidence suggests that the Canadians diverged from the practice of some women who came West with their fiancés, waiting to marry until both partners had filed for land in order to double the family land holdings. This appears to have been the case for up to a third of the American and Norwegian women but was not evident among the Canadian immigrants. Two widows and one deserted wife inherited their husbands’ homestead claims, and of the single women, only Jennie Draper married soon after filing. Most of the widows, in fact, filed their claims after their husbands died. And even those who married before gaining title came to Dakota Territory on their own, long before any married. Marion Beaton, for instance, was 24 when she entered the U.S. through Detroit. Three years later she filed for her homestead in Bottineau County. At age 31 she made final proof on her claim as Marion Cleveland, stating that she lived alone on her claim until she married and had lived there with her husband ever since. She had raised crops for four seasons and had worked hard to establish the farm. She had, she stated, lived on her land continuously except “for 6 terms of School at Devils Lake ND. I was on the claim at different times while teaching as my work would allow and spent my Vacation on the Claim and had the land cultivated all the time.” Her witnesses, Robert Lyon and Archibald McArthur, put it bluntly: She resided on her claim continuously, they said, “All but the time she was teaching School as she was a single woman and had to work for her living.”²⁵ Similarly, Frizine Sayer Lavallee made final proof on an 80-acre homestead near Rolla, North Dakota, in 1892, thirteen years after she emigrated to Dakota Territory. She had lived on the land since 1883; it was, she said, heavily wooded and “most valuable for timber.” She had cleared six acres and raised a garden for eight years. She married her husband only a month before making final proof. He was probably a widower; he and his two children were living in her home.²⁶ It is not likely that forty-three-year-old Frizine Lavallee had lived on her land for nine years waiting to establish a home for a man who was probably with the mother of his children when she arrived.

At least some of the Canadian women followed the pattern documented by other historians of settling near friends or family. The majority (60 percent) stated that they had families. And there are other scattered clues. Azilda Beaudoin filed final proof certificate No. 434 on her Rolette County homestead; certificate number 431 was filed by Louis Beaudoin, relationship uncertain. Ida L. Williams was away from her claim when she was “employed in Grand Forks from Nov. 1^st ’83 until May 1^st 1884, doing housework for different persons . . .. I also,” she stated, “worked for my sister in Arvilla, Dak from Nov. 1^st ’84 to May 1^st 1885 doing housework. . . .”²⁷

It is hard to know for certain what the land represented to the women who staked considerable time and labor to claim it. Somehow, they scraped together enough money to file on their land, improve it, and develop it for five years of uncertain crops and weather. It has been estimated that it cost an average $1,000–$1,500 to develop a homestead, and even if these women did it more cheaply, they needed some capital to survive on their claims.²⁸ Where, we might ask, for instance, did Mary Rushton get the $150 to buy her house and barn before she filed? Some, like Rushton, Ida Williams, and Marion Beaton worked for neighbors or away from their claims to support themselves and their homesteads. Ann Hockney obtained a leave of absence from her claim from May 1890–May 1891. She was, she wrote, “compelled to be away at work to earn her living and make improvements.” She had filed her claim in November 1888, had “85 acres under cultivation. A good well. A Frame house. . . .a Frame Barn that will hold 18 head of stock.” She swore, however, “That on account of the drought her crop last year 1889 was a failure that she seeded the whole 85 acres and on account of such failure she has been obliged to seek employment elsewhere.” To support her application for a leave, two neighbors, Thomas McDonald and Maggie Kennedy, swore that they knew her and believed that her statements were true.²⁹ Hockney, like many women homesteaders, likely managed her land and hired labor or traded for someone to work her farm. And, like many others, she found neighbors to support her. Thomas McDonald and Maggie Kennedy were not her kin but were part of a local community that recognized the challenges that women homesteaders faced in common with all who tried to farm the northern plains, and those they faced particularly as women.

If Canadian women followed the pattern of other women homesteaders—indeed of all homesteaders—only a minority would continue to live on their land and farm it for very long after gaining title. Lindgren found data about what women did with their land for 237 of the 306 women in her study. Sixty percent stayed on their homesteads only a bit longer than the time they needed to prove up, five years or less; 18 percent stayed 6–24 years; about one in five (22 percent) stayed 25 years or more. Her sample is skewed for persistence, both because she omitted women for whom she had no information, and because she gathered information about these 306 women by advertising in North Dakota.³⁰ And yet, those who left their land should not be deemed failures. For some women land represented an investment of time and labor to gain equity that they could trade for a business, an education, a house in town, or some other goal.

