established a post office for the Lower Brulé on my homestead and
appointed Ida Mary postmistress. She was the only woman ever to run a
post office on an Indian reservation, the data gatherers said. The
government named it Ammons.
So we had a postmistress and a post office, with its tiers of empty,
homemade pigeonholes ready to receive the mail.
And we discovered there was no way to get any mail in or out!
[Illustration]
VII
BUILDING EMPIRES OVERNIGHT
That spring I saw a country grow. Perhaps Rome wasn't built in a day,
but the Brulé was--almost. The incredible speed of the transformation of
the untouched plains; the invasion of the settlers in droves, lighting
on the prairies like grasshoppers; the appearance, morning after
morning, of new shacks, as though they had sprung up overnight; the
sound of hammers echoing through the clear, light air; plows at last
tearing at the unbroken ground--the wonder of it leaves me staggered
now, but then I was caught up in the breathless rush, the mad activity
to get things done. The Lucky Numbers were coming, coming.
A few weeks before, we had set up our shack in a wilderness. Now there
were shacks everywhere and frantic activity. The plains had come to
life. Over them, where there had been bleak emptiness, loomed tents,
white against the green background, where the settlers could sleep until
they were able to build houses. There was no time to rest, no time to
pause--here where there had been nothing but time.
Late one evening a wagon loaded with immigrant goods and a shabby car
loaded with children passed our place. The drivers stopped on a nearby
claim, threw their bedding on the ground, and slept there. Their
deadline for establishing residence was up that night. All over the
plains that intensive race went on, the hurried arrival of settlers
before their time should expire, the hasty throwing up of shelter
against the weather, the race to plant crops in the untamed soil so that
there would be food later on.
A land where one must begin at the beginning! Everything to be done, and
things crying to be done all at once. Those three basic needs, food,
fuel, water--problems which must be solved without delay.
Moving in a network, criss-cross in every direction, wagons and teams
hauled in immigrant goods, lumber and machinery, fence posts and fuel;
post holes supplemented those dug by the prairie dogs; strings of
barb-wire ran threadlike over the unbroken stretch.
From day to day we saw the prairie change, saw new, crude houses thrown
up, saw the first furrows broken in the stubborn soil, saw men and women
pit themselves against the frontier and shape it to their purpose and
their needs.
Among these people there were many more dirt farmers than had settled
around McClure, but at least 50 per cent of the immigrants were young
men and women from various walks of life, business and professions, who
had come for health or adventure; or because the land, through sale or
mortgage, would give them a start in life. While it is doubtless true
that these latter contributed little to the permanent building of the
West, the zest with which they enjoyed its advantages, the gallantry
with which they faced its hardships, contributed no small part to
increasing the morale of the settlers as a whole.
Almost every settler scooped out a dam at the foot of a slope for water
supply. We had Chris Christopherson plow one for us. These dams were
nothing but waterholes twelve to fifteen feet in diameter and two or
three feet deep. There should be late spring rains to fill them for the
summer. There were! While the settlers were still plowing and planting
and making their dams it began to rain. And when the frontier is wet,
it's wet all over. Dry creeks swelled to overflowing, and small ravines
became creeks, and it kept on raining. Both Ida Mary and I were caught
in one of those downpours and had to swim the horses across swift-rising
Cedar Creek.
Much of those first days were like chapters from Genesis, and to add to
the similarity we now had the Flood! The seed shot out of the ground and
the fields were green. The gardens grew like Jack's beanstalk. The thick
grass stood a foot high. And the dams were full of water.
And Ida Mary and I were literally in the center of this maze of
activity, this mushroom growth of a country. And Ammons was actually on
the map!
My sister wrote to the Postal Department for a mail carrier and found
out she would have to solve that problem for herself.
"We aren't cut out to cope with the plains," I said.
"How did you happen to find that out?" asked Ida Mary.
"I didn't. A New York broker told me."
We had to find some way to get mail in and out. We couldn't back up on
the trail, once we had started. There was no place to back to. So we
bought a team and started a U. S. mail route, hauling mail three times a
week from the stage line at McClure.
