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LAND OF THE BURNT THIGH
by
EDITH EUDORA KOHL
Drawings by Stephen J. Voorhies
New York, London, Funk & Wagnalls Co., 1938.
TO
THE MEMORY OF
IDA MARY
CONTENTS
A Word of Explanation xxxiii
I A Shack on the Prairie 1
II Down to Grass Roots 16
III "Any Fool Can Set Type" 36
IV The Biggest Lottery in History 46
V No Place for Clinging Vines 64
VI "Utopia" 83
VII Building Empires Overnight 99
VIII Easy as Falling Off a Log 120
IX The Opening of the Rosebud 143
X The Harvest 164
XI The Big Blizzard 185
XII A New America 199
XIII The Thirsty Land 214
XIV The Land of the Burnt Thigh 238
XV Up in Smoke 253
XVI Fallowed Land 268
XVII New Trails 282
[Illustration]
A WORD OF EXPLANATION
_I have not attempted in this book to write an autobiography. This is
not my story--it is the story of the people, the present-day pioneers,
who settled on that part of the public lands called the Great American
Desert, and wrested a living from it at a personal cost of privation and
suffering._
_Today there is an infinite deal of talk about dust bowls, of prairie
grass which should never have been plowed under for farming, of land
which should be abandoned. Yet much of this is the land which during the
crucial years of the war was the grain-producing section of the United
States. Regiments of men have marched to war with drums beating and
flags flying, but the regiments who marched into the desert, and faced
fire and thirst, and cold and hunger, and who stayed to build up a new
section of the country, a huge empire in the West, have been ignored,
and their problems largely misunderstood._
_The history of the homesteaders is paradoxical, beginning as it does in
the spirit of a great gamble, with the government lotteries with land as
the stakes, and developing in a close-knit spirit of mutual
helpfulness._
_My own part in so tremendous a migration of a people was naturally a
slight one, but for me it has been a rewarding adventure, leading men
and women onto the land, then against organized interests, and finally
into the widespread use of cooperative methods. Most of that story
belongs beyond the confines of the present book._
_Over thousands of acres today in the West men and women are still
fighting to control that last frontier, and wherever there are farmers,
the methods of cooperation will spread for decades. It is a good fight.
I hope I shall be in it._
_E. E. K._
LAND
OF THE
BURNT
THIGH
[Illustration]
I
A SHACK ON THE PRAIRIE
At sunset we came up out of the draw to the crest of the ridge. Perched
on the high seat of the old spring wagon, we looked into a desolate land
which reached to the horizon on every side. Prairie which had lain
untouched since the Creation save for buffalo and roving bands of
Indians, its brown grass scorched and crackling from the sun. No trees
to break the endless monotony or to provide a moment's respite from the
sun.
The driver, sitting stooped over on the front seat, half asleep,
straightened up and looked around, sizing up the vacant prairie.
"Well," he announced, "I reckon this might be it."
But this couldn't be it. There was nothing but space, and sun-baked
plains, and the sun blazing down on our heads. My sister pulled out the
filing papers, looking for the description the United States Land Office
had given her: Section 18, Range 77W--about thirty miles from Pierre,
South Dakota.
"Three miles from the buffalo waller," our driver said, mumbling to
himself, ignoring the official location and looking back as though
measuring the distance with his eye. "Yeah, right in here--somewhere."
"But," faltered Ida Mary, "there was to be a house--"
"Thar she is!" he announced, pointing his long whip in the direction of
the setting sun. "See that shack over yonder?"
Whipping up the tired team with a flick of the rawhide, he angled off
across the trackless prairie. One panic-stricken look at the black,
tar-papered shack, standing alone in that barren expanse, and the last
spark of our dwindling enthusiasm for homesteading was snuffed out. The
house, which had seemed such an extraordinary stroke of luck when we had
heard of it, looked like a large but none too substantial packing-box
tossed haphazardly on the prairie which crept in at its very door.
The driver stopped the team in front of the shack, threw the lines to
the ground, stretched his long, lank frame over the wheel and began to
unload the baggage. He pushed open the unbolted door with the grass
grown up to the very sill, and set the boxes and trunk inside. Grass.
Dry, yellow grass crackling under his feet.
"Here, why don't you get out?" he said sharply. "It's sundown and a long
trip back to town."
Automatically we obeyed. As Ida Mary paid him the $20 fee, he stood
there for a moment sizing us up. Homesteaders were all in his day's
work. They came. Some stayed to prove up the land. Some didn't. We
wouldn't.
"Don't 'pear to me like you gals are big enough to homestead." He took
his own filled water jug from the wagon and set it down at the door,
thus expressing his compassion. Then, as unconcerned as a taxi driver
leaving his passengers at a city door, he drove away, leaving us alone.
Ida Mary and I fought down the impulse to run after him, implore him to
take us back with him, not to leave us alone with the prairie and the
night, with nothing but the packing-box for shelter. I think we were too
overwhelmed by the magnitude of our disaster even to ask for help.
We stared after him until the sudden evening chill which comes with the
dusk of the frontier roused us to action.
