Explore "Lone Women" by Victor LaValle on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Just two years earlier, in 1913, a woman named Mattie T. Cramer caused a lot of conversation when she published a letter in the Great Northern Railway Bulletin. A testimonial from Montana published under the headline "Success of a ‘Lone' Woman." Adelaide had a copy. Back home she'd hidden it under her mattress like a child.
In this letter Cramer explained she'd left Iowa City, Iowa, with her little boy in tow and moved to Montana, near a town named Malta, arriving on May 4, 1908. Mattie went because the federal government had been giving out 320-acre plots of land for homesteading, only requiring a "person"-that wording was vitally vague-to live on the land for three years, making it habitable and cultivating crops. If, at the end of those three years, the person had done all this, then the land would become theirs forever. Completing the three-year bid was called "proving up."