Those Strenuous Dames of the Colorado Prairie
by Nell Brown Propst

Nell Brown Propst wrote about the women who settled the high, dry plains of eastern Colorado: homesteaders, ranch wives, teachers, doctors, and daughters who stayed. The book is arranged as a set of lives rather than a county history. Chapters move from the first years on the prairie through the testing years, the next generation, and what Propst calls the harvest.

The geography is the Colorado side of the same country your Panhandle researchers already know. The South Platte valley, the towns east of Denver, and the ranch country running toward the Nebraska and Kansas lines. Family names, schools, churches, and the work of keeping a claim appear throughout. It is illustrated, and it has a bibliography and an index.

The foreword is by Nellie Snyder Yost of North Platte, whose own books on the cattle country and the Blizzard of 1888 sit on many Nebraska shelves. That makes this a useful companion to Panhandle and western Nebraska women’s history, not only a Colorado title.