explosion. A great rumbling force was sending steam high into the air.
It was Ben Smith's Folly. He had struck gas--enough to pipe house and
barns for light and fuel!
Then came a heaving, belching from far down in the earth's cavern. And
up came the water--a great stream of it that ran over the dry hot
ground! Water overflowing. That artesian well, flowing day and night,
would save the people and stock until it rained.
And with the flowing of fresh, cool water on the Lower Brulé, life began
to flow through my veins once more, and I got up, ready for what was to
come.
[Illustration]
XVI
FALLOWED LAND
So it happened that only a few weeks before proving-up time, Ida Mary
and I had to start all over again. But with the coming of water into
that thirsty land it didn't seem so difficult to begin again. And we
weren't doing it alone. It was the settlers who built a new shack, a new
building for a printing press; the settlers who clothed us during those
first destitute days. "This is cooperation," they laughed at our
protests. "_The Wand_ has always preached cooperation."
In the cool of the evening I rode out over the devastated prairie, past
the charred timbers and ashes of my claim, across the scorched and
stunted fields blighted by drought, avoiding the great cracks which had
opened in the dry earth and lay gaping like thirsty mouths for rain.
The crops were burnt, and the land which had seemed so fertile looked
bleak and sterile.
I rode through the reservation gate. There was no one at home at Huey
Dunn's, but his little field of shocked grain lay there in the midst of
burnt grass and unharvested fields. Instead of dry chaff there were
hard, fairly well-filled heads. It had withstood the drought
sufficiently to mature. In an average year it would have yielded a good
crop.
On his claim near the reservation a young man was doing quite a bit of
experimenting. He was a graduate of an agricultural school. I looked at
his fields, which also had come through the drought much better than
others. From other farmers scattered here and there who had tried the
fallowing plan I got records of methods and results. Then I rode back
slowly, thinking of what might be done for the Brulé country.
Drinking water supply could be obtained. The next most vital problem was
moisture for the crops. Most of the rainfall came in the growing season,
but in dry years it was inadequate and much of it wasted on packed
ground. To produce crops in the arid or semi-arid regions, out-of-season
moisture--heavy snows and rains--must be conserved. There must be a way
to harness it.
Next to lack of moisture was the short growing season. These were the
principal barriers to converting the new West into an agricultural
domain. The latter problem could be solved, the farmers said. Progress
already was being made in developing seed adapted to the climate. The
Indians had produced quick-maturing corn through their years of
corn-raising in a small way. There could be developed a hardier,
short-stalked grain, eating up less moisture, agricultural authorities
maintained. The farmers said that nature itself gradually would do a
great deal toward that end.
Experience. Science. Time. Of course, this was a land of the future, not
of today. The homesteaders had expected to tame it in a year or two,
when many years must be spent on even the smallest scientific
discoveries. They had demanded miracles. That was because they had no
resources with which to await results.
President Roosevelt had done much in turning public attention toward the
necessity of reclaiming these public lands, and already much was being
done. They had been too long neglected. Years ago, when the supply of
government land had seemed inexhaustible, the tide of settlers had swept
around the forgotten frontier, on beyond the arid and semi-arid land to
the fertile soil and the gold fields on the Pacific Coast. But the time
had come when this neglected prairie was the only land left for a
land-hungry people. Some way had to be found to make the great arid
plains productive.
The Department of Agriculture was turning its attention to the frontier,
establishing bureaus and experiment stations in various western states,
making scientific research.
At the request of _The Wand_, two agricultural agents from the State
Experimental Farm came to examine the soil and advise us as to its
possibilities, as to crops and cultivation. They reported it rich in
natural resources, with splendid subsoil. We would have to depend
greatly upon the subsoil and its moisture-retaining quality.
And over the frontier there was talk about a new system of conserving
moisture. Some said it was bound to sweep the West. The method was
called fallowing--the method Huey Dunn had used. It was a radical
departure from anything farmers of the rain belts had ever used.
