and jobs were hard to get; with the growth of factories many young men
and women had flocked from farms and villages to cities, and they were
not finding conditions to their liking. They wanted to return to the
life they knew best, the life of the farm. In the more populous sections
the price of land was rising and was already beyond the reach of many
pocketbooks. There remained only Public Land--land which was allotted to
the Indians.
The government, accordingly, began to withdraw from the Indian
Allotments great tracts, by further treaties and deals, slashing
boundary lines, relegating the Indians to the unceded part of the land.
The great tracts thus acquired were then surveyed into quarter-sections
and thrown open to homesteading. In order to prevent the violence which
had attended the Oklahoma land opening, a new method was hit upon. A
proclamation was issued by President Theodore Roosevelt, announcing the
opening of land on the Lower Brulé Indian Reservation.
As I had learned on that flying trip to Pierre, the operation of the
plan was very simple. Land-seekers were to register at the Land Office
in Pierre, making an affidavit showing their qualifications to enter, at
which time each would receive a number. On a given day, October 12,
1907, the numbered envelopes containing the affidavits, which had been
deposited in large containers, fastened and sealed so that they could
not be opened, were to be drawn by lot, after having been thoroughly
mixed--as many numbers drawn as there were quarter-sections to dispose
of. The first person whose number corresponded with the number drawn had
first choice of the land.
Government posters and advertisements for the land opening were
published in every section of the country. And along with the government
publicity appeared the advertisements of the railroads. For them
increased population in this area was a crying need. While we had
drowsed through the lazy autumn days, advertising campaigns were
shrieking to the people all over the country of the last frontier.
And that October day "it blowed wide open!"
* * * * *
Into the little town of Pierre they swarmed--by train, by stagecoach, by
automobile, by wagon, on foot--men and women from every part of the
country, from almost every state--people who had been crowded out of
cities, people who wanted to settle as real dirt farmers, people who
wanted cheap land, and the inevitable trailers who were come prepared to
profit by someone else's good luck.
Like a thundering herd they stampeded the United States Land Office at
Pierre. "The Strip! The Strip!" one heard on every side. It was called
the Strip because the tract was long and narrow. One day the little
frontier town of Pierre drowsed through a hot afternoon, and the broad
plains lay tenantless, devoid of any sign that men had passed that way.
The next day the region swarmed with strangers.
Sturdy, ruddy-faced farmers, pale-looking city boys, young girls alert,
laughing--all sons and daughters of America--not an immigrant peasant
among them; plumbers and lawyers, failures and people weary of routine,
young men from agricultural colleges eager to try scientific methods of
farming and older men from Europe prepared to use the methods they had
found good for generations; raucous land agents and quiet racketeers
alert for some way of making easy money from the tense, anxious, excited
throng.
For many of that jostling, bewildered, desperately anxious throng the
land was their last chance to establish themselves. And yet the
atmosphere was that of a local fair, loud with shouting, with barkers
crying their wares, with the exclamations of wonder of people looking
upon a new country. And the air was heavy with the tense excitement and
suspense that attends any gambling game.
McClure, the Halfway House, where my little print shop had been thrown
up, was the only stopping place in that part of the country and at the
end of the main road from Pierre to the reservation, which lay some five
miles on across the prairie.
All that day the landseekers pushed their way into the shed annex which
served as a dining room of the Halfway House, and filled the table which
stretched from end to end. If there was no room for them, they ate
lunches from the store's food supply at the counter. We who had grown
accustomed to the sight of empty prairie, to whom the arrival of the
stage from Pierre was an event, were overwhelmed by the confusion, the
avalanche of people, shouting, pushing, asking questions, moving
steadily across the trackless plains toward the reservation.
Every homesteader who had a tug that would fasten over a doubletree, a
wagon that could still squeak, or a flivver that had a bolt in it, went
into the transportation business--hauling the seekers from Pierre or
from McClure to look at the land.
A generation before people had migrated in little groups in covered
wagons to find new land. Now they came by automobile and railroad in
colonies, like a great tidal wave, but the spirit that drove them was
still the pioneer spirit, and the conditions to be faced were
essentially the same--the stubborn earth, and painful labor, drought and
famine and cold, and the revolving cycle of the seasons.