It was the thing that had to be done, but sometimes, when we had a
moment for reflection, we were a little aghast. Carrying a mail route in
homestead country was a far cry from life in St. Louis. It began to seem
as though we rarely acted according to plan out here; rather, we were
acted upon by unforeseen factors, so that our activities were constantly
shifting, taking on new form, leading in new directions. The only
consistent thing about them was that they never back-trailed!
Now and then we hired boys to help us with heavy jobs which were beyond
our strength, and occasionally a young prairie girl, Ada Long, fourteen
years old, went for the mail. It was against the law to let anyone who
happened to be handy carry the mail, but the settlers had to have postal
service.
Ada was fair, with long yellow braids, strong and accustomed to the hard
ways of the prairie. She could hitch up a team and drive it like a man.
There was only one drawback to Ada. On Saturday when we were busiest
she went home and to church; and on Sunday she hung out the washing. Ada
was a loyal Adventist.
Settlers meeting on the trail hailed one another with "Hello! Where you
from? I'm from Illinois"--or Virginia--or Iowa. "You breakin'?" They had
no time for backgrounds. It didn't matter what the newcomers might have
been. That was left beyond the reservation gate. One's standing was
measured by what he could do and what kind of neighbor he would make.
And always the question, "Where you from?" Missouri, Michigan,
Wisconsin.
Bronco Benny, riding through one day, said, "I never seen so many gals
in my life. Must be a trainload of 'em. Some pretty high-headed fillies
among 'em, too." Bronco Benny knew no other language than that of the
horse world in which he lived.
Not only dirt farmers but many others became sodbreakers. The sod was
heavy, and with the great growth of grass it took all the strength of
man and teams, four to six horses hitched to a plow, to turn it. Steady,
slow, furrow by furrow, man and beast dripping with sweat, they broke
fields of the virgin earth.
How deep to plow, how to cultivate this land, few of them knew. The more
experienced farmers around the Strip, like Huey Dunn, would know. Here
was a service the newspaper could perform by printing such information
for the newcomers. Subscriptions for the paper began coming in before we
were ready to print it. We named it _The Reservation Wand_, and how it
ever was accepted in that man's country with a name like that is beyond
me. The first issue was distributed by homesteaders passing by and two
carriers.
Subscriptions came in rapidly at a dollar a year. Not only did most of
the settlers subscribe, but they put in subscriptions for friends and
relatives, so that these might know something of the country and its
activities. And in their rush of getting settled it was easier to have
the printer set up the news and run it off on a press than to take the
time to write a letter. Outsiders could not send in subscriptions by
mail until the newspaper had an address other than a section number of
the claim on which it was printed.
Food, shelter, fuel were still the pressing problems. An army had
peopled a land without provisions. Trade was overwhelmed and the small
towns could not get supplies shipped in fast enough. New business
enterprises were following this rush as lightning does a lightning rod.
There was bedlam. One could not get a plowshare sharpened, a bolt, or a
bushel of coal without making the long trip to town. One could not get a
pound of coffee or a box of matches on the whole reservation.
The settlers began to clamor for a store in connection with the
newspaper and the post office. Their needs ran more to coffee and sugar
and nails than to newspapers. They had to have a store for a few
essential commodities at least.
A store? I objected strenuously. We had already embarked on enough
enterprises, and running a store had no place among them. But practical
Ida was really interested in the project. It wasn't such a bad idea, she
decided. Our money was dwindling, the newspaper would not become a
paying proposition for some time, and the only revenue from the post
office was the meager cancellation of stamps.
We could hire the hauling done, she pointed out, grappling at once with
the details. And it would be a real service to the settlers. That was
what we had wanted to provide--the means didn't matter so much.
So we planked down a cash payment at a wholesale-retail store at Presho
for a bill of goods, got credit for the rest of it, threw up an ell
addition on the back of the shop for the newspaper, and stuck a grocery
store where the newspaper had been.
All this time we had been so submerged in activities connected with
getting settled, starting and operating a newspaper, a post office, and
now a store, that we had overlooked a rather important point--that on an
Indian reservation one might reasonably expect Indians. We had forgotten
the Indians.