The few sodbreakers who had tried it thought they had found a way to
conserve the moisture and at the same time to preserve the land, but it
was not they who heralded the plan as a great new discovery. To them it
was a way to raise their own crops. They may have learned it in the Old
Country, where intensive farming was carried on, or, like Huey Dunn,
figured it out for themselves. But it was ahead of the times in the new
West and generally looked upon as an impractical idea spread largely by
land agents as propaganda. Many of the farmers had never heard of it.
What I had heard and read of fallowing now came back to mind. I was in a
position to keep better posted on such things than they.
I got out my letters and records and spread them before Ida Mary on the
old square table, and with the sweat dripping down our faces from the
heat of the lamp we eagerly devoured their contents. Huey Dunn's plan of
mellowing, or rotting the soil, was not yet the true fallowing method.
"But it will mean cropping the land only every other year, and plowing
and raking the empty soil," Ida Mary said in a tone of misgiving.
"The top soil is kept loosened so that every bit of moisture will be
absorbed into the subsoil. Suppose it does mean letting the land lie
idle every other year, alternating the fields," I contended. "There is
plenty of cheap land here. It will be a way to utilize waste space."
Farmers in other arid regions, I learned as I scanned the letters, were
raising forage crops on the land in the off year.
But it will take two years, Ida Mary reminded me. The settlers had no
money to wait so long for a crop. "And all that labor--" she went on.
"It may be the solution, but I doubt if the settlers would listen to any
such plan."
I knew she was right. Two years of waiting, labor and expense. Labor was
no small item with the poor homesteaders. If the government would put in
money to carry out this new system until the farmers could get returns
from it--"It is a gigantic project for the government to finance ... it
would require great financial corporations to develop this country ..."
Halbert Donovan had said.
I talked it over with some of the more experienced farmers on the Strip
who understood the processes required. They figured they could plant
part of the ground while the other lay fallowing. If it happened to be a
wet year, that would give them something to go on. "But, mein Gott, how
we goin' to pull t'rough next winter?" old man Husmann raved. Even Chris
had no answer.
In the years of experimenting, the fallowing system underwent a number
of changes. But we had the plan in its fundamentals. After each rain the
land should be loosened; and late in the fall it should be plowed rather
deeply to soak up the winter snows. The top soil must be kept from
packing. It was worth trying, they agreed, if they could get money to
pull through this drought and stay on the land.
This might be a solution for the future. But for the people on the land
the solution must be immediate. Empty purses could not wait two seasons
for a good crop; empty stomachs could not await the future, and famine
stared the homesteaders on the Lower Brulé in the face.
Our proof sheet came out with the message, "We Can Fallow!" There was
encouragement to be derived from it, of course, but it was hope
deferred. Then, sitting in the doorway of the shack, leaning against the
jamb for support, my pencil held in tender fingers not yet healed, I
wrote to Halbert Donovan, setting forth the possibilities of the Strip,
and the West, under a moisture-retaining method of farming.
It was a morning in late August when I turned to see a well-dressed man
standing in the open door. Halbert Donovan!
At the first meeting he had found the West green and bright with spring
colors, and the outlaw printer of the McClure _Press_ excited and
voluble over the possibilities of the country. Now the investment broker
found a land of desolation and ruin, and the printer in sorry plight,
living in a crude, bare shack, clad like some waif of the streets in the
clothes donated by the settlers.
But he had come. He had driven out from Pierre along the dusty roads,
through the sultry heat, in a long shiny automobile. On the sagging
couch leaning against the hot wall, he sat wiping the perspiration from
his face as I told him more of the fallowing idea. He had not heard of
it. He knew practically nothing about agriculture, but he was a man to
whom any method of developing vast resources would appeal.
"At first," he said, little crinkles breaking around his eyes, relieving
the sternness of his face, "I read _The Wand_ (how I did laugh at the
name you gave it) with refreshing amusement, out of a personal curiosity
you had aroused. I wanted to see how long you would hold out. Later I
became deeply interested in this western activity."