"Shucks, it's simple as tying your shoe," stage driver Bill assured the
excited, confused landseekers. "Jest take enough grub to last a coupla
days and a bottle or two of strong whisky and git in line at the Land
Office."
The settlers were almost as excited as the landseekers. For many of them
it was the first opportunity they had had since their arrival to earn a
cash dollar. And while the gambling fever was high it was easy to
persuade the newcomers to spend what they could. Coffee, sandwiches,
foods of every description were prepared in great quantities and
disposed of to clamoring hordes. It seemed a pity I couldn't find some
way of making some money too. I would. Without wasting time I wrote some
verses on the land opening, made a drawing to accompany them, and sent
it to a printer at Pierre to have postcards made of it.
Wilomene White had made some belts and hatbands of snakeskins, and she
planned to put them, together with my cards, wherever we could sell them
as souvenirs.
I rode in at daylight for the cards, but the town was already astir.
People stood in line in front of the Land Office waiting to get in to
register. Some of them had stood there all night. Some sat on the steps,
cold, hungry and exhausted. But they had come a long way and could not
afford to miss their chance.
Every train that came in was loaded with men and women. The little state
capital became a bedlam, and the Land Office was besieged. They crawled
along in a line that did not seem to move; they munched little lunches;
a few fainted from exhaustion and hunger. But they never gave up.
Here at last was news that was news--for which the press of the country,
and Europe, clamored. These land openings were a phenomenon in the
settling of new territory, beyond the conception of foreign countries.
Reporters, magazine writers, free lancers pushed in for their stories of
the spectacular event.
The mere size of it, the gambling element, the surging mobs who had
risked something to take part in it were material for stories. The real
hero of the stories, of course, was the land itself--the last frontier.
There were a few who pondered on what its passing would mean to the
country as a whole.
I ordered 500 extra ready-prints by wire from the Newspaper Union and
persuaded a bronco-buster to turn the old press for me.
Bronco Benny rode bucking horses during the day for the entertainment of
the tenderfeet passing through and helped me at night, relating in a
soft western drawl the events of the day as he worked: "Did you see that
little red-headed gal--wanted one o' my spurs as a souvenir--haw haw!"
"Bronco, wait a minute," I would interrupt; "you've ruined that paper.
Spread a little more ink."
"And I says, 'You shore, Miss, you don't want the pony throwed in?'"
pushing the roller lazily back and forth over the inking table then
across the form on the press. "She ups and takes a snapshot," he rambled
on.
To my delight the postcards were selling like hot cakes at ten cents a
piece. The Ammons's finances were looking up. In many homes today,
throughout the country, there must exist yellowed copies of the card,
the only tangible reminder of an unsuccessful gamble in the government
lottery.
At midnight one night an old spring wagon rattled up to the shack and we
heard the voice of a man--one of the locators who had been hauling
seekers. He held out a handful of small change. "Here," he said proudly;
"I sold every card. And here"--he pulled out a note and a small package.
The note read:
"Your poem is very clever, but your drawing is damn poor. If I'm a Lucky
Number I'll see you in the spring. In the meantime, for heaven's sake,
don't try any more art. Stick to poetry." It was signed "Alexander Van
Leshout," and was accompanied by a ready-to-print cut.
This newspaper cartoonist from Milwaukee was only one of many people
from strange walks of life who entered that lottery. There were others
whose background was equally alien to life in a homestead cabin, who
came to see the West while it was still unchanged, drawn for reasons of
personal adventure, or because the romantic legends of the West
attracted them. People drawn by the intangibles, the freedom of great
space, the touch of the wind on their faces, a return to the simple
elements of living.
Standing in the dreary lines in the Land Office where some of them
waited for as long as two days and nights at a time, we saw farmers,
business men, self-assured boys, white-haired men and women.
A gray-haired woman in her late sixties, holding tightly to an old
white-whiskered man, kept saying encouragingly: "Just hold on a little
longer, Pa." And whenever we passed we heard her asking of those about
her: "Where you from? We're from Blue Springs." The Land Office recorded
the man as David Wagor.