And one afternoon they came. On horseback and in wagons, war bonnets and
full regalia glittering in the sun, the Indians were coming straight
toward the Ammons settlement. Neither of us had ever seen an Indian
outside of a Wild West show.
We were terrified. Into the shack we scurried, locked doors and windows,
and peeped out through a crack in the drawn blind.
The Indians had stopped and turned their horses loose to graze. We could
hear them walking around the store and print shop--and then came savage
mutterings outside our door and heavy pounding. We crawled under the
bed. A woman we knew had escaped being scalped once by hiding behind a
shock of corn. But there was no such refuge here.
"How! How kill 'em?" an old Indian was bellowing. No use trying to
escape. This was the end.
Trembling, hearts pounding, we opened the door. Two big savage-looking
creatures with battered faces stood there motioning toward the shop
where a group of them were sauntering in and out.
"How kill 'em?" they still muttered. Dazed, we followed them. They had
taken possession of the shop. Women were sitting on the floor, some with
papooses strapped to their backs. Men with hair hanging loose, or
braided down their backs, tied with red string, were picking up
everything in the print shop, playing like children with new toys.
They led us into the store, muttering, "_Shu-hum-pah; she-la_," as they
pointed to the shelves. At last we found they wanted sugar and tobacco,
and we lost no time in filling the order.
At sunset they rode away toward the Indian settlement, and we discovered
that we had been misled by the talk of "segregation." To us that had
meant that the Indians were behind some high barricade. But there wasn't
a thing to separate us from the tribe but another barb-wire fence, with
the gates down.
For several days after the red men came we moved in a nightmare of fear.
The Sioux had cherished this tall grass country as a hunting ground, and
we had invaded it. Suppose they were intent upon revenge!
Then, absorbed in our many duties, we almost forgot about the Indians.
But a week after their first visit they came again. They arrived shortly
before sundown, adorned in beads and feathers, stopped across the trail,
and to our horror pitched camp. Pinto commenced to neigh and kept it up,
a restless whinny, eager for his own people.
It looked as though the whole Sioux tribe had moved over to Ammons.
While the men unhitched and unsaddled, the squaws--for the most part
large shapeless creatures totally unlike the slim Indian maid of
fiction, and indescribably dirty--started small fires with twigs they
had brought with them. By now Ma Wagor, the gray-haired woman from Blue
Springs, was in the store every day, helping out, and she was as
terrified as Ida and I. It seems there were no Indians in Blue Springs.
They were among the few contingencies for which Ma Wagor was not amply
prepared.
By chance a strange cowboy came through about sundown and stopped for a
package of tobacco. While he dexterously rolled a cigarette with one
hand we surrounded him, three panic-stricken women. Did he think the
Indians were on the war path, we asked, our teeth chattering.
"Oh, I don't know," he answered carelessly, "can't tell a speck about an
Indian. Couldn't blame 'em, could you, with these landgrabbers invadin'
their range?"
The logic of this had already occurred to us, and we were not
particularly cheered by the cowboy's confirmation of our worst
suspicions.
"What do you suppose they're buildin' them fires for?" Ma Wagor was
anxious to know.
Sourdough couldn't say as to that. But he 'lowed it might be to burn the
scalps in.
At that we missed Ma. She had slipped into the house to wash her feet.
Ma was a great believer in preparedness, whether having something cooked
ahead for supper, or clean feet for heaven.
Instinctively I put my hand on my shock of fair hair to make sure it was
still in place. It had always been a nuisance, but now I felt a
passionate eagerness to keep it where it was.
The Indians stretched their tepees and cooked their supper. The prairie
around them was alive with bony horses and hungry-looking dogs. It was
the impatient yelping of the dogs about the kettles rather than any
sounds from the soft-footed Indians which we heard.
The cowboy threw his cigarette on the floor, stamped on it with a jingle
of spurs, and drawled, "Guess I'll be percolatin'--got to ride
night-herd."
Ma Wagor grabbed him by his wide belt. "You're goin' to do your
night-herdin' right in front of this shack," she declared grimly.
"You've got your pistol and we women need protection." Looking at Ma's
set jaw he promised to hang around that night.
