Draper, Arthur Gibbs, ed. My Ever Dear Charlie: Letters Home from the Dakota Territory.DRAPER, Arthur Gibbs, ed. My ever dear Charlie; letters home from the Dakota territory. Globe Pequot Press. 234p. illus, notes. c2006. 0-7627-395205. $12.95. JS Emma Draper, her father, her brother, and her seven children, ages one to 13, spent a year from June 1886 to June 1887 in a small sod house sod house, house with walls made of strips of sod laid horizontally in courses like bricks. Sod houses were common in the frontier days on the western plains of the United States, where wood and stone were scarce. The sod, turned by the plow and held together by roots, was lifted in strips and usually cut in 3-ft (1-m) lengths (sods). The walls were hewed smooth with a spade and were often plastered with clay and ashes. on the barren plains of what was then the Dakota Territory and is now north central South Dakota. While her husband Charles had come with the family initially, he had to return to their home in Lebanon, Missouri, to earn money to support his homesteading family. Emma wrote to her husband as often as she could, usually weekly, keeping him up to date on the children, the weather (especially the blizzards), what funds they needed, and the progress her father and brother were making on a shed for the mules and bringing in coal and hay from the nearest town. Her letters are bright, usually as cheerful as possible, but they express her incredible loneliness for her husband as well as her children's loneliness for the home they had left. Often, too, there are letters from the children to their father, and to their friends. Emma Draper was a resourceful woman. For a year she nursed one child, taught six others, fed at least ten people a day and kept house in a soddy probably no bigger than 10' by 24" with an added room about 9' square. At the end of a year, the family decided to return to Missouri, delighted to find their much-missed home again. Emma Draper's letters are a precious record of a struggle to find a new life in the era of the 1862 Homestead Act Homestead Act, 1862, passed by the U.S. Congress. It provided for the transfer of 160 acres (65 hectares) of unoccupied public land to each homesteader on payment of a nominal fee after five years of residence; land could also be acquired after six months of residence at $1.25 an acre. The government had previously sold land to settlers in the West for revenue purposes.. While not mentioned in the book, additional information on the Drapers may be found on the book's website, www.myeverdearcharlie.com. Patricia Moore, Chestnut Hill, MA |
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