It was not necessary to be a naturalized citizen in order to register,
but it was necessary to have filed intention to become a citizen. One
must be either single or the head of a family; wives, therefore, could
not register. For that reason we were interested in a frail young woman,
a mere girl, sagging under the weight of a baby on her arm, patiently
waiting her turn. She was shabbily dressed, with a trace of gentility in
clothes and manner. Whether she was a widow or unmarried only the Land
Office knew, but it pinched the heart to realize the straits of a
fragile girl who was ready to undertake the burden of a homestead alone.
"You are getting to be an outlaw printer," the proof king wrote me. "You
were not authorized to incur this additional expense." But, catching the
excitement of the crowds and perhaps a little of their gambling spirit,
I was not upset by his reproof. I filled the paper with the news items
about the Opening and sold out every copy to the landseekers passing
through.
The plains never slept now. All night vehicles rattled over the hard
prairies. Settlers on their way home, starting for Pierre, hurried by in
the middle of the night. Art Fergus's team of scrubby broncos were so
tired they didn't even balk in harness. Flivvers bumped over the rough
ground, chugging like threshing machines.
The westerners (every man's son of us had become a full-fledged native
overnight and swelled with pride as the tenderfeet said "You
westerners") responded exuberantly to the sudden life about us. Cowboys
rode in from the far ranges for one helluva time. They didn't kowtow to
this "draw-land" game, but they could play draw poker. And they wasn't
gamblin' for no homestead--you couldn't give 'em one. But they'd stake
two or three months' wages on cards. They rode hell-for-leather down the
streets, gaudy outfits glittering in the sun. With spurs clicking they
swung the eastern gals at a big dance. And the dignity of the state
capital be damned!
The whole prairie was in holiday mood. Ida Mary dismissed school at
noon--no one cared whether school kept or not--and we put on our
prettiest dresses to join the crowd. Through the throngs pushed the land
locators. They stood on curbs, in front of the Land Office and the
hotels, grabbing and holding onto their prospects like leeches. They had
been accustomed to landing a settler once in a blue moon, driving the
"prospect" over miles of plain, showing him land in various remote
districts in the hope that he would find some to suit him. Now they had
dozens clamoring for every quarter-section. This was their golden
harvest. Nearly all the seekers were too avid for land to be particular
about its location, and many of them too ignorant of the soil to know
which was the best.
"Plumb locoed," Bill described the excited seekers. "The government's
charging $2.50 to $4.00 an acre for that land. I drive 'em right over
vacant homesteads just as good for $1.25. Think they'll look at it?
No-siree!"
But we are a gambling people and the grass on the other side of the
reservation fence looked a lot better.
After they registered, most of the landseekers wanted to see the land
and pick out a claim--just in case they won one. The chances of winning
must have seemed slim with that avalanche of people registering, and the
results would not be known until the Drawing, which would be a week or
more after the entry closed.
Late one afternoon a crowd stood on the border of the Strip, on the
outside of the old barb-wire fence that divided it from the rest of
space. And the wire gate stood open. The landseekers who had driven over
the land stood looking across it, sobered. I think it occurred to them
for the first time that this was a land where one had to begin at the
beginning.
The buffalo and the Indian had each had his day on this land, and each
had gone without leaving a trace. It was untouched. And as far as the
eye could see, it stretched, golden under the rays of the setting sun.
Whether the magnitude of the task ahead frightened or exhilarated them,
the landseekers were all a little awed at that moment. Even I, seeing
the endless sweep of that sea of golden grass, forgot for the moment
the dry crackling sound of it under wheel and foot, and the awful
monotony of its endlessness which could be so nerve-racking.
And by the gods, the grass was higher and thicker on the other side of
the fence! "How rich the soil must be to raise grass like that," they
said to each other. Groups of men and women gathered closer together as
though for some unconscious protection against the emptiness. Around the
fence stood vehicles of all descriptions, saddle horses, and a few
ponies on which cowboys sat lazily, looking on. Even those who had come
only for adventure were silenced. They felt the challenge of the land
and were no longer in a mood to scoff.
