Burden Home in West (Location Key)

In Light in August sometime between 1863 and 1866 Calvin Burden decides to move his family "a hundred miles further west" than the place they moved to when they left St. Louis (245). It seems that they go back to Kansas, where Burden had fought as an abolitionist in the 1850s and which was admitted to the U.S. as a non-slave state in 1861. Calvin's son Nathaniel "rides back and forth across Kansas and Missouri" for two months (245) before he "finally caught up" with them in what Joanna refers to as "that time back in Kansas" (250). They are living in a "sod cabin" (245), a typical frontier dwelling on the treeless prairie, in a "settlement" that consists of "a store, a blacksmith shop, a church and two saloons" (242).