I knew in what mood he must have reached the shack, after that drive
from Pierre, across parched earth, seeing the ruined crops, passing
settlers' homes which from the outside looked like the miserable huts
one sees along waterfronts or in mean outskirts of a city where the
flotsam of humanity live. And cluttered around them, farm machinery,
washtubs, and all the other junk that could be left outdoors, with
countless barrels for hauling water, and the inevitable pile of tin
cans. It was dreary, it was unrelievedly ugly; above all, it looked like
grim failure.
Earnestly I faced him. "We aren't done," I told him. "We've just
begun--badly, I know, but we can fallow. Make reservoirs. Put down
artesian wells." I completely forgot, in putting these possibilities of
the Strip before him, to mention the gas and oil deposits which we had
discovered during our frantic search for water. I did not think of
saying, "We have natural gas here--let's go and look at the Ben Smith
ranch with all its buildings piped with gas. And over on the Carter
place a drill came up from a shallow hole sticky with oil." But the
minds of the settlers were so focused elsewhere that little had been
said about these things. With an investment broker interested in mining
projects under my very roof, many of us might have become rich and the
Brulé prosperous in no time.
Development of agriculture, to my mind, was of broader importance than
oil strikes, anyhow. "Men do put money into undeveloped things," I said.
"Eastern capitalists risk millions in undeveloped mines and oil fields
in the West. This is different. Land is solid."
He answered thoughtfully: "As an investment, land is not so precarious
as mines, but there are no big profits to be reaped from it. That's the
difference, my girl."
He must have known that even for investors, western land was going to be
a big thing. He must have known that the railroad companies were buying
it up--that the Milwaukee had gone into a spree of land buying in Lyman
County.
I poured him some water from the can we kept in a hole in the ground
back of the shack for coolness. He took a swallow and set it down. "Good
Lord, how can anyone drink that!" he exclaimed.
"We get used to it," I told him. "And we'll have a better water supply
in time. It will rain--it's bound to rain, sooner or later."
He looked out at the blazing sky, the baked earth, a snake slithering
from the path back into the dry grass which rustled as it moved. "So
this is the land you want to save," he exclaimed. "The incredible thing
is that people have managed to stay on it at all!"
"They will stay," I assured him. "Remember that these builders have had
nothing to work with, no direction, no system or leadership. What would
business men accomplish in such an undertaking under the circumstances?
If they had experienced leaders--men like you--"
"In other words," he smiled, "laying up riches where moth and rust do
corrupt." He walked to the door and stood, hands in pockets, looking out
over the plains. Then he turned to face me.
"My dear girl, I might not be worth a hoot at the job."
"Oh, you would! You would! And if the settlers never repaid you, think
what a land king you would become," I laughed.
"No, I don't want the land that way. I want to see the settlers succeed,
try to keep them from being squeezed out."
He mopped his face, picked up the glass of water and after a glance at
it set it down untouched. "Now, I've been thinking of this western
development for some time. It's going to open up new business in almost
every field. Aside from all that, it is worth while. I've kept track of
you and your Brulé. If one gets his money back here it is all he can
expect. How much would be needed to help these settlers hold on--a
little grubstake, some future operating money? I like this fallowing
idea."
He talked about second mortgages, collateral on personal property,
appointment of local agents, etc. He did not want the source of this
borrowing power to become known as yet.
It was he who brought me back to my personal predicament when, ready to
leave, he expressed his desire to help me, asking if I would accept a
check--"For you and your sister to carry on." But I refused. I had
appealed to him for the country, not for myself. But his offer mortified
me, made me conscious of my shabby appearance, the coarse, ill-fitting
clothes, the effects of the fire still visible in rough and
smoke-stained skin, the splotches of new skin on my lips, the face pink
and tender. Altogether, the surroundings and I must have made a drab
spectacle.
Holding out his hand to say good-by, Halbert Donovan saw my shrinking
embarrassment. Suddenly he put his arm around my shoulders, drew me to
him, brushed back the singed hair and pressed his lips to my forehead;
turned my small, blackened hand, palm upward, looking at it.
"I'll help you all I can," he said. "Just keep your Utopian dreams."