Hesitantly we stepped over the low sill of the little shack, feeling
like intruders. Ida Mary, who had been so proud of finding a claim with
a house already built, stared at it without a word, her round, young
face shadowed by the brim of her straw hat drawn and tired.
It was a typical homestead shack, about 10 × 12 feet, containing only
one room, and built of rough, foot-wide boards, with a small cellar
window on either side of the room. Like the walls, the door was of wide
boards. The whole house was covered on the outside with tar paper. It
had obviously been put together with small concern for the fine points
of carpentry and none whatever for appearance. It looked as though the
first wind would pick it up and send it flying through the air.
It was as unprepossessing within as it was outside. In one corner a
homemade bunk was fastened to the wall, with ropes criss-crossed and run
through holes in the 2 × 4 inch pieces of lumber which formed the bed,
to take the place of springs. In another corner a rusty, two-hole oil
stove stood on a drygoods box; above it another box with a shelf in it
for a cupboard. Two rickety, homemade chairs completed the furnishings.
We tried to tell ourselves that we were lucky; shacks were not provided
for homesteaders, they had to build their own--but Ida Mary had
succeeded in finding one not only ready built but furnished as well. We
did not deceive ourselves or each other. We were frightened and
homesick. Whatever we had pictured in our imaginations, it bore no
resemblance to the tar-paper shack without creature comforts; nor had we
counted on the desolation of prairie on which we were marooned.
Before darkness should shut us in, we hurriedly scrambled through our
provisions for a can of kerosene. Down in the trunk was a small lamp. We
got it out and filled it. And then we faced each other, speechless, each
knowing the other's fear--afraid to voice it. Matches! They had not been
on our list. I fumbled hastily through the old box cupboard with its few
dust-covered odds and ends. Back in a corner was an old tobacco can.
Something rattled lightly as I picked it up--matches!
We were too weary to light a fire. On a trunk which we used as a table,
we spread a cold lunch, tried to swallow a few bites and gave it up. The
empty space and the black night had swallowed us up.
"We might as well go to bed," said Ida Mary dully.
"We'll start back home in the morning," I declared, "as soon as it is
daylight."
* * * * *
Oddly enough, we had never questioned the impulse which led two young
city girls to go alone into unsettled land, homesteading. Our people had
been pioneers, always among those who pushed back the frontier. The
Ammonses had come up from Tennessee into Illinois in the early days and
cleared the timberland along the Mississippi Valley some forty miles out
of St. Louis. They built their houses of the hand-hewn logs and became
land and stock owners. They were not sturdy pioneers, but they were
tenacious.
Some of them went on into what Grandma Ammons called the Santa Fe
Bottoms, a low marshy country along the river, where they became
wealthy--or well-to-do, at least--by fattening droves of hogs on acorns.
Generally speaking, my mother's family ran to professions, and my
father's family to land. Though there was father's cousin, Jack Hunter,
who had been west and when he came to visit us now and then told wild
tales about the frontier to which my sister and I as little children
listened wide-eyed. He wove glowing accounts of the range country where
he was going to make a million dollars raising cattle. Cousin Jack
always talked big.
It was from his highly colored yarns that we had learned all we knew of
the West--and from the western magazines which pictured it as an
exciting place where people were mostly engaged in shooting one another.
While Ida Mary and I were still very young our mother died, and after
that we divided our time between our father's home--he had married
again and had a second family to take care of--and the home of his
sister. As a result my sister and I came to depend on ourselves and on
each other more than two girls of our age usually do.
By the time we were old enough to see that things were not going well
financially at home, we knew we must make our own way. Some of the girls
we knew talked about "going homesteading" as a wild adventure. They
boasted of friends or relatives who had gone to live on a claim as
though they had gone lion-hunting in Africa or gold-hunting in Alaska. A
homestead. At first thought the idea was absurd. We were both very
young; both unusually slight, anything but hardy pioneers; and neither
of us had the slightest knowledge of homesteading conditions, or
experience extending beyond the conventional, sheltered life of the
normal city girl in the first decade of the century.
We were wholly unfitted for the frontier. We had neither training nor
physical stamina for roughing it. When I tried to explain to an uncle of
mine that I wanted to go west, to make something of myself, he retorted
that "it was a hell of a place to do it." In spite of the discussion
which our decision occasioned, we made our plans, deciding to risk the
hazards of a raw country alone, cutting ourselves off from the world of
everyone and everything we had ever known. And with little money to
provide against hardships and emergencies.
At that time the country was emerging from the era of straggling
settlers. Immigration was moving west in a steady stream. The tidal wave
which swept the West from 1908 to the World War was almost upon us
although we could not see it then. But, we thought, there would be new
people, new interests, and in the end 160 acres of land for Ida Mary.
Perhaps for me the health I had sought so unsuccessfully.
Primarily a quarter-section of land was the reason for almost everyone
coming west. As people in the early pioneer days had talked of settling
in Nebraska and Kansas and the eastern Dakotas, they now talked about
the country lying farther on--the western Dakotas, Wyoming, Montana,
Colorado. Over the Midwest the homestead idea was spreading rapidly to
farm and hamlet and city. One heard a great deal about families leaving
their farms and going west to get cheap land; of young college men who
went out to prove up a quarter-section. The land would always be worth
something, and the experience, even for a short time, was a fruitful one
in many ways.
