"Frontiers" |40x30 oil on canvas| On the Oregon Trail in the 1840s the women who made the treacherous jounrey not only maintained their traditional responsibilies for food and laundry, but they also gathered buffalo chips for fuel, drove teams of oxen, made bullets, and cared for the sick and injured. It is estimated that in the first 50 years of the Homestead Act, women accounted for one third of all homestead claims. In fact, women of Wyoming gained the right to vote in 1869 -- the rest of the US still have to wait 80 more years before all women gained that right.