Standing at that barb-wire fence was like standing at the gate of the
Promised Land. And the only way in was through the casual drawing of
numbers. They stood long, staring at the land which lay so golden in the
sun, and which only a few could possess.
There were more real dirt farmers represented here than there had been
in most of the homestead projects--men who were equipped to farm. But
they were still in the minority. They picked up handfuls of the earth
that the locators turned over with spades, let it sift through their
fingers and pronounced it good. A rich loam, not so heavy or black as
the soil back east, but better adapted, perhaps, to the climate. Aside
from the farmers nobody seemed to know or care anything about the soil
or precipitation. And, ironically enough, it occurred to no one to ask
about the water supply.
"The land back east is too high-priced," the city laborer declared, "we
can never hope to own any of it."
"We'd rather risk the hazards of a raw country," said the tenant farmer,
"than be tenants always."
"We'll sell our eastern land at a high price," said the landowners, "and
improve new land."
"My mother took in washing to save money," said an earnest-faced boy,
"so I could make this trip. But if I win a whole quarter-section (and
how big a quarter-section looked to a city dweller!) I'll make a good
home for her."
A middle-aged widow from Keokuk told the group about her: "I mortgaged
my cottage to come. The boys are growing up and it's their only chance
to own land."
Others in the group nodded their heads. "Yes, land is solid!"
Leaning heavily on his cane a little old man with a long white mustache
and sharp eyes denounced the lottery method. "'Taint right, 'taint.
Don't give a feller a chanct. Look at me with my rheumatiz and I got as
good a chanct as any of 'em--brains nor legs don't count in this. Now in
the Oklahomy Run ..." And he told about the Oklahoma Run of almost a
generation before, when speed and strategy were necessary if one were to
be first on the land to stake a claim. But the Oklahoma Run, for all its
drama and its violence, dwindled in importance beside these Drawings
with their fabulous areas and their armies of people.
Across the prairie came the sound of horses' hoofs and the heavy
rumbling of a wagon. A locator with a hayrack full of seekers was coming
at a reckless pace, not stopping for the trails. At the reservation
gate he brought the team to a quick stop that almost threw his
passengers off the wagon. Some of them were so stiff and sore they
couldn't get off their cushion of hay; others were unable to stand after
they got up. But the locator was not disturbed by a little thing like
that. He waved his right arm, taking in at one sweep the vacant expanse
to the rim of the horizon and shouted:
"Here's your land, folks. Here's your land." He was locating them en
masse at $15 to $25 a head. No hunting up corner stakes. It all looked
alike to these bewildered people, anyhow, drunk as they were with the
intoxication that land lotteries produce.
He turned his weary team and human cargo around and started back to
town. A wholesale locator had no time for sleep. He must collect another
hayrackful of seekers early next morning.
Some of these landseekers tried to analyze the reasons for this great
movement, the factors which had swept them along with this tidal wave of
human migration. "We're concentrated too much in cities," they said,
"crowded and stifled, and our roots are choked. We have to go back to
the land where a man can grow himself the things he needs to live on,
and where his children can grow up with the country--and have a place in
it."
Our attitude toward the land is peculiar to America. The European
conception of a plot of ground on which a family is rooted for
generations has little meaning for people who move by the thousands onto
untamed acres, transform it into plowed fields and settlements and
towns, and move on endlessly to plow new fields.
This constantly renewed search for fresh pastures has kept the country
vital, just as the existence of its Western Public Lands has kept it
democratic. For its endurance the American spirit owes much to its
frontier.
Beside me stood a thin-faced, hollow-chested young man, a newspaper
reporter from Chicago. He ran lean fingers through brown, straggly hair,
looking from the Strip, reaching to the horizon, to the people waiting
to shape it according to their needs. "Great copy," he said lamely, but
he made no entry in his notebook.
Outside another gate, five miles or so beyond the main entrance from
McClure, was a little trading post, Cedar Fork, on the Smith ranch. The
long buildings were said to have been a sort of fort in the Indian war
days. The seekers overflowed even here, and when the swift darkness
settled on the plains, stayed for the night, the women filling the store
and house while the men slept in the barn loft or haystacks, or even in
their vehicles.