To the public, however, not so romantically inclined, the homesteaders
were the peasantry of America. Through the early homesteading days folk
who "picked up and set themselves down to grub on a piece of land" were
not of the world or important to it. But the stream of immigration to
the land was widening, flowing steadily on.
How did one go about homesteading? we asked. Well, all you had to do to
get a deed to a quarter-section--160 acres of land--was to file on it at
the nearest Land Office, live on it eight months, pay the government
$1.25 an acre--and the land was yours. Easy as falling off a log!
The only improvement required by the government was some sort of abode
as proof that one had made the land his bona-fide residence for the full
eight months.
What would that cost? And the whole undertaking? It depended partly on
what kind of shack one built and whether he did it himself or hired it
done. A shack cost all the way from $25 to $100 or more. Some of those
who had families and intended to stay, built cheap two-and three-room
houses.
Of course, it cost women who had to hire things done more to homestead.
But with grub, fuel and other necessities we figured it would cost not
more than $500 all told.
Then we learned of this quarter-section with a shack already built, bunk
and all. It had been filed on and the owner had left before proving-up
time so that the claim, shack and all, had reverted to the government.
We had about $300 saved up, and this was enough, we decided, to cover
homesteading expenses, inasmuch as the shack was provided. So we had all
but the final payment of $200 to the government, which would be due when
we had "made proof."
We decided to let the money for that final payment take care of itself.
The thing to do was to get hold of a piece of land before it was all
gone. To hear people talk, it was the last day of grace to apply for a
claim. They talked like that for ten years. We did not know there were
several million acres lying out there between the Missouri and the
Pacific waiting to be settled. We would have all winter to figure out
how to prove up. And we found that one could get $1000 to $1500 for a
raw claim after getting a deed to it.
The claim with the shack on it was in South Dakota, thirty miles from a
town called Pierre. We looked that up in the geography to make sure it
really existed. But when we tried to get detailed information, facts
and figures to help us prepare for what was to come, we got only printed
pamphlets of rules and regulations which were of no real help at all.
Land Offices were so busy in those days that all they could do was to
send out a package of printed information that no one could understand.
Armed with our meager array of facts, we talked to our father--as though
the information we gave him so glibly had any real bearing on this
precarious undertaking of his two young daughters. Whatever his doubts
and hesitations, he let us decide for ourselves; it was only when we
boarded the old Bald Eagle at St. Louis one summer day in 1907, bound up
the river, that he clung to our hands as though unable to let us go,
saying, "I'm afraid you are making a mistake. Take care of yourselves."
"It will be all right," Ida Mary told him cheerfully. "It is only for
eight months. Nothing can happen in eight months."
The first emergency arose almost at once. We started up the Mississippi
in high spirits, but by the time we reached Moline, Illinois, I was
taken from the boat on a stretcher--the aftermath of typhoid fever. It
was bad enough to be ill, it was worse to have an unexpected drain on
our funds, but worst of all was the fear that someone might file on the
claim ahead of us. For a week or ten days I could not travel, but Ida
Mary went ahead to attend to the land-filing and the buying of supplies
so that we could start for the homestead as soon as I arrived.
The trip from Moline to Pierre I made by train. Ida Mary was at the
depot to meet me, and at once we took a ferry across the river to Ft.
Pierre. The river was low and the ever-shifting sandbars rose up to meet
the skiffs. Ft. Pierre was a typical frontier town, unkempt and
unfinished, its business buildings, hotel and stores, none of more than
two stories, on the wide dirt road called Main Street. At one end of
Main Street flowed the old Missouri, at the other it branched off into
trails that lost themselves in the prairie.
Beyond Main Street the houses of the little town were scattered, looking
raw and new and uncomfortable, most of them with small, sunburned,
stunted gardens. But there was nothing apologetic about Ft. Pierre.
"We've done mighty well with what we've had to work with," was its
attitude.
Section 18, Range 77W--about thirty miles from Pierre. It seemed more
real now. The hotel proprietor promised to find us a claim locator to
whom that cryptic number made sense.
The next morning at sun-up we were on our way. At that hour the little
homestead town of Ft. Pierre lay quiet. Other homesteaders were ready to
start out: a farmer and his wife from Wisconsin, who were busy
sandwiching their four children into a wagon already filled with
immigrant goods, a cow and horse tied on behind.
At a long table in the fly-specked hotel dining room we ate flapjacks
and fried potatoes and drank strong coffee in big heavy cups. Then, at
long last, perched on the seat of the claim locator's high spring wagon,
we jolted out of town, swerving to let a stagecoach loaded with
passengers whip past us, waiting while a team of buffalo ambled past,
and finally jogged along the beaten road through the bad lands outside
of town.
Beyond the rough bad lands we came upon the prairie. We traveled for
miles along a narrow, rutted road crossed now and then by dim trails
leading nowhere, it seemed. Our own road dwindled to a rough trail, and
the spring wagon lurched over it while we clung to the sides to ease the
constant jolting, letting go to pull our hats over our eyes which ached
with the glare, or over the back of our necks which were blistered from
the sun.
