I’m reading a book called “Pioneer Women: Voices from the Kansas Frontier” — it’s a collection of stories gathered by the author’s great-grandmother from 800 women that left their lives in the East and in Europe to settle on this newly available land… An excerpt: “Pioneer life was not all hardship and danger. The outstanding fact is that the environment was such as to bring out and develop the dominant qualities of individual character. Kansas women of that day learned at an early age to depend upon themselves – to do whatever work there was to be done, and to face danger when it must be faced, as calmly as they were able. And there was the compensation of contact with the great new West – a new world – theirs to develop from wild prairie to comfortable homes.”