* * * * *
So it happened that, before famine could touch these people who had
already struggled through drought and blizzard and despair, they found
help in sight. Halbert Donovan put up $50,000 as a start, to be dealt
out for emergency on land, livestock, etc. Heretofore loans had been
made on land only. Now the reliability of the borrower himself was often
taken into account as collateral. It was enough that we knew the
borrower was honest, that he was doing his best to conquer the land and
to make it yield. We gambled on futures then, as we had done before.
That it was eastern capital, handled through a system of exchange and
agencies, was all that those who borrowed knew or cared.
And each day we scanned the heavens for signs of rain. We searched for a
cloud like a starving man for bread. The settlers went stalking about
with necks craned, heads thrown back, eyes fixed on the sky. And the
cartoonist from Milwaukee took to looking for a cloud with a field
glass. A cloud no bigger than a man's hand would raise the hopes of the
whole reservation. But in vain we searched the metallic blue of the sky.
With spectacular ceremonial and regalia the Indians staged their "rain
dance." The missionaries had long opposed this form of expression by the
Indians, and their objections led to a government ban which was finally
modified to permit some sort of ritual.
These symbolic dances were not mere ceremonials for the Plains Indians;
they were their one means of expressing their emotions en masse
rhythmically, of maintaining their sense of tribal unity.
The first part of the ceremony was secret and lasted for several days.
After that the public ceremony began. Painted according to ritual, they
danced in a line from east to west and back again, whistling as they
danced, every gesture having its symbolic meaning. The whistle
symbolized to them the call of the Thunderbird.
Pioneers belong to the past, people are prone to say; savage customs
belong to the past. But it was in the twentieth century that primitive
men, their bodies streaked with black paint, fasted and danced,
overcoming an enemy as they danced, compelling the Thunderbird to
release the rain. And on the Strip men and women prayed as fervently to
their own God, each in his own way.
That night, something breaking the dead stillness woke me. A soft, slow
tapping on the roof of the shack, like ghostly fingers. It increased in
tempo as though birds, in this land without trees, were pecking at the
roof; it grew to a regular drumming sound. I lay for a few moments,
listening, wondering. Then I leaped out of bed, ran to the door and
stepped outside.
Rain! Rain! Rain!
"Ida Mary," I called, "get up! It's raining!"
She was out of bed in a moment as though someone had shouted "fire."
In nightdress, bare feet, we ran out on the prairie, reached up our
hands to the soft, cool, soothing drops which fell slowly as though
hesitating whether to fall or not. And then it poured. The grass was wet
beneath our feet.
We lifted our heads, opened our lips and drank in the cool, fresh drops.
I lay down on the cool blanket of earth, absorbing its reviving moisture
into my body, feeling the rain pattering on my flesh.
Over the prairie dim lights flickered through the rain. Men and women
rushed out to hail its coming--and to put tubs and buckets under the
roofs. No drop of this miracle must be wasted. In their joy and relief,
some of the homesteaders, unable to sleep, hitched up and drove across
the plains to rejoice with their friends.
After that eternity of waiting it rained and rained, until the earth all
about was green and fresh. Native hay came out green, and late-planted
seed burst out of the ground. Some of the late crops matured. There was
water in the dams! The thirsty land drank deep of the healing rains.
The air grew fresh and cool, haggard faces were alight with hope. The
Lower Brulé became a different place, where once again people planned
for the future, unafraid to look ahead.
With the mail bag, the salvaged type, and Margaret's few sticks of
furniture which she wrote to us to take, we moved back to the homestead,
to the site of Ammons.
The settlers had the building up. This time it was a little
square-roofed house made of drop siding (no more tar paper). A thin,
wall-board partition running halfway to the ceiling divided the small
living quarters from the print shop.
The McClure _Press_ had died the natural death of the proof sheet, and
the proof king was submerged in the cause of prohibition. Later he was
appointed federal prohibition agent for the state of South Dakota. He
gave us most of the McClure _Press_ equipment. So I got that hand press,
after all. What few proofs were yet to be made in that section were
thrown to _The Wand_. With the current proof money coming in we bought
the additional supplies necessary to run the paper.
I sent a telegram to Halbert Donovan: "Rain. Pastures coming out green.
