stay. Some of the homesteaders would come back in the summertime,
putting out a little patch of garden and a few rows of corn each season.
But for the most part there would be no record of these transient guests
of the prairie but abandoned shacks. Those who took up claims only as an
investment either sold the land for whatever price they could get for it
or let it lie there to increase in value.
Some of the old-timers didn't object to this system. "When the land is
all taken up, people will have to pay more for it," they explained. But
on the whole they eyed with humorous intolerance the settlers who
departed, leaving their claims as they had found them.
A great blessing of the plains was the absence of vermin. I do not
remember having seen a rat or a weasel on the frontier at that time, and
many of the natives had never seen a potato bug or chinch bug or
cockroach.
But one day after a short, pelting rain, I came home and opened the door
and looked at the moving, crawling walls, and could not believe my eyes.
Worms--small, brown, slick worms--an inch to an inch and a half long.
The walls, the door, the ground were alive with them. They were crawling
through the cracks into the shack, wriggling along the floor and walls
with their tiny, hair-like legs. They infested the plains for miles
around. At night one could feel them crawling over the bed.
The neighbors got together to find means of exterminating these
obnoxious vermin. We burned sulfur inside and used torches of twisted
prairie hay on the outside of the house, just near enough to the walls
to scorch the creepers. But as one regiment burned up another came.
One day Ida Mary and I, in doing a little research work of our own--we
had no biologists to consult on plagues, and no exterminators--lifted up
a wide board platform in front of our shack, and ran screaming. The
pests were nested thick and began to scatter rapidly in every direction,
a fermenting mass.
They were not dangerous, they injured neither men nor crops, but they
were harder to endure than a major disaster. One was aware of them
everywhere, on the chair one sat in, on the food one ate, on one's body.
They were a crawling, maddening nightmare.
A number of homesteaders were preparing to leave the country--driven
out by an army of insects--when, as suddenly as they came, the worms
disappeared. Where they came from, where they went, no one knew. I
mention this episode as one without precedent or repetition in the
history of the frontier, so far as I know.
A number of theories were advanced regarding this worm plague. Some said
they had rained down in cell or germ form; others, that they had
developed with the sudden moisture from some peculiar embryo in the dry
soil. Finding from my own further observation that they were segregated
in the damper sections where the soil had not yet dried out after the
rain, I concluded they had been bred in the ground.
* * * * *
Our need for money had become acute, but before we were quite desperate
a ray of hope appeared. There were quite a few children scattered over
the neighborhood, and the homesteaders decided that there must be a
school in the center of the district.
The directors found that Ida Mary had taught school a term or two back
east, and teachers were scarce as hens' teeth out there, so she got the
school at $25 a month. The little schoolhouse was built close to the far
end of our claim, which was a mile long instead of half a mile square as
it should have been.
We had just finished breakfast one morning when Huey Dunn and another
homesteader drove up to the door with their teams, dragging some heavy
timbers along.
Huey stood in the door, his old straw hat in hand, with that placid
expression on his smooth features. A man of medium height, shoulders
slightly rounded; rather gaunt in the middle where the suspenders
hitched onto the overalls.
"Came to move your shack," he said in an offhand tone.
"Move it?" we demanded. "Where?"
"To the other end of the claim, over by the schoolhouse. And that's as
far as I'm goin' to move you until you prove up," he added. He hadn't
moved us off the land when we wanted to go. He would move us up to the
line now, but not an inch over it until we had our patent.
The men stuck the timbers under the shack, hitched the horses to it, and
Ida Mary and I did the housework en route. Suddenly she laughed: "If we
had been trying to get Huey Dunn to move this shack he wouldn't have got
to it all winter."
When they set us down on the proper location they tied the shack down by
driving stakes two or three feet into the ground, then running wire
cords, like clothesline, from the roof of the shack down to the stakes.
"Just luck there hasn't been much wind or this drygoods box would have
been turned end over end," Huey said. "Wasn't staked at all."