They wrapped themselves in heavy coats or blankets against the biting
chill of an October night--after a day so hot the tenderfeet sweltered
and blistered under the midday sun.
The next morning there was frost, with the air sharp and fresh. The
Smiths tried to feed the shivering, hungry seekers. The seekers always
seemed to be hungry. Kettles and washboilers full of coffee, slabs of
bacon sizzling in great pans, and, one after another, into the hot
grease slid a case of eggs. Home-baked bread was sliced into a washtub.
Shaking with cold, coat collars turned up, shawls and blankets wrapped
about them, tired, hollow-eyed and disheveled, the seekers looked like a
banished people fleeing from persecution. But they were not
disheartened.
On October 14 the "Drawing" started. The registrations were put into
sealed envelopes, tossed into boxes, shuffled up, and drawn out one at a
time, numbered as they were drawn out--as many numbers as there were
claims--with an additional number to allow for those who did not file or
whose applications were rejected. Then the filing of the winners began.
Most of the seekers had already selected their claims. They had six
months' time in which to establish residence on the land.
The stampede was over. After three weeks of high-pitched excitement the
seekers were gone, the plains regained their silence, and the settlers
around McClure were left to face the frontier winter with its desolation
and hardships. The void after the crowds had gone was worse than if they
had never come. The weather had turned raw and gray, and there was a
threat of snow in the air. Exhausted and let down, Ida Mary and I were
desperately blue.
And then we saw someone coming across the plains--the only moving figure
to be seen in the cold gray dusk. From the dim outline we could barely
make out horse and rider, but we knew them both--Wilomene on old
Buckskin. She was riding slowly as though there were nothing left out
here now but time.
She wore a dark red flannel shirtwaist, a divided skirt of black wool, a
suede jacket and black cap like a jockey's. There was an easy strength
and self-assurance in her carriage. She crossed the firebreak and rode
up over the ridge calling her cheery "Hoo-hoo-hoo!"
"She's going to stay all night," exclaimed Ida Mary, seeing the small
bag dangling from the saddlehorn.
After supper we counted the dimes we had earned from the postcards--more
than $50. And far into the night we talked of the people who had invaded
the Strip.
Next spring there would be life again over the plains when the "lucky
numbers" came out to live on the Strip. Would the reporter from Chicago
be among them, and the mystery girl with the baby in her arms, and Pa
Wagor--and a young cartoonist from Milwaukee?
It was something to look forward to when the blizzards shut us off from
the world.
[Illustration]
V
NO PLACE FOR CLINGING VINES
The settlers of the McClure district went on with their work as though
there had never been a land opening. The men fed their stock and hauled
fuel for winter, while the women tacked comforters and sewed and patched
heavy clothing.
Ida Mary went on with her school work and I continued to wrestle with
the newspaper. We put a little shed back of the shack where we could set
buckets of coal and keep the water can handy. With the postcard money we
bought a drum for the stovepipe, to serve as an oven. One either baked
his own bread or did without it.
Huey Dunn did some late fall plowing. "What are you plowing your land
for now, with winter coming?" neighbors asked.
"For oats next spring," Huey replied; "if the damn threshing machine
gets around to thresh out the oatstack in time to sow 'em."
The homesteaders shook their heads. There was no figuring out when Huey
Dunn would do things. This time he was far ahead of them. They did not
know that fall plowing, to mellow and absorb the moisture from winter
snow and spring rain, was the way to conquer the virgin soil. They had
to find it out through hard experience. Fallowing, Huey called it.
Lasso said, "The range is no place for clingin' vines, 'cause there
hain't nothin' to cling to." Ida Mary, under that quiet manner of hers,
had always been self-reliant, and I was learning not to cling.
I lived in the print shop a great deal of the time that winter--an
unusually open winter, barring a few blizzards and deep snows. I slept
on a rickety cot in one corner of the room, cooking my meals on the
monkey stove; and often I ate over at Randall's, who served meals for a
quarter to anyone who cared to stop, the table filled with steaming
dishes of well-cooked food. I liked to take the midday meal there, and
meet people coming through on the stage. They furnished most of the news
for the McClure _Press_.