Chapter VI: Part 6

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.

It was wood-hauling season, and women came sitting flat on the back end of loads. Among the Indian women were a few with primitive intelligence and wisdom. Others were morose and taciturn.

Even during the enforced lull of the deep winter there seemed to be much to do, and the routine duties of the post office and _The Wand_ appeared to require most of our time. The opportunity to study, to know the Sioux, was at hand, but we never took advantage of it; like most people, we were too busy with the little things to see the possibilities around us. Perhaps Alexander Van Leshout, who made a success of his Indian art, came to know these people better than any of us. But he was an artist--and therefore he refused to let the little things clutter up his life and take his attention from the one thing that was important to him--seeing clearly and honestly the world about him.

When the Indians got their government pay, they celebrated with a buying spree. They were lavish buyers as long as they had a cent, and they bought the goods that had the most alluring picture on can or box. Ida Mary would hold up something of staple quality, but they would shake their heads and turn to something gaudily wrapped.

Old Two-Hawk and a few others paid their yearly subscriptions to _The Wand_ every time they got their government allotment. "Your subscription is already paid," I would explain, but they would shake their heads and mutter. This was their newspaper, too, the thing that had signs and their own names printed on a machine. They had the right to trade beadwork or another dollar for it any time they liked.

Our subscription list looked like a Sioux directory with such names as Julia Lame Walking Eagle, Maggie Shoots at Head, Afraid of His Horses, Paul Owns the Fire, and his son, Owns the Fire.

Our daily visitors were the rank and file of the tribe, although famous old warriors and medicine men came now and then. The high rulers of the Brulé, who were among the most reserved and intelligent of all American Indians, did not come in this manner. But any negotiations between the Brulé whites and the Brulé red men were made with their Chief and Council. A few of the Indian warriors and chiefs always would hate the whites, but the rank and file of the Brulés were enjoying the strange new life about them. While they saw no advantage in an active life for themselves, they found activity in others highly entertaining.

The weather with its dry cold was sometimes deceptive. For several days we had had urgent business to attend to in Presho, but the weather prohibited the trip. One morning we awoke to see the sun brilliant on the snow.

A lovely day for the long trip, and we hitched the team to a light buggy so that we might wrap up better. The farther we drove the colder we became. There was no warmth in that dazzling sun. We huddled down as near as possible to the hot bricks. We took turns driving, one of us wrapped up, head and ears beneath the heavy robes.

On that whole journey we did not meet a soul. We were frozen stiff and had to have our hands thawed out in cold water when we reached Presho.

A homesteader living ten miles out stepped into the land office while we were there.

"Don't you girls know enough to stay at home on a day like this? I didn't dare attempt it until I saw you go by. I said to the family, 'There go the Ammons girls,' so I hitched up and started. And here it is 28 below zero."

The land commissioner said, "Well, you can't depend on the Ammons girls as a thermometer."

And the storms came.

XI

THE BIG BLIZZARD

Several miles from Ammons a bachelor gave a venison dinner on his claim to which a little group of us had gone. About noon it clouded up and no barometer was needed to tell us that a big storm was on the way. As soon as we had eaten we started home.

The sky was ominous. Antelope went fleeting by; a little herd of horses, heads high, went snorting over the prairie. Coyotes and rabbits were running to shelter and a drove of cattle belonging to the Phillips ranch were on a stampede. One could hear them bawling madly.

The guests had gone to the dinner together in a big wagon and were delivered to their respective shacks on the way back. We raced the horses ahead of the storm for a mile or two, but it was upon us by the time we reached Margaret Houlihan's. As we drove on up the draw to the settlement we saw the chimney of our cabin, consisting of a joint of stovepipe (the regulation chimney in this country) go flying across the prairie. And there was not an extra joint of pipe on the place--probably not one on the reservation, which meant that we would not be able to build a fire in the house until we could go to Presho or the state capital for a joint.

"Hey, whata you goin' to do," exclaimed the young neighbor boy who had taken us to the dinner. "You can't live in your shack through the storm that's comin' without a fire."