Our frantic haste to arrive while the land lasted seemed absurd now.
There was land enough for all who wanted it, and few enough to claim it.
All that weary day we saw no people save in the distance a few
homesteaders mowing strips of the short dry grass for hay. Now and then
we passed a few head of horses and a cow grazing. Here and there over
the hot, dusty plain we saw shacks and makeshift houses surrounded by
patches of corn or flax or dried-up garden. Why were the houses so
scattered, looking as though they had been thrown down at random? "They
had to be set on the claims," our locator said dryly.
About noon we stopped at a deserted ranch house, surrounded by
corrals--a camp, our driver explained, where some stockman held his
cattle overnight in driving them to market. Here we ate a lunch and the
locator fed and watered the team, refilling the jars from an old well
with its long wooden water troughs.
There the trail ended. Now we struck out over a trackless land that grew
rougher the farther we went. To look for a quarter-section here was like
looking for a needle in a haystack. It was late summer and the sun beat
down on the hot prairie grass and upon our heads. We had driven all day
without sign of shade--and save for that brief interval at noon, without
sight of water. Our faces and hands were blistered, our throats parched
from the hot wind.
This was not the West as I had dreamed of it, not the West even of
banditry and violent action. It was a desolate, forgotten land, without
vegetation save for the dry, crackling grass, without visible tokens of
fertility. Drab and gray and empty. Stubborn, resisting land. Heroics
wouldn't count for much here. It would take slow, back-breaking labor,
and time, and the action of the seasons to make the prairie bloom.
People had said this was no place for two girls. It began to seem that
they were right.
And this was the goal of our long journey--the tar-paper shack. We
pushed the trunk over in front of the door which had no lock, piled the
chairs and suitcases on top of the trunk; spread a comfort over the
criss-cross rope bed and threw ourselves across it without undressing.
We had no gun or other weapon for protection and were not brave enough
to use one had we possessed it.
The little cellar windows which stood halfway between the low ceiling
and the floor were nailed shut. But we needed neither window nor door,
so far as air was concerned. It poured through the wide cracks like
water through a sieve.
While we tossed, too tired and sick at heart to sleep, I asked: "What
became of the young man who built this shack?"
"He lived here only a few weeks and abandoned it," Ida Mary explained.
"The claim reverted to the government, shack, bunk and all. He couldn't
stick it out."
* * * * *
The next morning we awoke to a world flooded with sunshine, and it was
the surprise of our lives that we had lived to see it.
Ida started the oil stove and put on the coffee. Wearily I dragged
myself out of bed. We fried bacon, made toast, unpacked our few dishes.
Discovering that a hinged shelf on the wall was intended for a table, we
put it up and set our breakfast on it. We found that we were really
hungry.
Our determination to start back home was still unshaken, but we had
reckoned without the prairies. We were marooned as on a desert island.
And more pressing, even, than some way of getting back to Pierre--and
home--was the need for water. We must get a jug of water somewhere.
Water didn't come from a tap on the prairies. We began to wonder where
it did come from; certainly there wasn't a drop to be found on Ida
Mary's claim.
In the glaring morning sun which blazed on the earth, we saw a shack in
the distance, the reflection of the sun on yellow boards. It was farther
away than it appeared to be with the bright light against it.
This new home was larger than the regulation shack, and it had a
gable--a low-pitched roof--which in itself was a symbol of permanence in
contrast to the temporary huts that dotted the plains. It was made of
tongue-and-groove drop-siding, which did away with the need of tar
paper, and in the homestead country marked a man's prestige and
solidity.
We were met at the open door by a pretty, plump young woman. A little
girl of seven stood quietly at one side, and a little boy, perhaps five,
at the other. As we stood there with the jug she broke into a pleasant
laugh. "You've come for water! We have no well, but Huey hauled two
barrels this morning from Crooks's, several miles away."
We were led into a large room, clean and cool. After one has been in a
low, slant-roofed, tar-papered shack that becomes an oven when the sun
shines on it, entering a house with a gable is almost like going into a
refrigerator. There wasn't much in the room except beds and a sewing
machine. The floor, on which a smaller child was playing, was bare
except for a few rag rugs, but shining. An opening led into a small
lean-to kitchen with a range in one corner; in the other a large square
table spread with a checked tablecloth was set ready for the next meal,
and covered with a mosquito bar. The home, the family, gave one a
feeling of coming to anchor in a sea of grass and sky.
We learned that the name was Dunn and that they were dirt farmers from
Iowa, but they had not come in time to do much farming that season. They
had thrown up a makeshift barn as a temporary shelter for the horses and
one cow until they could build a real barn--after they found out what
the soil would do, Mrs. Dunn explained.
She hurried out to the kitchen, talking as she moved about, and came in
with coffee and a plate of oatmeal cookies.
"I am so glad you are going to live here," she told us. "Neighbors
within a mile and a half! I won't feel so much alone with neighbors
close by to chat with."
