The Divorce Colony: How Women Revolutionized Marriage and Found Freedom on the American Frontier

From a historian and senior editor at Atlas Obscura comes a fascinating account of the daring nineteenth-century women who moved to South Dakota to divorce their husbands and start living on their own terms.

For a woman traveling without her husband in the late nineteenth century, there was only one reason to take the train all the way to Sioux Falls, South Dakota—one sure to garner disapproval from fellow passengers. On the American frontier, the new state offered a tempting freedom often ...