These 121 women from the Devils Lake Land Office may seem a small number, and yet they are not a sample—they are the complete universe of all women who succeeded as homesteaders and gained title to their land in that time and place. It is harder, though, to determine their subsequent life trajectories and what they did with their land once they owned it. In part, there is the perennial problem for women’s historians of the fact that women’s last names change. By 2011, I had been able to trace a few. In 1900, the widow Mary Boyd was listed on the U.S. census living in Williston, Williams County, North Dakota. Perhaps she sold her land; perhaps she rented it; perhaps one of her four children farmed it for her. Perhaps it bought her a business, or perhaps she was, once again, “living with her income.”

I have, with Andrew Varsanyi’s help, pieced together the most information for Elizabeth Winkler Gailfus. Born in St. Jacobs, Woolwich Parish, Ontario, in 1840, she married Blasius Gailfus in 1858, who was, like her parents a Bavarian immigrant. They had five children. After Blasius died in 1880, she and her children walked to Clearwater, Manitoba, herding cattle ahead of them. Elizabeth Gailfus wrote on her homestead proof statement that she entered the United States in June 1884, at Turtle Mountain, Dakota Territory. Four years later she filed her intention to become a U.S. citizen and filed her homestead claim near Picton in Towner Country. She built a house and moved in that June; in October two of her three surviving children joined her there and were still living with her. Her third son, Hugo, later said that the family squatted on Elizabeth’s future homestead in 1883; the land wasn’t surveyed so they plowed a furrow around the land they wanted. He also built a log shack which cost $8.00, and then the family went back to Clearwater for the winter, returning in the summer of 1884. The first house was a shack with a sod roof that leaked when it rained. The first summer, Hugo said, he broke four- or five-acre patches with their oxen, to raise only forty bushels of wheat. Elizabeth said in 1888 that she had cultivated fifteen acres and used sixty acres for pasture; she estimated the value of her farm at $700. In 1900, at age 60, she was still living on her land, though the U.S. census predictably listed Hugo (or Hugh) as the head of the family. Elizabeth remarried in 1901, but her land stayed in the family. Hugo had returned to Canada before 1891, where he worked as a laborer. He moved back and forth across the border for over a decade. He married Lillah Bower in 1901, who died the following year giving birth to their son Clarence; Elizabeth raised the boy. She had, in the meanwhile, returned to Woolwich to marry John Wideman in October 1901; she died there ten years later. In 1904, Hugo married Mary Hilgardner in the Gailfus hometown of Ayton. They had six children. In about 1906, Hugo and Mary returned to North Dakota and took over the family farm. They built a home and lived there until Hugo’s death in 1964 at the age of 101. Hugo Gailfus was the Grand Marshal of the Rolla town celebration at the age of 100.³¹ Elizabeth Gailfus’s U.S. citizenship signified a transient allegiance, but her land enabled her to support herself and her children for almost two decades, and gave her a legacy to leave her son.

It is easiest to trace women who did not marry after making final proof, or whose land stayed in the hands of male descendants. While proving up, they had cultivated as little as one acre and as much as 125. Most had planted crops, principally wheat and oats; most had some livestock. At the time of proof, they valued their holdings at anywhere from $200 to $1,200, with a median value of $500 ($534 average value). Whether or not they stayed on the land, they had won their bets with the U.S. government and gained an economic stake for themselves.

The Canadian women who gained their homesteads during the Devils Lake Land Office’s first decade shared a great deal with women homesteaders from other nations. But there is one intriguing detail that might have accounted for their high proportions among the Devils Lake homesteaders, and that is where they chose to settle. They claimed homesteads as close as they could to the border. Of course, I looked at a land office that served an area that abutted the border, which was arguably why I found Canadian women close to the international boundary. But most of the Canadian women (eighteen of twenty-three) filed in Bottineau, Rolette, Towner, and Cavalier counties—the four counties west of Pembina County just below the 49^th Parallel. Two settled in McHenry County, one in Benson County, two in Eddy County. The nine who had entered the United States in Minnesota or North Dakota never went very far after they got across the line, though some, like Mary Rushton of Nova Scotia, had traveled quite a distance before turning south. The twelve who came through Michigan, New York, and Boston likewise headed for northern North Dakota, though there was plenty of land available in places that might seem more attractive by virtue of climate or proximity to rail lines. Yet they clustered near the boundary they had crossed to claim land in their own names.

