Land of the burnt thigh

the long version

Land of the Burnt Thigh, first published in 1938,is one of the best accounts. Edith Eudora Ammons and her sister Ida Mary moved to central South Dakota in 1907 to try homesteading near the "Land of the Burnt Thigh"--The Lower Brule INdian Reservation. There these two young women, both in their twenties and "timid as mice," found a community of homesteaders (including several other single women) who were eager to help them succeed at what looked to be impossible: living in a tiny tarpaper shack on 160 waterless, sunbaked, and snowblasted acres for eight months, until they could "prove up" the claim.