Maggie’s Forty Acres

A dying Maggie fills the last days of her life by telling her life story to her sister and care giver Alice. Both women lived most of their lives as single women in the young American West. The adventure for both began in 1883 when their family moved from the home of generations of their family in Sackville, NB, Canada to the raw West outside Custer, South Dakota Territory. This dramatically altered life opportunities for both women. From a one room school in Custer, Maggie blossomed into the best educated of her family. Her older brothers, cowboys in the raw land north of the Missouri, believed in her so much they paid her tuition at Hastings College, Nebraska. South Dakota then paid for her next three years of college at Spearfish Normal College. After five years of teaching in Custer, Maggie returned to college in Chicago to study not the facts to be taught but the most effective means to teach the young. She emerged an Educational Specialist working for struggling new schools in the West.