It was autumn and the air was cold early in the mornings and sweet with
the smell of new-mown hay. We hired a homesteader who had a mower to put
up hay for us and had a frame made of poles for a small barn and stacked
the hay on top around it, against the winter. Most of the settlers first
covered this frame with woven wire to keep the stock from eating into
the hay. We left ours open between the poles as a self-feeder through
which Pinto could eat hay without any work or responsibility on our
part.
Then one day Ida Mary went swinging down the trail to her school, a
small, sun-bonneted child at each side. The schoolhouse was much like
any country school--but smaller and more cheaply built. It had long
wooden benches and a rusty stove and in fine weather a dozen or more
pupils, who ranged in age from very young children to great farm boys,
who towered over Ida Mary, but whom, somehow, she learned to manage
effortlessly in that serene fashion of hers. In bad weather, when it was
difficult to travel across the prairie, her class dwindled until, at
times, she had no pupils at all.
[Illustration]
III
"ANY FOOL CAN SET TYPE"
McClure, South Dakota (it's on the map), was the halfway point on the
stage line between Pierre and Presho, three or four miles from our
claim. It consisted of the Halfway House, which combined the functions
of a general store, a post office, a restaurant, and a news center for
the whole community, with the barns and corrals of the old McClure
ranch. And set off a few rods from the house there was another building,
a small crude affair that looked like a homesteader's shack. Across its
rough board front was a sign painted in big black letters:
THE McCLURE PRESS
The first time I saw that sign, I laughed aloud.
"What on earth is a newspaper doing out here?" I asked Mr. Randall, the
proprietor of the Halfway House.
"It's a final-proof sheet," he answered, not realizing that the brief
explanation could mean little to a stranger.
These final-proof sheets, however, were becoming an important branch of
the western newspaper industry, popping up over the frontier for the
sole purpose of publishing the proof notices of the homesteaders. As
required by the government, each settler must have published for five
consecutive weeks in the paper nearest his land, his intention to make
proof (secure title to the land) with the names of witnesses to attest
that he had lived up to the rules and regulations prescribed by the
government.
Also, according to government ruling, such newspapers were to be paid
five dollars by the landholder for each final proof published, and any
contestant to a settler's right to the land must pay a publication fee.
Thereby a new enterprise was created--the "final-proof" newspaper.
These weeklies carried small news items with a smattering of advertising
from surrounding trade centers. But they were made up mostly of "proofs"
and ready-printed material supplied by the newspaper syndicates that
furnished the prints; leaving one or two blank sheets, as required by
the publisher for home print. The McClure _Press_ had two six-column
pages of home print, including the legal notices.
This paper was a proof sheet, pure and simple, run by a girl homesteader
who had worked on a Minneapolis paper. Myrtle Combs was a
hammer-and-tongs printer. She threw the type together, threw it onto the
press and off again; slammed the print-shop door shut; mounted her old
white horse, and with a gallon pail--filled with water at the
trough--tied to the saddlehorn, went loping back to her claim four or
five miles away. But Myrtle could be depended upon to get out the
notices, which was all the owner required.
One day when I went for the mail she called to me: "Say! You want the
job of running this newspaper? I'm proving up. Going home."
We needed the extra money badly. Proving-up time came in early spring.
To get our deed and go home would require nearly $300, which Ida's $25 a
month would not cover. Besides, I felt that I had been a heavy expense
to Ida Mary because of my illness on the road, and I did not want to
continue to be a burden to her. She had succeeded in finding a way to
earn money and I was eager to do my own part.
I didn't know as much about running a newspaper as a hog knows about
Sunday. It was a hard, dirty job which I was not physically equipped to
handle. But I had lived on a homestead long enough to learn some
fundamental things: that while a woman had more independence here than
in any other part of the world, she was expected to contribute as much
as a man--not in the same way, it is true, but to the same degree; that
people who fought the frontier had to be prepared to meet any emergency;
that the person who wasn't willing to try anything once wasn't equipped
to be a settler. I'd try it, anyhow.
