Single Woman Homesteader

by Leona Dixon Cox
Illustrated by David N. Giles

She survived the Great Depression with $5 plus grit, determination and knowledge of the wilderness.

Born as the 20th century began, Leona Dixon Cox grew up at her family's hunting lodge.  When the Great Depression struck she took off on her own, surveyed 640 acres of precipitous wilderness with a lariat, cut her own timber and built a home and ranch.  Detailed construction guides and illustrations enliven the text of this woman's dramatic encounters with nature in all its caprices.

"I knew what my father should have done," said the author, having observed the failure of his hunting lodge.

At age 69 she married for the first time, her friend and widowed neighbor, John Cox.  They traveled everywhere together until Leona lost a leg to an old injury from a spooked horse incident with a cougar (included in the book).  She bought a computer and began writing in her 70's.  In her eighties she caught the largest bass on a trip in Alaska waters, then died at 97, just before another turn of the century.

Single Woman Homesteader was featured in Healdsburg, California, for National Women's History Month in March, 1994.  All the bookstores in town sold out, the library overflowed for a two-hour talk by the author and the Healdsburg Museum had the biggest crown in its history.  The Tribune, Oklahoma.

The truly authentic voice of a pioneer woman. CSU, Hayward.

We welcome this book.  It will attract an eager audience from historical societies, women, naturalists, genealogists and school historians from third grade on. Sonoma County Library.