We hadn't the courage to tell her that we weren't going to stay.
"You must have found the shack dirty," she said, with a glance at her
spotless house. "A bachelor homesteader had it and they are always the
worst. They wait until the floor is thick with dirt and grease and then
spread newspapers over it to cover up the dirt. You'll have a time
getting it fixed as you want it."
We wondered how anyone made a home of a tar-paper shack. To hear Mrs.
Dunn's casual remarks, one would think it no more of a problem than
redecorating a city home.
As we started on the trek back, she called after us, "Huey will haul you
over a keg of water tomorrow."
As soon as we were out of earshot I said, "We can hire Mr. Dunn to take
us back to Pierre."
"That's an idea," Ida Mary agreed.
By the time we had walked back the mile and a half--which seemed five in
the scorching heat--it was past noon and we were completely exhausted.
So we did not get started back to Pierre that day. But we felt a little
easier. There was a way to get out.
[Illustration]
II
DOWN TO GRASS ROOTS
There is a lot of sound common sense in the saying about leaving the
cage door open. As long as we knew we could be taken back to town we
were content to stay for a day or two, and take a look at the country
while we were there--by which we meant that we would gaze out over the
empty spaces with a little more interest.
We strained our eyes for sight of moving objects, for signs of life.
Once we saw a team and wagon moving toward the south. As suddenly as it
had appeared it dropped out of sight into a ravine. A horseman crossing
the plains faded into the horizon.
As our vision gradually adjusted itself to distance we saw other
homestead abodes. The eye "picked up" these little shacks across the
plains, one by one.
For years straggling settlers had moved on and off the prairie--and
those who stayed barely made a mark on the engulfing spaces. The
unyielding, harsh life had routed the majority of homesteaders--they had
shut the door behind them and left the land to its own.
All over the plains empty shacks told the tale. They stood there with
the grass grown up around them, the unwritten inscription: "This
quarter-section has been taken." Dilapidated; the tiny window or two
boarded up; boards cracked or fallen apart. They, too, had not been able
to weather the hard forces of nature on the frontier. If the shack had
gone down, or had been moved in the night by some more ambitious
homesteader, there was always the pile of tin cans to mark the spot.
They stayed and rusted.
And from the tin cans ye knew them. Bachelors' huts were always
surrounded; where there was a woman to do the cooking there were fewer
cans. But as a rule the shack dwellers lived out of tin cans like city
apartment dwellers.
But for the most part the land was inhabited by coyotes and prairie
dogs, with a few herds of range sheep and cattle. Few of the
homesteaders were permanent. They stayed their eight months--if they
could stick it out--and left at once. Their uneasy stay on the land was
like the brief pause of migratory birds or the haphazard drifting of
tumble weeds that go rolling across the plains before the wind, landing
against a barbed-wire fence or any other object that blocked their way.
The empty shacks reminded one of the phantom towns which men had thrown
up breathlessly and abandoned when the search for gold had proved
illusory. Only permanency could dig the gold of fertility from the
prairie, and thus far the people who had made a brief attempt to cope
with it had been in too much of a hurry. Those abandoned
quarter-sections had defeated the men who would have taken them.
The main movement over the plains was that of hauling water from the few
wells in the country, or from one of two narrow creeks that twisted
through the parched land and vanished into dry gulches. They were now as
dry as a bone.
"I'd have a well," Huey Dunn said, "if I could stop hauling water long
enough to dig one." That was the situation of most of the homesteaders.
Most of these migratory homesteaders wanted the land as an
investment--to own it and sell it to some eastern farmer or to a
rancher. Some, like Huey Dunn, came to make a permanent home and till
the land. These few dirt farmers raised patches of corn, and while the
farmers from Iowa and Illinois were scornful of the miniature stalks,
the flavor of the sweet corn grown on the dry sod was unsurpassed. The
few patches of potatoes were sweet and mealy. But the perfect sod crop
was flax. Already the frontier was becoming known for its flax raising.
We saw no large range herds, though there were no herd laws to keep them
off private property. One could drive straight as the crow flies from
Pierre to Presho, forty or fifty miles, without stopping to open a gate.
If one struck a fence around a quarter-section here or there he either
got out and cut the wire in two, or drove around the corner of the
fence, depending upon how he felt about fences being in the way.
No wonder sheep-herders went crazy, we thought, swallowed up by that sea
of brown, dry grass, by the endless monotony of space.
I think what struck us most those first days was the realization that
the era of pioneers had not ended with covered wagon days; that there
were men and women, thousands of them, in our own times, living under
pioneer conditions, fighting the same hardships, the same obstacles, the
same primitive surroundings which had beset that earlier generation.
Toward evening, that first day, sitting on the little board platform in
front of the door where there was a hint of shade and a suggestion of
coolness in the air, we saw two animals approaching.
"I never saw dogs like that, did you?" I said to Ida Mary when they came
a little closer.
She jumped up, crying "Wolves!" We had seen one on the road out from
Pierre. We ran into the shack, nailed the door shut that night--no
risking of trunks or boxes against it--crawled into bed and lay there
for hours, afraid to speak out loud.
