time count. The country is too new to accomplish anything easily."
"Too old, you mean. These plains have been hyar too long for a little
herd of humans to make 'em over in a day."
"We have fourteen months to do it in," I reminded him, referring to the
revised proving-up period.
"You'll be mighty sore and stiff for a few days," he said as he laid the
mail sack down on the floor; "sorry, miss, I scared your horse," and
touching his ten-gallon hat he was gone.
"Where did _he_ hail from?" Ma Wagor demanded from the store where she
had been watching.
"He's not from Blue Springs, Ma."
"I declare you are as tormentin' as an Indian when it comes to finding
out things," Ma exclaimed in disappointment. She couldn't understand
how I could have ridden any distance with the man without learning all
about his present, guessing at his past, and disposing of his future to
suit myself. People, as Ma frequently pointed out, were made to be
talked to.
Just before sunset one day a week or so later I was sitting in the shop
when the cowboy walked in. "Got to thinkin' you might be hurt worse than
you appeared to be." He said he was top hand, had charge of a roundup
outfit over in the White River country some fifty miles away, and some
of the stock had roamed over on the reservation. Name was Lone
Star--Lone Star Len.
And then one gray, chilly day in November, with the first feathery
snowflakes, he rode up on his cow pony to say good-by. He was leaving
the country, taking a bunch of cattle down to Texas for winter range. He
was glad to be going. "Don't see how folks can live huddled up with
somebody on every quarter-section. Homesteaders is ruinin' the country,
makin' it a tore-up place to live. It's too doggone lonesome with all
this millin' around."
When the Brulé became populated, Lone Star Len had gone into the empty
Rosebud country, "where I'm not hemmed in by people, some place where
there's a little room." Now he would be driven on--and on. And in the
spring there would be a new influx of people in our section of the
frontier.
Meanwhile, fall had come. The plains, which had stretched to the horizon
that spring untouched by a plow, unoccupied by white men, were now
unrecognizable. A hundred thousand acres of fertile waste land had been
haltered. Hundreds of settlers had transplanted their roots into this
soil and had made it a thriving dominion. Fall rains filled the dams and
creeks. There were potatoes and other vegetables in abundance.
Think of it! Caves full of melons, small but sweet. _The Wand_ told of
one small field that yielded twenty bushels of wheat, another twenty-two
bushels of oats, to the acre. There was fall plowing of more ground,
schools being established, Sunday schools, preparations for the winter
already in progress.
Never had a raw primitive land seen such progress in so short a time.
And _The Wand_ had played a substantial part in this development. It was
swamped with letters of inquiry.
Fall was roundup time on the range. The Indian lands were so
far-reaching that there were no nearby ranches, but the herds ranged
over miles of territory around us.
And across the fence, on the unceded strip, the great herds of Scotty
Phillips's outfit roamed over his own and the Indians' holdings. Across
the plains came the ceaseless bawling of thousands of cows and calves
being separated. That wild, mad, pitiful bawling rent the air and could
be heard through the stillness of night for miles around, and the
yelling and whooping of cowboys, the stamping of cow ponies and herds,
the chanting and tom-toms of the Indians.
And enveloping it all, the infinite plains, unmoved, undisturbed by all
that was taking place upon them.
So the homesteaders gathered their first harvest, and the goose hung
high. There was hay--great stacks and ricks of it. Piles of yellow corn
stacked like hay in barbed-wire enclosures or in granaries. To
commemorate that first golden harvest, the pilgrims of the Lower Brulé
celebrated their first Thanksgiving.
Seeing the stacks of grain that stood ready for threshing or for feeding
in the straw, old man Husmann pointed to the field. "Mein Gott in
Himmel! Vat I tell you? Das oats made t'irty bushels an acre. And flax.
Mein Gott! She grow on raw land like hair on a hog's back. Back in Ioway
we know notings about flax for sod crop." Dakota taught the United
States that flax was the ideal sod crop.
The average yield of oats with late and slipshod sowing had been around
fifteen bushels to the acre. Some fields of spring wheat had run fifteen
bushels. And potatoes had fairly cracked the ground open. One settler,
an experienced potato grower, had four acres that yielded 300 bushels.
