Frontier Woman Born in 1850 Talks About Living Alone for Three Years Without Seeing Another Soul

Frontier Woman Born in 1850 Talks About Living Alone for Three Years Without Seeing Another Soul Mary Ellen Cole (née Haight) (1850–1934) was born in Pike County, Ohio, the eldest daughter of a corn farmer. She married William Cole in 1872 and in the spring of 1878 followed him west to a homestead claim on the Nebraska prairie, twenty miles from what would become Milford. When William left that fall to settle a debt — a decision both understood as necessary — she stayed alone on the claim for three years. One cow, a sod house, no neighbor within a day's ride. She held the land and brought in three harvests. In Milford, where she has lived since 1885, she has been spoken of as a woman of unusual toughness, and she has never corrected that. In this account, given in her eighty-second year, she does not dispute the toughness. She disputes what it was. What those three years made of her was not strength but a changed interior she has never fully named — a distance between herself and other people that did not exist before and never closed. Her husband William returned in 1881, lived beside her for twenty-one more years, and never asked what that time had been like from the inside. She did not tell him. A small hand mirror, last looked into in April of 1881, remains wrapped in cloth in the bottom drawer of her chest and has not been opened since. #historicalnarratives #1800s #19thcentury