Fifteen of the twenty-three in fact settled in two counties: Bottineau and Rolette. And there may have been more. Two of the Rolette County settlers whose birthplaces are unknown came from somewhere in the British Commonwealth. So why these two counties? Rolette County was named for a Métis fur trader “Jolly Joe” Rolette, and Bottineau County for Pierre Bottineau (1817–1895), a Métis pioneer, hunter, and trapper who became a successful land speculator. Both counties were formally organized in 1884, the year after the Land Office opened. Settlers began moving to Rolette County in 1883, the year after the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Reservation was established there. The ancestors of the Pembina Chippewas migrated to the Pembina area from the Great Lakes in the 1400s. Many worked in the fur trade as trappers, voyageurs, and guides. The Pembina Chippewa developed lasting relationships with the Cree and French, and the area remains a center of settlement for them and their Métis descendants. The populations of the two counties had diverged sharply by 2000, when fewer than 2 percent of all Bottineau County residents claimed Native American ancestry, and only 5.4 percent French; one in four was of Norwegian descent. Rolette County, in contrast, was 73 percent Native American; a bit over 3 percent of the residents listed Ojibway, Cree, or French Cree as their first languages.³²

For the minority of the Canadian women homesteaders who were likely French Canadian or Métis, the draw to this area might have been ties of history or kinship. Two French-surnamed women,Azilda Beaudoin and Frizine Sayer Lavallee, settled in Rolette County. Margaret Belgarde lived there for a time and died there. She and Eulalie Gauthier settled in Bottineau County, and the presence of French speakers, kin, or the historic ties to the Canadian fur trade may have drawn some of the women to these two counties. But the names of the remaining Rolette and Bottineau County settlers don’t, on the face of it, suggest that this was the case: Elliott, Boyd, Robertson, Rushton, White, Garver, Beaton, and Murta. Some, like Mary Ann Finlayson, might have had ties to Red River or the fur trade. Perhaps it was simply that land opened in Rolette and Bottineau Counties when these women sought to homestead. Perhaps some had kin in Manitoba. Perhaps the climate and farming conditions were familiar, or timber more available. Perhaps we may find equal proportions of Canadian women filing elsewhere. Perhaps, for these few early Canadian homesteading women, it felt good to be close to home. I don’t know.

But from what the data from one land office in its first decade can tell us, here is how I would respond to the question, “Why did the women cross the line?” The women crossed the line because that seemed their best option. The lives they chose were not easy and promised no great wealth—often not even modest security. They might have fled limited options or abusive families; they might have been drawn by adventure or the urge to provide better for themselves or their families. Some of them were single women, some were widows, likely with few resources. Although a few married soon after immigrating, only one seems to have planned to marry before she chose to homestead. Some, like most western homesteaders, joined friends or family; some forged new communities of neighbors who, like them, wagered the government that they could survive in a difficult land. For some, U.S. citizenship was a necessary expedient; for others and their descendants the United States truly became home.

The 49^th Parallel, which separated their options in two countries, bridged the artificial distance between public politics and private lives, as national policies made a gendered difference in the daily lives of ordinary women. That twenty-three women had to cross that international boundary line to stake their claims was surely Canada’s loss, Dakota’s gain. It remains eloquent testimony to the ways an unevenly porous border filtered the promise of western opportunity for different people, depending at times on race, on their circumstances in their countries of birth, depending on their family status, and on their gender.

And whatever the cost—separation from friends, family, and homeland; loss of Canadian citizenship; long winters in sod houses and frame shanties; working hard to break the land or to earn money to hire it done—whatever the cost, it clearly seemed worth the effort to Mary Rushton, Margaret Belgarde, Marion Beaton, Ann Hockney, Sarah Boyd, Azilda Beaudoin, Frizine Sayer Lavallee, Elizabeth Gailfus, and many more.

Notes

Dedicated to the memory of Maggie Osler, who crossed many lines, and in so doing enriched her friends, colleagues, and the history of science.

I thank the donors who established the Imperial Oil-Lincoln McKay Chair in American Studies, who made the research for this essay possible, and whose generosity enabled me to have the help of an extraordinary group of graduate students: Gretchen Albers, Amy McKinney, and Andrew Varsanyi.

