frontier woman

Grace Wayne was a young girl playing on her grandfather's boat on the Mississippi and Wisconsin Rivers when Carrie Ingalls was a baby living near Pepin. Grace was a teacher near Sioux Falls when Carrie was working for the Leader in De Smet. Grace married Shiloh Fairchild and moved with her husband to a claim near Huron, then west to a horse-and-cattle homestead in Stanley (later Haakon) County, along the stagecoach route between Fort Pierre and the Black Hills. The area was sparsely-settled at the time; just north was the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation. Some of the horses Mr. Fairchild sold had been strays that wandered away from the reservation.

Grace had ten children in almost as many years, and she worked hard at keeping body and soul together while making sure her children had a better life than she did. Meanwhile, Carrie was a bachelor girl, working in stores in De Smet or for various newspapers. She also took extended trips: to Mansfield for several months to visit sister Laura Ingalls Wilder, to Colorado for several years to seek relief from asthma, and on multiple trips to western Dakota, where she decided to file on a preemption claim of her own.

Carrie Ingalls' claim was a mile south of Grace and Shiloh Fairchild's.

In that day and place, many settlers didn't stay long, and through the years, Grace watched them come and go. Even Carrie didn't hold onto her claim long past final proof. Carrie had gone there with a number of other Kingsbury County friends as both an adventure and as a way to acquire land to be sold at a profit. Despite having a husband who was ill-suited to homesteading, Grace Fairchild stayed on the claim long enough to raise her children, ditch her husband, and accumulate 1440 acres of her own.

Grace Fairchild also kept a diary.

Late in her life, Grace organized her papers, and historian Walker Wyman used them to write Frontier Woman: The Life of a Woman Homesteader on the Dakota Frontier, published first in 1972. Although Wyman's book doesn't mention Carrie Ingalls by name, he does mention people and places certainly known by Carrie: the Morrisons, Cooledges, the Sheltons, and the nearby towns of Elbon and Top Bar.

Grace Fairchild's diaries and papers are in the South Dakota State Archives in Pierre. Two guesses as to who is mentioned in those papers that Wyman didn't include in Frontier Woman.
- posted by pioneergirl at 5:53 PM