_The Wand_ played that up in headlines for easterners to see.
Late-ripened melons lay on the ground, green and yellow--watermelons,
muskmelons, golden pumpkins ready for the Thanksgiving pie. Over the
Strip women and children were gathering them in against a sudden freeze.
The reservation fairly subsisted on melons that fall. Before the harvest
the rations had been getting slim, with the settlers' money and food
supply running low.
Women dried corn, made pumpkin butter and watermelon pickles, and put up
chokecherries. A number of them had grown in their gardens a fruit they
called ground cherries. This winter there would be baked squash and
pumpkin pie.
So there was food for man and beast. And Scotty Phillips who owned what
was said to be the largest buffalo herd in America killed a buffalo and
divided it among the settlers, as far as it would go, to add to the
Thanksgiving cheer of the Brulé. There was a genuine sense of fruition
about that first harvest. Looking back to the empty plains as they had
stretched that spring, the accomplishments of the homesteaders in one
brief summer were overwhelming. There had been nothing but the land. Now
a community had grown up, with houses and schools, and the ground had
yielded abundantly.
In other ways our efforts had also borne fruit. There was to be a new
bridge at Cedar Creek. From the fight _The Wand_ had carried on, one
would think that we were boring a Moffat tunnel through the Great
Divide. And _The Wand_ fought a successful battle with John Bartine over
county division. It had come about when Senator Phillips came by one day
during the summer on his way from Pierre to his ranch. "Scotty"
Phillips, senator, cattleman and business man, was one of the Dakotas'
most influential citizens. A heavyset man he was, with an unconscious
dignity and a strong, kindly face; a squaw man--his wife was a
full-blooded Indian who had retained many of her tribal habits. One day
one would see the Senator ride past in his big automobile, and the next
day his wife would go by, riding on the floor of the wagon on the way to
the reservation to visit her relatives.
"I stopped in to see if you wanted to go to the county division meeting
tomorrow at Presho," Senator Phillips said. "It's a rather important
matter to the settlers. _The Wand_ will represent those of the Lower
Brulé, of course."
What was county division? We set out the next morning to find out. The
county, it appeared, was becoming so thickly settled that the people of
the western part wanted it divided, with a county seat of their own. We
learned that Lyman County covered approximately 2500 square miles and
the settlers of the extreme western part were 110 miles from the county
seat, with no means of transportation. It sounded reasonable enough, and
_The Wand_ backed those who wanted county division.
The speaker for that little meeting was a slight and unassuming young
man who was greeted with cheers.
"Who is he?" I asked Senator Phillips.
"Why that," he said, "is John Bartine!"
John Bartine was one of the most noted and romantic figures of the
western plains. He had come west with a few law books packed in his
trunk and no money, a young tenderfoot lawyer. He almost starved waiting
for a case. There were no law cases, no real legal difficulties but
cattle rustling, and nothing, apparently, that an inexperienced young
easterner could do about that. But he persuaded stockmen who were being
wiped out by the depredations of the rustlers to let him take their
cases against these outlaw gangs. He had himself elected judge so that
he could convict the thieves. And he had convicted them right and left
until a band of rustlers burned down the courthouse in retaliation. But
he kept on fighting, at the risk of his own life, until at last that
part of the country became safe for the cattlemen.
After we had heard him talk we discovered that the county division
problem was not as simple as it appeared at first. It wasn't merely a
problem of dividing territory; division would increase the taxes, the
non-divisionists said.
We hadn't thought of that. One did not pay taxes on the land, of course,
until he got his deed, but there were other taxes to be paid, and the
homesteaders felt they were developing resources for the nation at their
own expense.
I did not know how to carry on a campaign like that, but _The Wand_ put
facts and figures before the settlers, to bring the situation clearly
before them and let them do the deciding. When a frontier newspaper ran
out of something to do, it could always enter a county division fight,
as there were always counties to be divided as soon as they were settled
up, many of them larger than our smaller New England States. And, so far
as my own district was concerned, I had won this first battle with Judge
Bartine. But the fight against the measure was so strong that Lyman
County was not divided for several years.
