fourteen-year-old helper. She came of a struggling family who had
settled on an alkali claim set back from everything until the Brulé
settlers had broken a trail past it. So Ada, finding herself in a new
moving world, was happy. With her long yellow braids hanging beneath a
man's straw hat, strong capable hands, and an easy stride, she went
about singing hymns as she worked, taking upon herself many tasks that
she was not called upon to perform. And Fred Farraday was taking much of
the heavy work of the print shop off our hands.
Ma Wagor, too, was an invaluable help to us. "All my life I've wanted to
run a store," she admitted. "I like the confusement." Every morning she
came across the prairie sitting straight as a board in the old buggy
behind a spotted horse that held his head high and his neck stretched
like a giraffe. The few dollars she got for helping in the store eked
out Pa's small pension, which had been their only revenue.
The commodities handled at the store had increased from coffee and
matches to innumerable supplies. The faithful team, Fan and Bill, were
kept on the road most of the time. We made business trips to Presho and
Pierre. Help was not always available, and there could be no waste
movements in a wasteland. On some of these trips we hitched the team to
the big lumber wagon and hauled out barrels of oil, flour, printers' ink
and other supplies for all and sundry of our enterprises. It had come to
that.
"There go the Ammons sisters," people would say as the wagon started,
barrels rattling, down the little main street of Presho, off to the hard
trail home.
Slim and straight and absurdly small, in trim shirt waists, big
sombreros tilted over our heads, we bounced along on the wagon, trying
to look as mature and dignified as our position of business women
demanded.
"Those are the two Brulé girls who launched an attack on the Milwaukee
railroad," Presho people remarked. "Well, I'll be damned!"
Once when I was too ill to leave Presho and we stayed for the night in a
little frame hotel, Doc Newman came in to look me over.
"Do you girls get enough nourishing food?" he asked.
"We eat up all the store profits," lamented Ida Mary.
He laughed. "Keep on eating them up. And slow down."
Pioneer women, old and new, went through many hardships and privations.
The sodbreakers' women over the Strip worked hard, but their greatest
strain was that of endurance rather than heavy labor. But refreshing
nights with the plains at rest and exhilarating morning air were the
restoratives.
Hard and unrelieved as their lives were in many respects, gallantly as
they shouldered their part of the burden of homesteading, the women
inevitably brought one important factor into the homesteaders' lives.
They inaugurated some form of social life, and with the exchange of
visits, the impromptu parties, the informal gatherings, and the
politeness, the amenities they demanded--however modified to meet
frontier conditions--civilization came to stay.
The instinct of women to build up the forms of social life is
deep-rooted and historically sound. Out of the forms grow traditions,
and from the traditions grow permanency, which is woman's only
protection. With the first conscious development of social life on the
Brulé, the Strip took on a more settled air.
Meanwhile, out of the back-breaking labor the first results began to
appear. The sodbreakers were going to have a crop. And hay--hay to feed
their livestock and to sell. Everyone passing through the Strip stopped
to look at the many small fields and a few large ones dotting the
prairie. People came from other parts of the frontier to see the rapid
development which the Brulé had made.
"Mein Gott in Himmel!" shouted old Mr. Husmann, pointing to a field of
oats. "Look at them oats. We get one hell of a crop for raw land."
On the other side of us, Chris Christopherson's big field of flax was in
full bloom, like a blue flower garden.
"I come by Ioway," Mr. Husmann went on, "when she was a raw country, and
I say, 'Mein Gott, what grass!' But I see no grass so high and rich like
this."
The gardens matured late, as all growth on the western prairie does. The
seed which was sown on the sod so unusually late that year never would
have come up but for the soaking rains. Now there were lettuce,
radishes, onions and other things. One could not buy fresh green
vegetables anywhere in the homestead country, and they were like manna
from Heaven. It had been almost a year since Ida Mary and I had tasted
green foods. It is a curious paradox that people living on the land
depended for food or canned goods from the cities, and that the fresh
milk and cream and green vegetables associated with farm life were
unattainable.