"Any fool can learn to set type," Myrtle said cheerfully. "Then throw it
into the 'form' [the iron rectangle the size of the page in which the
columns of set-up type are encased, ready to print]. If it don't stick,
here's a box of matches. Whittle 'em down and just keep sticking 'em in
where the type's loose until it does stick."
She locked the form by means of hammering tight together two
wedge-shaped iron pieces, several sets of them between type and iron
frame which were supposed to hold the type in the form like a vise;
raised it carefully, and there remained on the tin-covered make-up table
about a quarter of a column of the set type. She slammed the form down
in place again, unlocked it with an iron thing she called the key,
inserted more leads and slugs between the lines of type, jamming them
closer together.
"If you need more leads or slugs between the lines," she said, "here's
some condensed milk cans--just take these"--and she held up a pair of
long shears--"and cut you some leads." She suited the words to action;
took the mallet and smoothed the edges of the oblong she had cut. I
watched her ink the roller, run it over the form on the press, put the
blank paper on, give the press a few turns, and behold! the printed
page.
With this somewhat limited training I proceeded to get out the paper. I
knew absolutely nothing about mechanics and it was a hard job. Then a
belated thought struck me. Perhaps I should ask the owner for the job,
or at any rate inform him that I had taken it. From _The Press_ I found
the publisher's name was E. L. Senn. I learned that he owned a long
string of proof sheets. A monopoly out here on the raw prairie. Folks
said he was close as the bark on a tree and heartless as a Wall Street
corporation.
With this encouragement I decided to ask for $10 a week. Myrtle had
received only $8. Of course, I had no experience as a printer, but I
explained to Mr. Senn my plans for pushing the business so that he would
be able to afford that extra $2 a week. Of my experience as a typesetter
I wisely said nothing.
While I waited for the owner's reply I went on getting out the paper.
There was no holding up an issue of a "proof" newspaper; like the show,
it must go on! The Department of the Interior running our public lands
saw to that. Friday's paper might come out the following Monday or
Wednesday, but it must come out. That word "consecutive" in the proof
law was an awful stickler. But everyone who had hung around the print
shop watching Myrtle work, took a hand helping me.
When the publisher replied to my letter he asked me about my experience
as a printer and added: "I don't know whether you are worth $2 a week
more than Myrtle or not, but anybody that has the nerve you exhibit in
asking for it no doubt deserves it. Moreover, I like to flatter such
youthful vanity."
He called it nerve, and I had thought I was as retiring as an antelope.
But the main reason for his granting my demand was that he could not
find anyone else to do the work on short notice. Printers were not to be
picked up on every quarter-section.
I made no reply to this letter. A week later I was perched on my high
stool at the nonpareil (a small six-point type) case when the stage
rolled in from Presho. Into the print shop walked a well-dressed
stranger, a slender, energetic man of medium height. He looked things
over--including me. And so I found myself face to face with the
proof-sheet king.
It did not take long to find out how little I knew about printing a
newspaper. So in desperation I laid before him an ambitious plan for
adding subscriptions and another page of home print filled with
advertising from Pierre.
The trip alone, he reminded me, would cost all of $10, probably $15.
"And besides," he added, "if you did get ads you couldn't set them up."
With that final fling at my inefficiency he took the stage on to Pierre.
The average newspaperman would have sneered at these plains printing
outfits, and thrown the junk out on the prairie to be buried under the
snowdrifts; but not many of us were eligible to the title. The McClure
_Press_ consisted of a few cases of old type, a couple of "forms," an
ink roller and a pot of ink; a tin slab laid on top of a rough frame for
a make-up table. Completing the outfit was a hand press--that's what
they called it, but it needed a ten-horsepower motor to run it; a flat
press which went back and forth under a heavy iron roller that was
turned with a crank like a clothes wringer. My whole outfit seemed to
have come from Noah's ark.