Although the settlers had not been on the Brulé long enough to vote,
office seekers kept coming through, asking the indorsement of _The
Wand_. "It's no wonder the men we elect to run things make such a fizzle
when they get into office," Ma Wagor snorted one day with impatience;
"they wear themselves plumb out getting there."
Old Porcupine Bear, wise man and prophet, warned us that it would be a
hard winter, and the plainsmen agreed that it was a humdinger. I asked
the wise old Indian how he could foretell the winter. "By food on shrub
and tree," he said, "heap plenty; the heavy coat of the animals; the
bear and squirrel storing heap much for eat, and the bear he get ready
go sleep early." And so the winter came on us.
The dams froze over and the Strip was a great white expanse which
appeared level at first sight but was beautifully undulating. Now there
was a shack on every quarter-section, which appeared black in relief
against the white. The atmosphere did curious things to them. Sometimes
they looked like small dry-goods boxes in the distance, sometimes they
seemed to have moved up to the very door. A coyote off a mile or two, or
a bunch of antelope running along a ridge in the distance, appeared to
be just across the trail.
In the mornings we cut a hole in the ice of our dam to dip out the water
for household use, and then led the livestock down to drink. And at
night we went skating on the larger dams, with the stars so large and
near it seemed one could reach up and touch them, and no sound on the
sleeping prairie but the howling of a pack of wolves down in the next
draw.
But there were tracks on the white floor of earth, tracks of the living
things which inhabit the silent areas and which had stealthily traveled
across the plains, sometimes tracks of the larger wild beasts, and
everywhere jack rabbits squatted deep in the snow.
The majority of the settlers wintered in little paper-shell hovels, of
single thin board walls, the boards often sprung apart and cracked by
the dry winds; a thin layer of tar paper outside and a layer of building
paper on the inside, which as a rule was stretched across the studding
to provide insulation between the wall and lining. Some of these paper
linings were thin and light, the average settler having to buy the
cheapest grade he could find.
We got along fairly well unless the wind blew the tar paper off. There
was not a tree, not a weather-break of any kind for protection.
Sometimes the wind, coming in a clean sweep, would riddle the tar paper
and take it in great sheets across the prairie so fast no one could
catch up with it. The covering on our shack had seen its best days and
went ripping off at the least provocation. With plenty of fuel one could
get along fairly well unless the tar paper was torn off in strips,
leaving the cracks and knotholes open. Then we had to stop up the holes
with anything we had, and patch the paper as best we could.
We had our piano out there that winter and Ida Mary bought a heating
stove for the front room. "The Ammons girls are riding high," some of
the settlers said good-naturedly. But when the stove, the cheapest
listed in the mail-order catalog, arrived, Ida Mary cried with
disappointment and then began to laugh. It was so small we could not
tell whether it was a round heater or a bulge in the stovepipe. With it
the temperature of the room ran automatically from roasting to freezing
point unless one kept stoking in fuel.
In some ways Ida Mary and I remained objects of curiosity. Occasionally
we saw indications of it. There had been a hot Sunday afternoon during
the summer when Ida Mary and I were sitting in the open door of the
shack. A strange cowboy rode up to the door. "Is this the place where
the newspaper and everything is?"
We told him that it was. He threw one leg over the saddlehorn and fanned
himself with his sombrero, looking us over, gaudy in a red and black
checkered shirt, fringed leather chaps and bright green neckerchief.
"Well, you ain't the ones I heard about that's runnin' it, are you?" He
seemed puzzled.
Yes, we were the ones. Anything he wanted?
"No. I'm a new wrangler over on Bad Horse creek--I come from Montana.
Montana Joe, they call me. And a bunch of the punchers was just a
wondering what you looked like; wanted me to come over and find out," he
admitted candidly.
"But," and he stared disapprovingly at our slippered feet, "them don't
look like range hoofs to me. They look like Ramblin' Rosie's." Ramblin'
Rosie, it appeared, was a notorious dance-hall girl.
And about that time a Chicago newspaper came out, carrying a big
headline story, complete with drawings, about our adventures in taming
the frontier. It pictured Ida Mary and me with chaps and six-shooters;
running claim-jumpers off our land and fighting Indians practically
single-handed, plowing the land in overalls, two large, buxom, hardy
girls. In fact, it had us shooting and tearing up the West in general. A
friend sent us a copy and we laughed over it hysterically, marveling at
this transformation of two girls who were both as timid as field mice,
into amazons. We hid it quickly so that no one could see it, and forgot
about it until long afterwards.