Huey Dunn came next day with the keg of water. "Wolves?" he said, as we
told him of the experience. "They wouldn't hurt anyone, unless they were
cornered--or hungry."
"But how," demanded Ida Mary, "were we to tell when they were hungry?"
Huey laughed at that. When the snow lay deep on the ground for a long
time after a blizzard, and there was no way to get food, they sometimes
attacked sheep or cattle, and they had been known to attack persons, but
not often. They generally went in packs to do their foraging.
"Goin' back tomorrow?" Mr. Dunn ejaculated, as we interrupted his talk
about the country to ask him to take us to Pierre. "Why, my wife planned
on your comin' over to dinner tomorrow." But if we wanted to go the next
day--sure, he could take us. Oh, he wouldn't charge us much. As he drove
away he called back, "Don't get scared when you hear the coyotes. You'll
get used to 'em if you stay."
And that night they howled. We were awakened by the eerie, hair-raising
cry that traveled so far over the open prairie and seemed so near; a
wild, desolate cry with an uncannily human quality. That mournful sound
is as much a part of the prairie as is the wind which blows, unchecked,
over the vast stretches, the dreary, inescapable voice of the plains.
The first time we heard the coyotes there seemed to be a hundred of
them, though there were probably half a dozen. All Huey Dunn's assurance
that they were harmless and that it was a nightly occurrence failed to
calm us.
When Huey got home his wife asked what he thought of their new
neighbors.
"Right nice girls to talk to," Huey said, "but damn poor homesteaders.
Beats the devil the kind of people that are taking up land. Can't
develop a country with landowners like that. Those girls want to go
home. Already. I said you wanted 'em to come over to dinner tomorrow
noon. Maybe you can fix up something kinda special."
"I'll drop a few extra spuds into the pot and bake a pan of
cornbread--they'll eat it," Mrs. Dunn predicted cheerfully. She was
right.
Bringing us back to the claim the next afternoon Huey suddenly
remembered that he had promised a neighbor to help string barb-wire the
following day. But--sure--he could take us to town 'most any day after
that.
The next day we began to discover the women who were living on
homesteads and who, in their own way, played so vital a part in
developing the West. One of our nearest neighbors--by straining our eyes
we could see her little shack perched up against the horizon--put on her
starched calico dress and gingham apron and came right over to call. The
Widow Fergus, she said she was.
She sat down, laid her big straw hat on the floor beside her (no, just
let it lie there--she always threw it off like that) and made herself
comfortable. Her graying hair, parted in the middle and done up in a
knot in the back, was freshly and sleekly combed. She was brown as a
berry and just the type of hard-working woman to make a good
homesteader, with calloused, capable, tireless hands. She was round,
bustling and kind. The Widow Fergus had taken up a homestead with her
young son.
She looked at the unopened baggage, the dirty shack. Now that was
sensible, she said, to rest a few days--it was so nice and quiet out
here. Homesick? My, no. There was no time to get homesick. Too much to
do getting by on a homestead. Women like the Widow Fergus, we were to
discover, had no time for self-pity or lamenting their rigorous, hard
lives. They did not, indeed, think in terms of self-pity. And they
managed, on the whole, to live rich, satisfying lives and at the same
time to prepare the way for easier, pleasanter lives for the women who
were to follow them.
When she left she said, "Now, come over, girls, and anything you want,
let me know...."
A little later that same day we saw three riders galloping across the
plains, headed straight for our shack. They stopped short, swung off
their ponies, three girl homesteaders.
They rode astride, wore plain shirtwaists and divided skirts. Two of
them wore cheap straw hats much like those worn by farmers in the fields
everywhere. They swung from their saddles as easily as though they wore
breeches and boots.
"How did you learn we were here?" I asked, curious to know how news
could travel over these outlying spaces.
"Huey Dunn told it over at the road ranch while I was waiting there for
the mail," the oldest of the girls explained, "so I just rode around and
picked up the girls."
One would think they lived in the same city block, so nonchalant was she
over the round-up, but "only eighteen miles," she explained easily.
Her name was Wilomene White, she told us, and she came from Chicago. She
had been out here most of the time for almost two years--what with
leaves of absence in the winter prolonging the term of residence. She
was a short, plump woman whom we judged to be in her early thirties, and
she had a sense of humor that was an invaluable asset in a country like
that. She was an artist and head of her father's household. Her brother
was a prominent surgeon in Chicago and for several years Wilomene,
besides being active in club work, had been on the board of the
Presbyterian Hospital there.
When her health failed from overwork and strenuous public activities,
her brother ordered a complete change and plenty of pure fresh air. So
with a little group of acquaintances she had come west and taken up a
homestead. It was easy to understand that she had found a change--and
fresh air. What surprised us was that she took such delight in the
country and the pioneer life about her that she no longer wanted to
return to her full life in Chicago.
The three girls stayed on and on, talking. Girl homesteaders had no
reason for going home. Days and nights, days of the week and month were
all the same to them. There were so few places to go, and the distance
was so great that it was a custom to stay long enough to make a visit
worth while. The moon would come up about ten that night--so nothing
mattered. Afraid to ride home in the middle of the night? What was there
to fear out here?
