Chapter 4, Rural Life Summary and Analysis

Rural living was hardly the idyllic, nostalgic, "clean living" way of life many thought it was.

Frontier women endured back-breaking labor, either over the ancient stove which required intensive labor in the form of constant feeding of wood, or laundry which required hours of scrubbing, stamping, and clobbering.

The local well soon became a cesspool of contamination, with drainage from the outhouse, animal waste, and kitchen slush. Insects were a constant, impossible annoyance, with window screening only introduced well into the 1880s.

Winter posed a health hazard when settlers huddled in their closed houses inhaled the smoky air from the iron stove. Tramps and various vagrants were a constant danger and fear on the open prairie and its relative lawlessness.

Children, as soon as they were physically able, were forced into the day-to-day drudgery of their parents...