Most of the settlers lived principally on beans and potatoes with some
dried fruits, but we had bought canned fruits, oranges and apples,
pretending to ourselves that we would stock them for the store. Some of
the settlers could buy such foods in small quantities, for they had a
little money that first summer; but the Indians were our main customers
for the more expensive things, buying anything we wanted to sell them
when they got their government allowances. While their money lasted they
had no sales resistance whatever.
This characteristic apparently wasn't peculiar to the Brulé Indians, but
was equally true of those in the Oklahoma reservation who boomed the
luxury trades when oil was discovered on their land. There it was no
uncommon sight to see a gaudy limousine parked outside a tepee and a
grand piano on the ground inside.
But what the Indians didn't buy of these foods at forbidden costs we ate
ourselves, cutting seriously into our profits. And when Mrs.
Christopherson sent her little Heine over one day with a bucket of green
beans we almost foundered as animals do with the first taste of green
feed after a winter of dry hay.
We had a few rows of garden east of our shack. I remember gathering
something out of it--lettuce and onions, probably, which grew abundantly
without any care.
It was hot, and everybody on the Strip, worn out from strenuous weeks,
slowed down. The plains were covered with roses, wild roses trying to
push their heads above the tall grass. The people who had worked so
frantically, building houses, putting in crops, walked more slowly now,
stopped to talk and rest a little, and sit in the shade. They discovered
how tired they were, and the devitalizing heat added to the general
torpor.
"It's this confusement," Ma Wagor said, "that's wore everybody out." She
was the only one on the Strip to continue at the same energetic pace.
"There ain't a bit of use wearing yourself out, trying to do the things
here the Almighty Himself hasn't got around to yet--flying right in the
face of the Lord, I says to myself sometimes."
But in spite of the heat and the general weariness, the work was
unrelenting. The mail must be delivered regularly. The paper must be
printed. One day Ida Mary's voice burst in upon the clicking of type.
"What are we going to do about the rattlesnakes?" she said tragically;
"they're taking the country."
She was right. They were taking the reservation. They wriggled through
the tall grass making ribbon waves as they went. They coiled like a
rubber hose along the trails, crawled up to the very doors, stopped
there only by right-fitting screens.
One never picked up an object without first investigating with a board
or stick lest there be a snake under it. It became such an obsession
that if anyone did pick up something without finding a snake under it he
felt as disappointed as if he had run to a fire and found it out when he
got there.
On horseback or afoot one was constantly on the lookout for them. For
those gray coiled horrors were deadly. We knew that. There were plenty
of stories of people who heard that dry rattle, saw the lightning speed
of the strike and the telltale pricks on arm or ankle, and waited for
the inevitable agony and swift death. The snakes always sounded their
warning, the chilling rattle before they struck, but they rarely gave
time for escape.
Sourdough stopped at the store one morning for tobacco. He had a pair of
boots tied to his saddle and when Ida Mary stepped to the door to hand
him the tobacco, a rattlesnake slithered out from one of the boots. He
jumped off his horse and killed it.
"Damn my skin," Sourdough exclaimed, "and here I slept on them boots
last night for a pillow. I oughta stretched a rope."
Plainsmen camping out made it a practice to stretch a rope around camp
or pallet as a barricade against snakes; they would not cross the hairy,
fuzzy rope, we were told. It may be true, but there was not a rope made
that I would trust to keep snakes out on that reservation.
I remember camping out one night with a group of homesteaders. The
ground was carefully searched and a rope stretched before we turned in,
but it was a haggard, white-faced group which started back the next
morning. True, there hadn't been any rattlesnakes, but from the amount
of thinking about them that had been done that night, there might as
well have been.
A young homesteader rushed into the print shop one day, white as a
sheet. "A snake," he gasped, "a big rattler across the trail in front of
the store."
"What of it? Haven't you ever seen a snake before?"
"Have I!" he replied dismally. "I saw them for six months back there in
Cleveland. But my snakes didn't rattle."
Ours rattled. The rattle of the snake became as familiar as the song of
the bird. The settlers were losing livestock every day. Everyone was in
danger. With the hot dry weather they became bigger and thicker. The
cutting of great tracts of grass for hay stirred them into viperous
action. They were harder to combat than droughts and blizzards. Not many
regions were so thickly infested as that reservation. Those snakes are a
part of its history.