Additional Sources: Elizabeth Jameson, “Halfway Across That Line: Gender at the Threshold of History in the North American West,” Western Historical Quarterly 47:1 (Spring 2016): 1–26, contains some information from the expanded sample of women homesteaders from the first two decades the Devils Lake Land Office operated; a shorter version of that article appears as chapter 13 in this volume. Sarah Carter, Imperial Plots: Women, Land and the Spadework of British Colonialism on the Canadian Prairies (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2016) examines the largely failed efforts to achieve women’s access to land in the Canadian West and is the most important analysis of the relationships of women, gender, and North American settler colonialism.

1. 1 Mary J. Rushton Homestead Claim File, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Records of North Dakota Land Offices, Records of the Bureau of Land Management, 1685–1993, Record Group 49, Washington, DC (hereinafter cited as Homestead File and name of entrant).

2. 2 Mary J. Rushton Homestead File. The Timber Culture Act of 1873 required 40 acres of trees; as amended in 1878, it required 10 acres.

3. 3 Rushton Homestead File.

4. 4 It became the Devils Lake Office November 7, 1884, when the town of Creelsburg was renamed Devils Lake.

5. 5 Histories of women homesteaders began with Sheryll Patterson-Black’s pathbreaking article, “Women Homesteaders on the Great Plains Frontier,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 1 (Spring 1976): 67–88. For an excellent study of North Dakota women homesteaders, see H. Elaine Lindgren, Land in Her Own Name: Women as Homesteaders in North Dakota (1991; repr., Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996). See also Katherine Benton-Cohen, “Common Purposes, Worlds Apart: Mexican-American, Mormon and Midwestern Women Homesteaders in Cochise County, Arizona,” Western Historical Quarterly 36 (Winter 2005): 429–52; Dee Garceau, “Single Women Homesteaders and the Meanings of Independence: Places on the Map, Places in the Mind,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 15 (Spring 1995): 1–26; and Sherry L. Smith, “Single Women Homesteaders: The Perplexing Case of Elinore Pruitt Stewart,” Western Historical Quarterly 22 (May 1991): 163–83.

6. 6 Roy M. Robbins, Our Landed Heritage: The Public Domain, 1776–1936 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962), 375.

7. 7 In 2011, like most historians at that time, I used the more than 50 percent failure rate estimated by Fred A. Shannon, “The Homestead Act and the Labor Surplus,” American Historical Review 41, no. 4 (1936): 637–51 and The Farmer’s Last Frontier: Agriculture, 1860–1897 (New York: Farrar & Rinehart 1945). Shannon’s figures have since been challenged by Richard Edwards, Jacob K. Friefeld, and Rebecca S. Wingo, Homesteading the Plains: Toward a New History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017), chap. 2, “Recalculating Homesteading’s Reach and Success,” 25–40, who offer the 37–45 percent correction. The precise proportion of homestead filings that resulted in achieving title to the land remains uncalculated for all times and regions, but a significant proportion of people who filed for homesteads failed to gain title to their claims.

8. 8 Patterson-Black, “Women Homesteaders on the Great Plains Frontier,” 68. See also Lindgren, Land in her Own Name.

9. 9 Lindgren, Land in Her Own Name, xiii, 19–22.

10. 10 All demographic data were calculated from the Homestead Claim records of the 121 women who achieved title to their claims in the Devils Lake Land Office from 1883–1893, Records of the Devils Lake Land Office (1884–1893), Records of North Dakota Land Offices, Records of the Bureau of Land Management, 1685–1993, Record Group 49, NARA (hereinafter cited as Homestead Files).

11. 11 Record Group 49, NARA.

12. 12 Sarah Carter, “‘Daughters of British Blood’ Or ‘Hordes of Men of Alien Race’: The Homesteads-For-Women Campaign in Western Canada,” Great Plains Quarterly 29 (Fall 2009): 269–70. For other examples, see Sarah Carter, “Transnational Perspectives on the History of Great Plains Women: Gender, Race, Nations, and the Forty-Ninth Parallel,” American Review of Canadian Studies 33 (Winter 2003): 565–96.

13. 13 Homestead Files.

14. 14 Odd S. Lovoll, “Norwegian Immigration and Women,” in Norwegian American Women: Migration, Communities, and Identities, eds. Betty A. Bergland and Lori Ann Lahlum (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2011), 51–73.

