From a historian and senior writer and editor atAtlas Obscura, 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's laws offered a tempting freedom often difficult to obtain elsewhere: divorce.With the laxest divorce laws in the country, five railroad lines, and the finest hotel for hundreds of miles, the small city became the unexpected headquarters for society divorcees infamous around the world as THE DIVORCE COLONY. These divorce seekers put Sioux Falls at the center of a heated national debate over the future of American marriage. Clashes mounted between religious leaders, congressmen, and enterprising lawyers; gossip columns, church