"Couldn't be many in other regions," Olaf Rasmusson, an earnest young
farmer, said dryly; "they're all settled here."
"Look out for snakes!" became the watchword on the Strip.
Mrs. Christopherson's little Heine, a small, taciturn boy of five who
had become a daily, silent visitor at the store, came in one afternoon,
roused into what, for him, was a garrulous outburst:
"There's a snake right out here, and I bet it's six feet long the way it
rattles."
Ada grabbed a pole and tried to kill it. The monster struck back like
the cracking of a whip. She backed off and with her strong arm hit
again and again, while Ida Mary ran with a pitchfork.
"Keep out of the way," shouted Ada, "you may get bitten!"
Winded, Ada fanned herself with her straw hat and wiped the perspiration
from her face. "I got that fellow," she said triumphantly.
This was one problem about which _The Wand_ seemed helpless. Printers'
ink would have no effect on the snakes, and if this horror were
published, the Strip would be isolated like a leper's colony. After
using so much ingenuity in building up the achievements of that
swift-growing country, the announcement of this plague of snakes might
undo all that had been accomplished.
And the snakes increased. When Ida Mary was out of sight I worried
constantly. It was like one's fear for a person in battle, who may be
struck by a bullet at any moment. But the rattler was more surely fatal
when it struck than the bullet.
Something had to be done. To Hades with what the world thought about our
having snakes! We had to do something that would bring relief from this
horror. We went to the old medicine men--John Yellow Grass, I think was
one of them--to find out how the Indians got rid of snakes. They didn't.
But at least they knew what to do when you had been bitten. The Indian
medicine men said to bleed the wound instantly, bandaging the flesh
tightly above and below to keep the poison from circulating. That was
the Indians' first-aid treatment; and, as a last resort, "suck the
wound."
_The Wand_ printed warnings: "Bank your houses ... keep doors and
windows tightly screened ... keep a bottle of whisky close at hand....
Carry vinegar, soda and bandages with you, and a sharp thin-bladed knife
to slash and bleed the wound." What a run there was on vinegar and
pocket knives!
By this time the sight of a coiled rope made me jumpy and I dreamed of
snakes writhing, coiling, moving in undulating lines. At noon one day I
was alone, making up the paper. I stood at the form table working, when
I turned abruptly. A snake's slimy head was thrust through a big
knothole in the floor. Its beady eyes held me for a moment, as they are
said to hypnotize a bird. I could neither move nor scream.
Then with a reflex action I threw an empty galley--an oblong metal tray
used to put the set type in--square over the hole. The snake moved so
quickly it missed the blow and lay under the floor hissing like an
engine letting off steam. It would have been in the print shop in
another second. The floor was laid on 2 × 4 inch scantlings, so there
was nothing to keep snakes from working their way under. It should have
been banked around the foundation with sod.
The next day a homesteader's little girl was bitten. Oh, for serum! But
if there were any such life-saver on the market we had no way of getting
it.
_The Wand_ called a meeting of the settlers and laid plans of warfare
against the snakes. The homesteaders organized small posses. And cowboys
and Indian bucks joined in that war against the reptiles.
They killed them by the dozens in every conceivable manner. The cowboys
were always telling about shooting their heads off, and they said the
Indians used an arrow, spearing them in the neck just back of the head.
They never let one get away if they could help it. Some of them claimed
they picked up rattlesnakes by the tails and cracked their heads off.
The snakes wintered in the prairie-dog holes, but I never heard of a
prairie dog being bitten by one of them. On warm days in late fall the
snakes came out of the holes and lay coiled thick on the ground, sunning
themselves, while the little dogs sat up on their hind legs and yipped
in their squeaky voices. The settlers and cowboys invaded the dog towns
and killed off the snakes by the hundred. Dog towns were the tracts
where the prairie dogs made their homes. During the intensive snake war,
a homesteader came from one of the big prairie-dog towns to take us over
to look at the kill.