Locked in the shack, we waited for the cowboy's signal of attack. He'd
"shoot 'em down as fast as they crossed the trail," he assured us, but
we were not so confident of his prowess.
"I'd send for Pa," Ma Wagor said dismally, "but what good would he do?
And one of us has got to be left to prove up the claim." It was
unlikely, according to Ma, that anyone in that cabin would survive. But
as the night wore on everything across the trail became quiet and at
last we threw ourselves across the bed, exhausted. We woke next morning
to find our cowboy gone and the Indians cooking breakfast.
Two leather-skinned men with hair hanging loose over their shoulders and
faces painted in red and copper hues led a big-boned horse up to the
door and walked into the store. They pointed to the shelves, held up ten
fingers, then pointed to the horse. They wanted to trade it for ten
dollars' worth of groceries.
Ida Mary did not bother to look at the horse. She traded. The last thing
that would have occurred to her at that moment was to disagree with any
wishes the Indians might express. We found out later that the old mare
was stone-blind and locoed.
Within a week we had the corral full of horses--the lame, the halt and
the blind. We would have traded the whole store for anything that the
Indians wanted, to get rid of them.
Sourdough, who belonged to the Scotty Phillips outfit over on the Indian
lands, had ridden straight on to do night-herd duty. Every cowpuncher,
it seemed, must play at least one trick on the tenderfeet.
Then one day a handsomely built young buck, straight as an arrow, walked
into the print shop. "How Kola!" he said, and then introduced himself as
Joe Two-Hawk. He was a college graduate, it appeared, and he explained
that "How Kola" was the friendly greeting of the Sioux, a welcome to the
two white girls who ran the settlement.
Many of these young Indians went East to Indian colleges, acquiring,
along with their education, a knowledge of civilized ways to which they
adapted themselves with amazing rapidity. On returning to the
reservations, however, in many cases, perhaps in most, they discarded
one by one, as though they had never been, the ways of the white man,
and reverted to their primitive customs and ways of life. Nor should
they be too thoughtlessly condemned for it. Among civilized peoples the
same urge for an escape from responsibility exists, thwarted often
enough merely by necessity, or by the pressure of convention and public
opinion. The Indians who have reverted to type, discarded the ways of
civilization for a tepee and primitive uncleanliness, follow the path of
least resistance. Traditions of accomplishment as we know them have no
meaning for the Indians; and the way of life for which his own
traditions have fitted him has been denied him.
How Kola! That must be what the old warrior was bellowing the day we
thought he had said he would kill us. Old Two-Hawk laughed at that when
his son Joe interpreted it in Sioux.
Old Two-Hawk explained us to his son, of whom he was manifestly very
proud. He pointed to me. "He-paleface-prints-paper"; then to Ida Mary,
"Him-paleface-trades-horses." Thus the Brulé Indians distinguished us
from each other.
Joe Two-Hawk had come as a sort of emissary from the Brulés. They wanted
us, he explained, to make Ammons an Indian trading post. Looking at the
corral, we felt, to our sorrow, that they had already done so. Joe
Two-Hawk said they had wood and berries in abundance along the Missouri
River, which ran through the Indian lands. They wanted to exchange them
for merchandise. And the settlers, we knew, needed the Indian
commodities.
So to the newspaper, the post office, the store, the mail route, the
heavy hauling, we added an Indian trading post, trading groceries for
fence posts; subscriptions to _The Wand_ for berries--very few of them
could read it, but they didn't mind that--it was a trade. Joe Two-Hawk
became a mediator and interpreter until Ida Mary and I learned enough of
the Sioux language to carry on. We tried to figure out a way, in this
trading, to make back our loss on the menagerie we had collected at
Ammons. Those bare store shelves worried us. Then, one morning, the old,
blind, locoed mare turned up with a fine colt by her side. We were
getting even.
And we no longer minded that the gate was open between the Indian lands
and the section of the Brulé which had been thrown open to white
settlers. While the gate stood open, enmity and mutual suspicion could
not exist, and the path between it and Ammons was beaten hard and
smooth.
