The local press of Casselton reported in 1883 that a “broom brigade of ladies” assembled in town to march on the “residence of a grass widow with the expectation of finding their husbands.” They discovered, however, that their wayward mates were all occupied at a poker game in the saloon.
I’ve been talking about the use of the phrase, “grass widow,” in prairie communities of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth. Also, the awkward place of grass widows in such communities. A grass widow was a woman who had, or was presumed to have, a husband, but he was absent, either divorced or just missing. A woman on her own. Often the object of desire, humor, or suspicion.
I suspect the story of the Casselton broom brigade is apocryphal, but it is illustrative. Others are more unsavory, portraying the grass widow as a temptress. (Certain small-town newspaper editors, indeed, took a suspiciously intent interest in the activities of local grass widows.) One joke went, “A grass widow and a rake usually get on well together.”
In 1882, however, the Fargo press reported a “buxom grass widow” had drawn a “nice young man” of previously “irreproachable reputation,” “quite prominent in church circles,” into a relationship of “fervid intimacy,” visiting him at “unseemly hours and remaining all night.” When pranksters secured his door from the outside, the grass widow dove out a window.
A story from Sanborn in 1887 made sport both of bachelors and grass widows. A fellow “fell violently in love with a pretty grass widow” and, while exercising his passions on a couch, was alarmed to hear cracking noises. He feared he had fractured the lady’s ribs — but it turned out he had merely busted her corset stays.
In 1902 a liveryman from Jamestown disappeared from town the same day as a local grass widow, leading the town’s editor to suggest they “trot a fast heat together.”
A few years later came a pathetic story from Braddock concerning a young man named Robert Frood. He took up with a grass widow (unnamed) who, the press reported, “helped him drive a bunch of Aug. Benz’s cattle to Bismarck for sale.” Although the implication was the grass widow had brought young Frood to grief, it was he who was sentenced to two and a half years in the state penitentiary.
The same year, 1909, in the same county, we read a “dashing Hazelton businessman” showed up with a party of guests at what was supposed to be his wedding to a local grass widow — only to find the lady in question, after first appearing to prepare for the nuptials, and perhaps gathering together some gifts, “had taken the auto route with a better-looking man.”
Rarely were press reports of the doings of grass widows gracious. The Pembina Pioneer Press in 1885 reported that the grass widows of the town had gathered to enjoy an oyster supper. This was reported with a straight face as a matter of women offering one another social support.
Newspapers reported only the shady or suspicious doings of grass widows because in prairie communities, grass widows, even more than male bachelors, were regarded as a social problem. The best they could hope for was a don’t-ask-don’t-tell status. Usually, people told. They told jokes, which might be relatively benign. Frequently, they blamed grass widows for misbehavior that, it must be noted, also involved male partners! This was a fact of life in prairie communities. The stories of the grass widows, in their own terms, went untold.