Ida Mary and I still hesitated about going far from the shack. The
prairie about us was so unsettled, so lacking in trees that there were
practically no landmarks for the unaccustomed eye to follow. We became
confused as to direction and distance. "Three miles from the buffalo
waller," our locator had said. "No trouble to locate your claim." But if
we got far enough away from it we couldn't even find the buffalo waller.
Even against our will the bigness and the peace of the open spaces were
bound to soak in. Despite the isolation, the hardships and the awful
crudeness, we could not but respond to air that was like old wine--as
sparkling in the early morning, as mellow in the soft nights. Never were
moon and stars so gloriously bright. It was the thinness of the
atmosphere that made them appear so near the earth, we were told.
While the middle of the day was often so hot we panted for breath,
mornings and evenings were always gloriously cool and invigorating, and
we slept. With the two comforters spread on the criss-cross rope bed, we
fell asleep and woke ravenously hungry each morning.
That first letter home was a difficult task, and we found it safer to
stick to facts--the trip had been pleasant, Ida Mary had filed on the
claim. But to prepare for our arrival at home, we added, "There is
nothing to worry about. If we think it is best, we will come home." This
was eventually sent off after we had discussed what we had better tell
our father, and crossed out the sentences that might worry him. "Don't
waste so much paper," Ida Mary warned me. "It is thirty miles to another
writing tablet."
We were eating supper one evening when four or five coyotes slipped up
out of the draw and came close to the shack. Almost one in color with
the yellow grass, they stood poised, alert, ready to run at the
slightest sound. Graceful little animals, their pointed noses turned
upward. A great deal like a collie dog. We did not make a move, but they
seemed to sense life in the once deserted cabin, and like a phantom they
faded into the night.
Huey Dunn was one of those homesteaders who believed the world (the
frontier at least) was not made in a day. He was slow getting around to
things. He never did get around to taking Ida Mary and me back to
Pierre. And to our dismay a homesteader drove up one day with the big
box of household goods we had shipped out. The stage express had brought
it out from Pierre to McClure, and it had been hauled the rest of the
way by the first homesteader coming our way. Altogether it cost twenty
dollars to get that box, and there wasn't ten dollars' worth of stuff in
it.
Ida Mary and I had collected the odds and ends it contained from
second-hand stores in St. Louis, selecting every article after eager
discussion of its future use, picturing its place in our western cabin.
We hadn't known about the tar-paper shack then. Its arrival stressed our
general disillusionment.
We had now seen the inside of a few shacks over the prairie. The
attempts the women had made to convert them into homes were pitiful,
although some of them had really accomplished wonders with practically
nothing. It is pretty hard to crush the average woman's home-making
instinct. The very grimness of the prairie increased their determination
to raise a bulwark against it.
Up to now we had been uneasy guests in the shack, ready for flight
whenever Huey Dunn got around to taking us back to Pierre. But trying to
dig out a few things now and then from grips and trunks without
unpacking from top to bottom is an unsatisfactory procedure. So we
unpacked.
Then we had to find a place for our things and thought we might as well
try to make the cabin more comfortable at the same time, even if we
weren't staying. We looked about us. There wasn't much to work with. In
the walls of our shack the boards ran up and down with a 2 × 4 scantling
midway between floor and ceiling running all the way around the room.
This piece of lumber served two purposes. It held the shack together and
served as a catch-all for everything from toilet articles to hammer and
nails. The room had been lined with patches of building paper, some red,
some blue, and finished out with old newspapers.
The patchwork lining had become torn in long cracks where the boards of
the shack were split, and through the holes the dry wind drove dust and
sand. The shack would have to be relined, for there was not sufficient
protection from the weather and we would freeze in the first cold spell.
This regulation shack lining was a great factor in the West's
settlement. We should all have frozen to death without it. It came in
rolls and was hauled out over the plains like ammunition to an army, and
paper factories boomed. There were two kinds--red and blue--and the
color indicated the grade. The red was a thinner, inferior quality and
cost about three dollars a roll, while the heavy blue cost six. Blue
paper on the walls was as much a sign of class on the frontier as blue
blood in Boston. We lined our shack with red.
The floor was full of knotholes, and the boards had shrunk, leaving wide
cracks between. The bachelor homesteader had left it black with grease.
When Huey hauled us an extra keg of water we proceeded to take off at
least a few layers.
We were filling the cracks with putty when a bachelor homesteader
stopped by and watched the operation in disgust.
"Where you goin' to run your scrub-water," he wanted to know, "with the
cracks and knotholes stopped up?"
In the twenty-dollar box was a 6 × 9-foot faded Brussels rug, with a
couple of rolls of cheap wallpaper. From a homesteader who was proving
up and leaving we bought an old wire cot. With cretonnes we made
pillows, stuffed with prairie grass; hung bright curtains at the little
windows, which opened by sliding back between strips of wood. In the big
wooden box we had also packed a small, light willow rocker. In one
corner we nailed up a few boards for a bookcase, painting it bright red.