But we weren't the only girls on the plains with problems. A surprising
number of homesteaders were girls who had come alone. They had a
purpose in being there. With the proceeds of a homestead they could
finish their education or go into business.
Many of these girls came from sheltered homes and settled out in the
wilderness of plains, living alone in little isolated shanties out of
reach of human aid in case of illness or other emergency. They had no
telephones or other means of communication. Some of them had no means of
transportation, walking miles to a neighbor in order to send to town for
a little food or fuel, sometimes carrying buckets of water a mile or two
over the plains. In winter they were marooned for days and nights at a
stretch without a human being to whom they could speak, and nothing but
the bloodcurdling cry of coyotes at night to keep them company.
They tried to prepare themselves for any situation so that they would
neither starve nor freeze; with books and papers to read and the daily
grinding routine of work to be done on every homestead, where each job
required the effort and time of ten in modern surroundings, they managed
to be contented. But it took courage.
In spite of the rigors of the winter, the settlers made merry. Our piano
was hauled all over the Strip for entertainments. Barring storms or
other obstacles, it was brought home the next day, perhaps not quite as
good as when it went, but a piano scuffed or off-tune did not matter
compared to the pleasure Ida Mary had that winter, going to parties and
dancing. I did not always go along; my strength didn't seem to stretch
far enough.
Sometimes a group of homesteaders would drive up to the settlement
about sundown in a big bobsled behind four horses, the sled filled with
hay, heavy blankets and hot bricks. We would shut up shop and the whole
staff would crowd into the sled, Imbert tucking Ida Mary in warm and
snug.
On cold winter evenings, when a gray-white pall encircled the earth like
a mantle of desolation, three or four of the girls were likely to ride
up, each with a bag of cooked food, to spend the night. One never waited
to be invited to a friend's house, but it was a custom of the homestead
country to take along one's own grub or run the risk of going hungry. It
might be the time when the flour barrel was empty. So our guests would
bring a jar of baked beans, a pan of fresh rolls, potato salad or a
dried-apple pie; and possibly a jack rabbit ready baked. Jack rabbit was
the main kind of fresh meat, with grouse in season. We had not as yet
been reduced to eating prairie dog as the Indians did.
"Breaking winter quarantine," the girls would announce as they rode up.
Late in the evening we brought in the ladder, opened up the small square
hole in the ceiling, and our guests ascended to the attic. On the floor
next to the hole was a mattress made of clean, sweet, prairie hay. Our
guest climbed the ladder, sat on the edge of the mattress, feet dangling
down through the cubbyhole until she undressed, and then tumbled over
onto the bed. The attic was entirely too low to attempt a standing
posture.
On one such night with three girls stowed away in the attic, we lay in
bed singing.
"Hello, hello there," came an urgent call.
We peered through the frosted window, trying to see through the driving
snow, and made out a man on horseback.
"I'm on my way to Ft. Pierre and I am lost! I am trying to reach the
Cedar Creek settlement for the night."
"You can't make it, stranger, if you don't know the country," Ida Mary
called out.
"Well, what have I struck?" he asked, perplexed.
"A trading post."
"A trading post! It sounded like an opera house."
"We don't know who you are," Ida Mary called through the thin wall of
the shack, "but you can't get on tonight in this snow. Tie your horse in
the hayshed and we will fix you a bed in the store."
Next morning the girls rolled down the ladder one at a time, clothes in
hand, to dress by the toy stove while Ida Mary and I started the wheels
of industry rolling. When breakfast was ready we called in our strange
guest.
When he asked for his bill we told him we were not running public
lodgings but that we took in strangers when it was dangerous for them to
go on.
After that Ida Mary always left a lamp burning low in the kitchen
window, and the little print shop, set on the high tableland, served as
a beacon for travelers who were lost on the plains.
Many a night stranded strangers sought shelter at the Ammons settlement.