There, strung on wires, hung more than a hundred huge, horrid rattlers,
many of them still wriggling and twisting and coiling like a thrown
lariat.
It seems too bad the snakeskin industry of today missed that bonanza of
supply, and that science did not make a more general use of rattlesnake
serum at that time. The settlers would have made some easy money and
science would have got serum in unlimited quantity.
This is a gruesome subject. The constant, lurking menace of the snakes
was one of the hardest things the frontier had to endure, harder than
drought or blizzard, but in one way and another we came through.
Instead of _The Wand's_ campaign against snakes injuring the Strip it
created a great deal of interest, and people said we were "subduing the
frontier."
Easy? Oh, yes; easy as falling off a log.
[Illustration]
IX
THE OPENING OF THE ROSEBUD
The settling of those western lands was as elemental as the earth, and
no phase of its settlement was as dramatic as the opening of the
Rosebud. Homesteading was now the biggest movement in America. We were
entering a great period of land development running its course between
1909 and our entrance into the World War in 1917. The people were land
crazy. The western fever became an epidemic that spread like a prairie
fire. Day by day we watched the vast, voluntary migration of a people.
Men with families to support, frail women with no one to help them, few
of them with money enough to carry them through, took the chance, with
the odds against them. I have seen men appear with their families, ten
dollars in their pockets, or only five after the filing fee on the land
was paid. I have seen them sleep on the prairie, get odd jobs here and
there until they could throw up a shelter out of scrap lumber, and
slowly get a foothold, often becoming substantial citizens of a
community they helped to build.
Free land! Free land! It was like the tune piped by the Pied Piper.
"This is the chance for the poor man," I wrote in _The Wand_. "When the
supply of free land is exhausted the poor man cannot hope to own
land.... If the moneyed powers get hold of this cheap land as an
investment, they will force the price beyond the grasp of the masses....
The West is the reserve upon which the future growth and food supply of
the nation must depend."
Ida Mary said that I was running to land as a Missourian did to mules,
but _The Wand_ was fast becoming identified with the land movement.
As the homesteaders flowed in a great sea out of the towns and cities
into the West, one wondered at their courage. There was not the hope
which inspires a gold rush, the possibility of a gold strike which may
bring sudden wealth and ease. The road was long, the only likely signs
of achievement an extra room on the shack, a few more acres of ground
turned under. And--eventual security! That was it, security. A piece of
ground that belonged to them, on which they could plant their feet,
permanency.
In answer to that cry for land there came another proclamation from the
President, Theodore Roosevelt. Another great tract of land, the great
Rosebud Indian Reservation, with a million acres of homesteads, was to
be thrown open. A lottery with 1500 square miles of territory as the
sweepstakes and 100,000 people playing its wheel of fortune. Trying to
describe its size and sweep and significance, I find myself, in the
vernacular of the range, plumb flabbergasted.
Of course, there were some among the homesteaders on the Lower Brulé who
found the grass greener on the Rosebud, and wanted to throw up their
claims and move on to new ground; but the government informed them,
somewhat grimly, that they could prove up where they were, or not at
all. And I can understand their restlessness. To this day I never hear
of some new frontier being developed without pricking up my ears and
quivering like a circus horse when he hears a band play. There are some
desert products that can't be rooted out--sagebrush and cactus and the
hold of the open spaces.
The Rosebud Opening was one of the most famous lotteries of them all.
The Rosebud reservation lay in Tripp County, across White River from the
Brulé. Its conversion into homesteads meant an immediate income for the
United States Treasury, but according to a recent law, all monies
received from the sale of the lands were to be deposited to the credit
of the Indians belonging to and having tribal rights on the reservation,
the funds thus acquired to be used by Congress for the education,
support and civilization of the Indians.
The name Rosebud was emblazoned across the nation, after the government
proclamation, in the newspapers, in railroad pamphlets, on public
buildings. As usual, the railroads played a major part in aiding
prospective settlers to reach the registration points, a half-dozen
little western villages.
