Two Women Who Held Their Own Land for Eighteen Months
Estelle Williamson and Gertrude McCann pass through Ocosta on the way to Olympia to prove up on homestead claims they worked alone — braver, a neighboring paper says, than most men.
Miss Estelle Williamson and Miss Gertrude McCann passed through Ocosta Tuesday on their way to Olympia to prove up on their claims, which lie about five miles south of Ocosta. These ladies have been holding their claims for the past eighteen months and have lived there most of that time. They have exhibited a degree of bravery not possessed by a large number of the sterner sex, and they have well earned their lands, which, without doubt, will be quite valuable at no distant day.
“They have exhibited a degree of bravery not possessed by a large number of the sterner sex, and they have well earned their lands.”
Single women could homestead in their own name under the 1862 Homestead Act, and by the 1890s thousands in Washington Territory and state did exactly that — living alone on raw coastal land for the five years' residence the law demanded. The Ocosta country they filed on was in the middle of a frantic Grays Harbor land boom; the paper's confidence that the land 'will be quite valuable at no distant day' shows that even a story of grit is also a story about speculation.
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