Most of the type was nicked, having suffered from the blows of Myrtle's
wooden hammer. She used the hammer when it failed to make a smooth
surface in the form that would pass under the roller. Readers had to
guess at about half the news I printed, and the United States Land
Office developed a sort of character system of deciphering the notices
which I filed every week.
But running proof notices was not merely the blacksmith job that Myrtle
had made it appear. It required accuracy to the _n_th degree. The proofs
ran something like this:
Blanche M. Bartine of McClure, S. D., who made Homestead Entry No.
216, Serial No. 04267, for the South One-half of the NE 1/4 and
North One-half of SE 1/4 of Section 9, Township 108 North, Range 78
West of the Fifth Principal Meridian, has filed notice of intention
to make final computation proof to establish claim, etc., etc.
Then the names of four witnesses were added and the signature of the
Land Office Register of that district.
One day a man went to town with a string of witnesses to prove up. He
intended to go on to Iowa without returning to the claim. That night he
walked angrily into the print shop and laid a copy of his published
notice before me, together with a note from the Land Office. I had him
proving up somewhere out in the Pacific Ocean, having given the wrong
meridian. For that typographical error the man must wait until I
republished the notice. Washington, so the man at Pierre said, was not
granting deeds for claims in mid-ocean. One can't be inexact with the
government's red tape.
But, on the whole, the work was not as trivial as it may appear. With
every proof notice published in these obscure proof sheets 160 acres of
wasteland passed into privately owned farm units--and for this gigantic
public works project there was not a cent appropriated either by State
or Federal government.
One day when the corn was in the milk--that season which the Indians
celebrate with their famous corn dance--we saw Wilomene White streaking
across the plains on old Buckskin, her knock-kneed pony. Wilomene was a
familiar sight on the prairie, and the sight of her short, plump figure,
jolting up and down in a stiff gallop, as though she were on a wooden
horse, water keg hanging from her saddlehorn--just in case she _should_
come across any water--was welcome wherever she went. "It doesn't matter
whether it's illness or a civic problem or a hoedown, Wilomene is always
called on," people said. And she was repaid for every hardship she went
through by the fun she had telling about it, while her rich, contagious
laughter rang over the whole country.
Today there was no water keg bouncing up and down behind old Buckskin.
That in itself was ominous. For all his deformity and declining years,
she descended on us like Paul Revere.
She galloped up, dismounted, jerked a Chicago newspaper out of the
saddlebag, and pointed to a big black headline.
"Look at this. The reservation is going to be thrown open. The East is
all excited. There will be thousands out here to register at the Land
Office in Pierre--railroads are going to run special trains--"
"What reservation?" we wanted to know.
"The Indian reservation, just across the fence," Wilomene explained. The
"fence" was merely a string of barbed wire, miles long, which marked the
boundary of our territory and separated it from the Indian reservation.
I glanced at the paper announcing the great opening of the Lower Brulé
by the United States Government which was to take place that fall, some
hundred thousand acres of homestead land. Here we were at the very door
of that Opening and had to be told about it by eastern newspapers, so
completely cut off from the world we were.
"What good will that do us?" practical Ida Mary inquired.
"It will help develop this section of the country and bring up the price
of our land!"
That was worth considering, but Ida Mary and I were not dealing in
futures just then. We were too busy putting away winter food--corn and
the chokecherries we had found along a dry creek bank; patching the tar
paper on the shack. Like most of the settlers we were busier than
cranberry merchants, getting ready for the long winter. But there is a
great satisfaction in doing simple, fundamental things with one's hands.
That evening, however, I picked up the pamphlet on the Opening which
Wilomene had left. It announced that the United States Government would
open the Lower Brulé reservation to entry for homesteading on a given
date. At this time any American citizen eligible as a claimholder could
register "as an entry" in the Drawing for a homestead. And after the
registrations were closed there would be a "drawing out" up to the
number of claims on the reservation. Eligible persons were to register
at the United States Land Offices most conveniently located--and
designated by the General Land Office in Washington--for a
quarter-section of the land.