The frontier town of Pierre had been unprepared for the avalanche of
people who had descended upon it during the Lower Brulé opening. Service
and equipment had been inadequate. In the great Bonesteel Opening a few
years earlier, gambling and lawlessness had run riot. Therefore
Superintendent Witten formulated and revised the drawing system,
endeavoring to work out the most suitable plan for disposing of these
tracts so that there might be no suggestion of unfairness.
Railroads traversing the West had already begun to extend their lines
still farther into the little-populated section, starting new towns
along their lines, running landseekers' excursions in an effort to show
the people what this country had to offer them.
In preparation for the Rosebud Opening they prepared for the influx of
people on a gigantic scale, made ready to take whole colonies from
various sections of the East and Middle West to the reservation.
Among the registration points was the little town of Presho. A crude,
unfinished little town, with a Wild West flavor about it, Presho
couldn't help doing things in a spectacular fashion. Like most hurriedly
built frontier towns, there was little symmetry to it--two irregular
rows of small business places, most of them one-story structures, with
other shops and offices set back on side streets. Its houses were set
hit-and-miss, thickly dotting the prairie around its main street. Two
years before, it had been merely an unsettled stretch of prairie.
Then the Milwaukee railroad platted the town, bringing out carloads of
people to the auction. Two men, named Dirks and Sedgwick, paid $500 for
the first lot, on which to start a bank. That was $480 more than the
list price.
They had a little building like a sheep wagon, or a cook shack, on
wheels, which they rolled onto the lot. Within eight minutes the bank
was open for business. The first deposit, in fact, was made while the
sheep-wagon bank rolled along. Two barrels and a plank served as a
counter.
The two founders had the necessary $5000 capital, and when the cashier
went to dinner he took all the money with him, with two six-shooters for
protection. He was never robbed. For two years, during the land boom,
the bank had not closed, day or night.
Locators coming in, in the middle of the night, from their long trips
over the territory, would knock on the door in the back end of the bank.
The banker would open the door a crack, stick his gun out and demand,
"Who's there?"
"It's Kimball. Got a bunch of seekers here. They have to catch the train
east."
The locator or other person wanting to transact business after the
banker had gone to bed had to identify himself before the door was
opened. When the homestead movement of that region was at its height,
thousands of dollars passed over the board-and-barrel counter in the
bank's night-time business.
"The Rosebud has been throwed open!" went the cry. The entire western
country made ready for the invasion of the landseekers. The government
red tape for the lottery, with its various registration points, would
require a small army to handle. It was one of the most gigantic
governmental programs ever known. Notaries had to be appointed to take
care of the affidavits, land locators selected to show the seekers the
land, accommodations provided for the 115,000 who registered in that
Drawing.
Even the Brulé was crowded with people ready to play their luck in the
land lottery. Every available corner was utilized for sleeping space,
and the store at Ammons did a record business that would help pay the
wholesale bills at Martin's store. Ida Mary was busy taking care of
postal duties, handling increased mail, government notices, etc.
During the summer our financial condition had gone from bad to worse.
"Do you know those Ammons girls?" one native westerner asked another.
"Came out from St. Louis, about as big as my Annie (Annie was about
twelve); head wranglers out on the Lower Brulé, newspaper, trading post,
whole works."
"Well, they'll last till their money is gone."
And it was about gone! "What are we going to do to meet these payments,
Edith?" Ida Mary asked one day in a breathing spell. There wasn't enough
money to pay for groceries, printing equipment, interest, etc.
If we could only hold on, the proof notices would bring in $2000 or
more, which was big money out there. But the proof season was almost a
year ahead, and the money had already been pledged.
Profit and loss! My head ached. I felt as though I had been hit on the
head by 200 square miles of Brulé sod. Ma Wagor offered us a way out of
one of our difficulties. She'd always wanted a store. She liked the
"confusement." So we turned the store over to the Wagors', lock, stock
and barrel--prunes and molasses, barrels of coal-oil and vinegar,
padlocks on the doors. They had no money, but Ma wanted it as much as we
wanted to be rid of it, so it was a satisfactory deal. They were to pay
us on a percentage basis. We still had a claim, a post office and a
newspaper to manage, and the Indian trade to handle.