15. 15 Homestead Files.

16. 16 Homestead Files.

17. 17 Margaret Belgairde Homestead File (Belgarde claim); U.S. Bureau of the Census, Seventh Census of the United States–1850, Minnesota Territory, Population Schedules for Pembina County, Minnesota Territory, microfilm, reel 367, M432, Records of the Bureau of the Census, RG 29, NARA (hereinafter census records); and U.S. Bureau of the Census, Tenth Census of the United States–1880, Dakota Territory, Population Schedules for Pembina County, Dakota Territory, microfilm, reel 114, T9, census records. Margaret Belgarde died February 12, 1893 and was buried in Pembina. Belgarde’s given name on her homestead claim file was Margaret; it appears as Margaret or Marguerite on different documents.

18. 18 Homestead Files.

19. 19 Walter Sage, “Some Aspects of the Frontier in Canadian History,” in Canadian Historical Association, Annual Report, 1928. Sage spent his career at the University of British Columbia, described in Chad Reimer, “The Making of British Columbia History: Historical Writing and Institutions, 1784–1958” (PhD diss., York University, 1995), 311–62.

20. 20 Eulalie Gauthier, Final Proof Statement, Eulalie Gauthier Homestead File.

21. 21 Mary A. Boyd, Final Proof Statement, Mary A. Boyd Homestead File.

22. 22 Frizine Sayer Lavallee, Testimony of Claimant, Frizine Sayer Lavallee Homestead File.

23. 23 Ida P. Williams Homestead File.

24. 24 Jennie Draper Garver Homestead File.

25. 25 Marion Beaton Cleveland Homestead File.

26. 26 Frizine Sayer Lavallee Homestead File.

27. 27 Ida L. Williams Homestead File, Final Proof Statement.

28. 28 Estimate in Shannon, “The Homestead Act.”

29. 29 Ann Hackney Ketcham Homestead File.

30. 30 Lindgren, Land in Their Own Name, 191.

31. 31 Elizabeth Gailfus Homestead File; 1885 Census of Dakota Territory; 1915 Census of Picton Township, Towner County, North Dakota; 1925 Census of Picton Township, Towner County, North Dakota; 1920 and 1930 U.S. Censuses of Picton Township, Towner County, North Dakota; Hugo Gailfus entry in History of Towner County 1883–1989; 1861, 1871, 1881, 1891 Censuses of Canada; 1851, 1861, 1871, and 1911 Censuses of Woolwich, Waterloo, Ontario.

32. 32 In 2011, I relied on on-line sites for some of the history of the Pembina and Wood Mountain Chippewa and Métis communities. I also received wise counsel from colleagues Heather Devine and Michel Hogue, who helped me place Métis women homesteaders in their own contexts. I am very grateful. Since I wrote my lecture, Michel Hogue’s masterful history of Métis and the border that divided them has appeared, and I include appropriate references from his book that I couldn’t use in 2011, but which could expand readers’ understanding of Métis history and help locate women like Margueriste Belgarde and Azilda Beaudoin in their historical and community contexts, as well as provide information on Métis migrations to the United States after the Métis Rebellions of 1870 and 1885. I list the references I used in 2011 first: Reference Desk, “Bottineau County, North Dakota,” https://www.ereferencedesk.com/resources/counties/north-dakota/bottineau.html; Reference Desk, “Rolette County, North Dakota,” https://www.ereferencedesk.com/resources/counties/north-dakota/rolette.html;North Dakota; County History, https://www.nd.gov/government/state-government/county-history,“Bottineau County, North Dakota,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bottineau_County,_North_Dakota;

    “Pierre Bottineau. (1816-1895),” compiled by Lawrence Barkwell, Coordinator of Métis Heritage and History Research, Louis Riel Institute, https://www.metismuseum.ca/media/document.php/07413.Pierre%20Bottineau.pdf; “Rolette County, North Dakota,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolette_County,_North_Dakota; “ROLETTE (Rollette), JOSEPH,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Vol. X, https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/rolette_joseph_10E.html; all online articles accessed April 6, 2011; Michel Hogue, Metis and the Medicine Line: Creating a Border and Dividing a People (Regina: University of Regina Press and Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 13, 23–35, 40–41, 48–51, 60–61, 64–65, 69, 88–90, 101, 105, 143, 171,180, 230, 257n50.