The next day I was a stage passenger on the return trip to Pierre to get
detailed information on the Lower Brulé Opening from the United States
Land Office. With a new and reckless abandon I listed the expenditure
and received a prompt reply from the proof magnate. "I note an
unauthorized expense of $10--trip to Pierre. You are getting to be an
unruly outlaw of a printer."
Then I forgot the coming Land Opening. There were days, that early fall,
when McClure was lifeless and I would work all day without seeing a
human being anywhere over the plains. In the drowsiness of
mid-afternoons the clicking of my type falling into the stick and the
pounding of the form with the mallet would echo through the broad
silence.
And one day in October the stage driver rushed into the shop, shouting,
"Say, Printer! She's open! Blowed wide open!"
[Illustration]
IV
THE BIGGEST LOTTERY IN HISTORY
It is an extraordinary fact that one of the most gigantic, and certainly
the most rapid, land settlements in the history of the United States has
been little known and little recognized, either for its vast scope or
its far-reaching importance.
The passing of the frontier, with its profound effects upon American
life, is not a part of our early history. It ended with the World War.
The trek of early settlers in covered wagons, the swift and colorful
growth of the cattle kingdom, the land rush at Cimarron are a part of
our familiar history. But the greatest of all these expansion movements
was at its height within the twentieth century with 100,000,000 acres of
Public Land opened by the government for settlement, waste land which
in a few seasons produced crops, supported villages, towns, and finally
cities, in their lightning growth.
In a sense the United States Government conducted a vast lottery, with
land as stakes, and hundreds of thousands of men and women gambling
their time and strength and hope on the future of the West.
The land so lavishly disposed of was the white man's last raid on the
Indian. The period of bloody warfare was long past. The last struggle
against confiscation of Indian land was over, and the Indians were
segregated, through treaties, on tracts designated by the government,
"like the cattle on the range being driven back to winter pasture or the
buffalo driven off the plains," to which they mournfully compared their
fate. And if there is anything an Indian hates it is boundaries.
The migration and settlement of vast numbers of people has changed world
history time and time again. And the Americans have been a migrating
people. From the early years of their first settlement of the colonies
there had been a steady movement toward the West. Without the West with
its great Public Lands the United States as it has become could hardly
have existed. While there was a frontier to develop, land for the small
owner, there would always be independence.
European theories might influence the East from time to time, but there
was always a means of escape for the man or woman oppressed by labor
conditions, by tendencies to establish class distinctions. Public Land!
On the land men must face primitive conditions as best they could, but
they were independent because the land was their own, their earnings
their own.
For many years the Public Land seemed inexhaustible; it was not until
the Civil War had been waged for two years, with the country disrupted
by conflict, and people looking--as they will in times of disaster--for
a place where they might be at peace, that they realized the desirable
land at the government's disposal was gone. But there remained the land
of the red men, and white settlers looked on it and found it good. They
raised a clamor for it, and the most determined staked out their claims
and lived on it regardless of treaty.
As a result, the government yielded to public pressure and took over the
land from the Indians, forcing them back once more. It wasn't quite as
simple as it sounds, of course; it took some twenty-five years and
nearly a thousand battles of one kind and another to do it. But at the
end of that time the land again had been absorbed by the people, settled
in accordance with the Homestead Act of 1862, and the demand continued.
The government then bought Oklahoma from the Indians in 1889. It was
impossible to satisfy all those who wanted homesteads and difficult to
choose those who should have them. A plan was therefore hit upon to give
everyone a chance. On the day of the Oklahoma Opening, throngs of white
settlers stood at the boundary and at a given signal rushed upon the
land, taking it by speed and strategy and trickery--and too often by
violence.
Within twenty-four hours the land was occupied; within a week there were
frame buildings over the prairie, and villages and towns followed at a
speed inconceivable to the foreign nations which looked on, breathless
and staggered at the energy of a people who measured the building of a
western empire not by generations but by seasons.