The Indians came in processions with loaded wagons; unloaded, turned
their horses loose on the range and sat around--men and women--for hours
at a time on floor or ground, dickering. Ida Mary became as expert at it
as they were. It was not long before _The Wand_ had legal work from
them, the settling of estates, notices pertaining to land affairs, etc.
And that led, logically enough, to Ida Mary's being appointed a notary
public.
"Want to sell your land, girls?" a man from Presho asked us one day.
"That's what I drove out for. I have a buyer anxious to get a claim on
the Brulé and I believe he would pay $1200 for this relinquishment. A
quick profit."
"Sell? No!" we declared. "With such demand for land on the Strip we may
be able to get $2500 for it when it is proved up."
He agreed. A raw quarter-section of deeded land just outside the border
had sold the other day for $3500, he informed us. With all the breaking
and improvement going on over the Brulé, it was predicted by real-estate
boosters that choice homesteads here would be worth $4000 to $5000 in
another year or so--after the land was deeded.
Within sixty days after the arrival of the first Lucky Number on his
claim the 200 square miles of the Brulé would be filled. The winners had
filed consecutively, so many numbers each day for that length of time.
Their time to establish residence would thus expire accordingly. Already
the broad expanse of grassland we had seen during our first week on the
Brulé was changed beyond recognition, shacks everywhere, fields plowed,
movement and activity. The frontier had receded once more before the
advancing tide of civilization. Within sixty days!
With the price of claims soaring, it became a mecca for claim jumpers.
They circled around ready to light on the land like buzzards on a
carcass. They watched every quarter-section for the arrival of the
settler. If he were not on his land by dark of the last day, some
"spotter" was likely to jump the claim and next morning rush to the Land
Office and slap a contest on it.
They were unlike the claim jumpers of the older pioneer days who jumped
the land because they wanted it for a home. Many of these men would not
have proved up a claim at any price. But in many instances they brought
landseekers with them who legally filed contests and homesteading rights
over the settler. They paid the claim jumpers well for their services in
getting hold of the land. Often, being strangers, the landseekers did
not know that these "spotters" were not land agents.
They were a ruthless lot as a whole, these claim jumpers. They took long
chances, illegally selling relinquishments and skipping the country
before they were caught. Some of them even threatened or intimidated
newcomers who knew nothing about the West or its land laws.
Of a different type were unscrupulous locating agents who used the
technicalities of the homestead law to operate the despicable "contest"
business. Whether they had any grounds for contesting a homestead or
not, they could claim they had, and the settler must then either go to
trial to defend his rights or give up the land. It was a serious problem
for the settlers.
So many strangers came and went that the homesteaders seldom identified
these land thieves, but the print shop, set high in the middle of the
plains, was like a ranger's lookout where we could watch their
maneuvers; they traveled in rickety cars or with team and buggy, often
carrying camping equipment with them. By the way they drove or rode back
and forth, we could spot the "spotters."
They often stopped at the settlement for tobacco or a lunch out of the
store--and a little information.
"Whose shack is that off to the southwest?" a man asked one morning,
reading off the claim numbers from a slip of paper. He was a ruddy-faced
man dressed in a baggy checkered suit with a heavy gold watch chain
across the front of his vest and a big flashy ring.
"Belongs to a woman from Missouri," Ida Mary told him. "She had a
neighbor build the shack for her."
"No one living there," he said.
"Oh, yes," Ida Mary improvised rapidly, "she was in here yesterday on
the way to town for furniture. Won't be back until tomorrow night."
He looked doubtful. "Doesn't look to me as though anyone ever slept
there. Not a thing in the shack--no bed."
Ida Mary called out to me, "Edith, didn't you lend that woman some
bedding yesterday?"
"Yes," I declared, "so she could sleep there a few nights before the
deadline."
All our early training in truth-telling was lost in the skirmish, and
sometimes I doubted if the truth was left in us. But there was zest in
this outwitting of men who would have defrauded the settlers if they
could.
One day I noticed two men driving back and forth over a vacant claim
nearby. At sundown no one had established residence. I watched the
maneuvers of the two men.
"Ida," I called, "those men are going to jump that claim."
I looked over my land plat and saw that the homestead belonged to Rosie
Carrigan from Ohio. It was the last day of grace. She had until midnight
to get there.