Abigail Becker

In 1854, Abigail Becker married a widower and moved to a small, rugged trapper’s cabin on Long Point, Lake Erie, in very remote Ontario, Canada, where she planned to earn a hardscrabble life living off the land and the lake. Oh, and she was also there to raise her husband’s six kids. The two of them went on to have eight kids together, and when he died, she married again and had three more kids.

Seventeen kids, living hand to mouth out in the middle of frigid Lake Erie. And thus concludes this installment of Historical Badass.

Well, no, not really.

Born Abigail Jackson in 1830 in Frontenac County, Upper Canada, she was the daughter of a United Empire Loyalist of Dutch heritage and a French-Canadian mother. She was six feet tall by her teenage years — an imposing figure by any era’s standards — and the physicality seemed to come with a matching disposition. As a girl, she twice rescued neighbors from drowning,