Little by little the old tar-paper shack took on a homelike air.
It is curious how much value a thing has if one has put some effort into
it. We were still as disillusioned with the country as we had been the
first day, we felt as out of place on a homestead as a coyote sauntering
up Fifth Avenue, we felt the tar-paper shack to be the most unhomelike
contraption we had ever seen; but from the moment we began to make
improvements, transforming the shack, it took on an interest for us out
of all proportion to the changes we were able to make. Slowly we were
making friends, learning to find space restful and reassuring instead of
intimidating, adapting our restless natures to a country that measured
time in seasons; imperceptibly we were putting down our first roots into
that stubborn soil.
At first we read and reread the letters from home, talking of it
constantly and wistfully like exiles, drawn constantly toward the place
we had left. Almost without our being aware of it we ceased to feel
that we had left St. Louis. It was St. Louis which was receding from us,
while we turned more and more toward the new country, identified
ourselves with it.
Ida Mary and I woke up one day a few weeks after our arrival to find our
grubstake almost gone. Back home we had figured that there were ample
funds for filing fees, for transportation and food. Now we began to
figure backwards, which we found was a poor way to figure. There was no
money to take us back home. We had burned our bridges not only behind
but in front of us.
It was the incidentals which had cut into our small reserve. The expense
of my illness on the road had been heavy. The rest of the money seemed
to have evaporated like water in dry air. Fixing up the shack had been
an unexpected expense, and we had overlooked the cost of hauling
altogether--in a country where everything had to be hauled. We had paid
$25 for a stiff old Indian cayuse, the cheapest thing in horseflesh that
we could find.
In order to be safe we had figured on standard prices for commodities,
but we found that all of them were much higher out here. Coal, the only
fuel obtainable, ran as high as $20 a ton, with the hauling and high
freight. Merchants blamed the freight cost for the high price of
everything from coal to a package of needles.
I laid the blame for our predicament on Huey Dunn. But Ida Mary thought
it went farther back than that. It was the fault of the government!
Women should not be allowed to file on land.
Regardless of where the blame lay, we were now reduced to a state of
self-preservation. Had not the majority of the settlers taken this
gambling chance of pulling through somehow, the West would never have
been settled.
It is curious how quickly one's animal instinct of survival comes to the
fore in primitive lands. If we ran out of bacon we stirred flour into a
little grease, added water and a few drops of condensed milk (if we had
it) and turned out a filling dish of gravy. If we ran out of coal we
pulled the dried prairie grass to burn in the little two-hole monkey
stove, which we had bought with the cot. Laundry stoves, some called
them.
To keep the water from becoming warm as dishwater we dug a hole in the
ground to set the water can in. The earth became so cool at night that
anything set down in a shallow hole on the shady side of the house kept
cool all day.
We learned that it took twice as long to cook beans or other vegetables
in that high altitude; that one must put more flour in the cake and not
so much shortening or it would surely fall; that meat hung in the dry
air would keep fresh indefinitely--but we had not tasted a bite of fresh
meat since we came.
Our homestead not only had a cabin, but it boasted a small patch of
sweet corn planted by the first filer on the land. It would make food
for both man and beast--for the Ammons girls and the pinto.
It was a frontier saying that homesteading was a gamble: "Yeah, the
United States Government is betting you 160 acres of land that you can't
live on it eight months." Ida and I weren't betting; we were holding
on, living down to the grass roots. The big problem was no longer how to
get off the homestead, but how to keep soul and body together on it.
If one were in a country where he could live by foraging--"We can live
on jack rabbits next winter," homesteaders would say. But Ida Mary and I
would have to depend on someone to get them for us. We realized more
every day how unequipped we were for plains life, lacking the sturdy
health of most frontier women, both of us unusually small and slight.
Back of Ida Mary's round youthful face and steady eyes, however, there
were grit and stamina and cool-headed common sense. She would never
stampede with the herd. And for all my fragility, I had the will to hang
on.
Well, we would eat corncakes with bacon grease a while longer. (They
were really good. I became an expert in making them.) And we still had
some bacon left, and the corn; a little syrup in the pail would take the
place of sugar. Uncle Sam hadn't won that bet yet, on the Ammons
homestead, though most of the settlers thought he would.
Three or four miles from the claim was McClure, a ranch house combined
with a general store and a post office. Walking there one day for
groceries and our mail we passed a group of men lounging in front of the
old log ranch house. "Now such as that won't ever be any good to the
country," one of them said of us. "What the country needs is people with
guts. There ought to be a law against women filing on government
land...."
"And against all these city folks coming out here just to get a deed and
then leaving the country," added another. "If they ain't going to
improve the land they oughtn't to have it."
"Most of 'em take their trunks along when they go to town to prove up,"
put in the stage driver, "and that's the last you ever see of 'em.
They've gone on the next train out."
Landgrabbers, the native westerners called the settlers, no good to the
country. And there was a great deal of truth in it. We began to check up
on the homesteaders of whom we knew. Probably two-thirds of them would
go back home as soon as they proved up, leaving their shack at the mercy
of the wind, and the prairie to wait as it had always waited for a
conquering hand.