No other trading center in the middle of a reservation was run by girls,
so strangers took it for granted that there were men about, or if they
knew we were alone they did not think of our being unarmed in that
country where guns had been the law.
Once we decided we should have a watchdog around. Ida Mary traded a
bright scarf and some cigarettes for two Indian mongrels. They were lean
and lopeared and starved. The only way they ever would halt an intruder
was by his falling down over them, not knowing they were there. And they
swallowed food like alligators. Van Leshout named them "Eat" and
"Sleep." In indignation Ida Mary returned them to their owners. What was
the matter, they wanted to know. "No barkum, no bitem," Ida Mary
explained, and she tied them firmly to the back of the first Indian
wagon headed for the Indian settlement and gave up the idea of a dog for
protection.
However, women were probably safer in the homestead section than in any
other part of the country. Women had been scarce there, and they met
with invariable respect wherever they went; it was practically unheard
of for a solitary woman to be molested in any fashion.
Both men and women came through the Strip that winter looking for
friends or relatives who had claims, or in quest of land. Often they
could get no farther than the print shop by nightfall. And never was any
such person refused food or shelter.
Ida Mary went around that winter with one of the city boys, though she
still saw Imbert. "We take each other too much for granted," she said.
"I've been dependent upon him for companionship and diversion and help
in many ways. For his sake and mine I must know that it's more than
that."
I cannot recall that we ever planned ahead of proving up on the claim.
We measured life by proving-up time. Only the dirt farmers planned
ahead. And Ma Wagor--who was an inveterate matchmaker. I can see her
now, driving across the plains, holding her head as high as that of the
spotted pony she drove--a pony which, though blind as a bat, held its
head in the air like a giraffe.
Often she would stay with us at night. "Pa won't mind. He's got plenty
of biscuit left," she would say; "the cow give two gallons of milk
today, and he's got _The Wand_ and the Blue Springs paper to read--"
But sometimes, when business had kept her from home for two or three
days, or we needed her, she would gaze out of the window, watching for
him.
And it got colder. Getting the mail back and forth to the stage line
became a major problem. "It appears to me," said Ma, "like a post office
is as pestiferous a job as a newspaper." But Ma never admitted anything
pestiferous about running the store.
The post office receipts picked up. Mail bags were jammed with letters
written by the settlers through long, lonely evenings. The profits
helped to pull us through as the newspaper business slumped to almost
nothing during the "holing-in" period. The financial operations of the
trading post, in fact, rose and fell like a Wall Street market.
We struggled through sharp wintry squalls to the stage line with the
laden sacks of mail, and realized that when the winter really set in we
would never be able to make it. So Dave Dykstra was appointed
mail-carrier. He was a homesteader who taught the McClure school that
winter, a slim, round-shouldered chap, rather frail in physique. Dave
would never set the world on fire, but he would keep it going around
regularly. Blizzard, rain or sun, he came to the post office every
morning those short winter days before it was light. At night Ida Mary,
as postmistress, would lock the mail sack and carry it into the cabin.
In the morning we would hear Dave's sharp-shod horse striking the
hard-frozen ground, and one of us would leap to the icy floor, wrap up
in a heavy blanket, stick our feet into sheep-lined moccasins (some
nights we slept in them), open the door a foot or so, and hold out the
mail bag. Dave would grab it on the run.
One who has never tried it has no idea what that feat meant in a shell
of a hut with the temperature ten or twenty degrees below zero, freezing
one's breath in the performance. We used to hope Dave would oversleep,
or that his coffee would fail to boil so that we might have a few more
moments to sleep.
The Indians were always underfoot. The great cold did not keep them
away. Men sauntered around, trading, loafing. Women sat on the floor,
papooses on their backs, beadwork in hand. Our trade was extended to
Indian shawls, blankets, moccasins and furs, for which the post found
ready and profitable markets. Ida Mary became an adept at Indian
trading. By that time we had a smattering of the Sioux language,
although we were never really expert at it. It did not require much to
trade with the Indians.
Often they turned their horses loose, built campfires and spent the day.
They rolled a prairie dog in the wet earth, roasted it in the fire, and
invited us to eat. They brought us _shanka_, dog meat. There was a time
when we actually swallowed it because we were afraid to refuse. But now
we shook our heads.