Dwarfed grain can make feed in the straw. My flax making part crop. Dams
full of water. Fall fallowing begun." In hilarious mood I signed it
"Utopia."
Delivered the twenty-five miles in the middle of the night, special
messenger service prepaid, came the answer: "Atta girl. Am increasing
the stakes."
He did. Halbert Donovan's company interested other financial concerns in
making loans, "to deal out through competent appraisement."
So the Brulé won through, as pioneers before them had done, as other
pioneers in other regions were doing, as ragged, poverty-stricken,
gallant an army as ever marched to the colors.
[Illustration]
XVII
NEW TRAILS
Ida Mary and Imbert were going to be married. At last Ida Mary was sure,
and there was no need of waiting any longer. So she went back to St.
Louis for the first time, and two weeks later the wedding took place.
When they returned as bride and groom, the settlers came from every
direction, accompanied by all the cow and sheep bells, tin cans and old
horns on the Strip for a big charivari. They came bringing baskets of
food for the supper and any little article or ornament they could find
at home for a wedding present, singing as they came, "Lucky Numbers Are
We," and "We Won't Go Home Till Morning."
Imbert took over the Cedar Fork ranch and store--that little trade
center outside the reservation gate where a disheveled group of
landseekers had faced a new dawn rising upon the Strip. And Ida Mary,
who so loved the land, came at last to make it her permanent home.
Steady, practical and resourceful--it was such women the West needed.
The sturdily built log house was a real home, no tar-paper
shack--rustic, we would call it now--with four rooms and a porch. There
were honest-to-goodness beds, carpets and linoleum on the kitchen floor!
Ida Mary was so proud of the linoleum that she wiped it up with skim
milk to make it shine. There was a milk cow and consequently homemade
butter and cottage cheese--all the makeshift discomforts of homesteading
replaced by the solid and enduring qualities of home.
Peace, home, happiness--for Ida Mary.
And Ma Wagor's problems were solved, too. It appeared that her first
husband had left her more than the an-tik brooch of which she was so
proud. He had left her a son who had grown to be a stalwart,
good-looking young man, who worked with a construction company out in
western Nebraska. Learning of the Wagors' misfortune, he came, started
another store at Ammons for his mother, and helped her to run it for a
while.
All around Ammons the fields lay freshly turned, fallowing for next
year's crop. Our field of flax had been cut for what little it would
make, and the ground plowed over to soak up the winter's moisture. With
the turning of the ground for another season, a page in my own life was
turning. "What am I going to do, now that I've come in under the wire?"
I wondered.
And then I proved up and got my patent. I borrowed a thousand dollars on
it to pay off the government and the balance due our financial backers,
who had gambled on us without security. But I did not borrow the money
through the Halbert Donovan Company. The loan had been promised me by
the banks many months before. We had borrowed on the first homestead to
get the second, borrowed to the limit on the second to pay for the
privilege of helping to run the reservation. We now had both farms
mortgaged to the hilt. But the hay alone would pay the interest and
taxes. Land would increase in value.
I was alone at the shack now with the newspaper still to get out. Riding
across the plains toward the claim one afternoon, I heard the swift,
staccato clicking of type as it fell rapidly in the stick. The metallic
sound carried across the prairie as I neared the shop. As I walked in I
saw, perched on the high stool in front of the type case, a little
hoydenish figure with flying hair--Myrtle Coombs, the hammer-and-tongs
printer. "This don't look right to me," she remarked, reading her stick
as I came in, "but a good printer follows copy even if it flies out of
the window."
Myrtle had come back on vacation to see how her homestead was
progressing. Seeing that I needed help, she unrolled a newspaper bundle
and hung her "extra" dress and nightgown on a nail, laid a comb and a
toothbrush on the dry-goods-box dressing table, and for two weeks she
"threw" out the paper with a bang.
About this time the régime of our government was changing. Out of the
West, from which we had had only sheep and cattle, there were coming men
destined to be leaders in the affairs of the country. As men had risen
from the ranks to guide the destinies of the Colonies, so men appeared
from the West to shape this new America.