"We have a monkey-stove in the store," Ida Mary told him. He shook his head, but before hurrying home he scooped up a few buckets of coal we had on hand and took it into the store, and watered and fed the horses, knowing we might not be able to reach them until the blizzard had passed. "That all the fuel you got?" he demanded.

"A settler went to town this morning to get coal for us."

"But he can't get back until the storm is over. How you goin' to manage? No fire in your shack? No fuel for the monkey-stove?"

"We'll be all right," we assured him. He was not convinced, but he dared not linger. He had to get home while he could still find the way.

In thirty minutes we were completely shut in by the lashing force of wind and snow that swept across the plains in a blinding rage. Ma Wagor and Kathryn, our typesetter, had gone home and we were alone, Ida Mary and I. We built up a hot fire in the monkey-stove, which sat in the middle of the store building and was used for heating both store and print shop. From canned goods on the shelf, baked beans and corned beef, we prepared a sketchy supper, and ate on the counter.

Although it had been without heat only a few hours, the shack was already like an iceberg, and we were shaking with cold by the time we managed to drag the couch out of it, with a mighty effort, and into the store. It was warm there, and we lay safe under warm blankets listening tranquilly to the storm hurling its strength furiously against the frail defense of the little store, the shriek of the wind, the beating of the snow on the roof. It must be horrible to be out in it, we thought, pleasantly aware of protection and warmth and safety.

Next morning there was a real old-time blizzard raging. We could barely see the outline of the shack ten feet from the store; the rest of the world was blotted out and the wind roared like an incoming tide as the snow and sleet pelted like shot on the low roof. A primeval force drove the storm before it. All over the plains people were hemmed in tar-paper shacks, the world diminished for them to the dimensions of their thin-walled houses, as alone as though each were the only dweller on the prairie.

The team, Fan and Bill, and Lakota were the only horses tied up in the hay barn. They could reach the hay and eat snow for water. There would be plenty of snow. Our menagerie of Indian plugs, including Pinto, was loose on the plains; but they were accustomed to battling storms in the open and there were haystacks now to provide food and shelter. Somewhere in the open they were standing, huddled together, facing the onslaught of the storm.

The west end wall of the flimsy ell print shop, exposed to the full force of the storm, was swaying in. Together we dragged forth some boxes of canned goods, heavy cans of lard and molasses, and propped it with their weight. We watched anxiously for a time, but the heavy boxes seemed to provide sufficient support. There were no further signs of the wall collapsing.

By evening the storm had gripped the plains like a demon of wrath. We had been rather enjoying this seclusion--no Indians. And--we chuckled like a victim of persecution whose persecutor had been overtaken--there would be no mail carrier in the morning. No mail to be taken care of. Exultant, we tried to figure how many days Dave would be blockaded and we would be spared that morning penance of handing the mail sack out from the icy shack.

On the second morning the storm was still raging, with the snow two feet deep between the store and the barn. The west wall still held, and between glances at it we stoked the monkey-stove. Stoked it while the coal dwindled. When the last chunk had been swallowed up we hunted around for something else to burn. Newspapers, cartons, wooden boxes--everything we could find went into the voracious maw of the stove.

We tended it as religiously as priestesses at an altar, or as primitive men building up a fire to keep off wild animals. Only under such conditions does one fully experience that elemental worship of fire. It literally meant life to us.

Searching for something else we could burn, something else to keep that flame going even a little while longer, that pleasant glow which had come with our sense of protection gradually disappeared. The blizzard was not merely a gigantic spectacle put on by nature for our entertainment, it was a menace, to be kept at bay only by constant alertness on our part.

Now there was nothing left in the store that we could burn!

"The Indians brought some fence posts," Ida Mary recalled. "They are back of the barn where they unloaded them. We'll have to get them."

We put on our coats, pulled fur caps close down around our faces and ears, wrapped gunny sacks around our feet and legs over high arctics to serve as snowshoes. It took our combined strength to push the door open against the storm. Before we could close it behind us, snow had swept into the store and was making little mounds. Clinging to each other we plowed our way through the loose snow to the fence posts and dragged in a few, making two trips, breaking a trail with them as we went. The wind-blown snow cut our faces like points of steel. Hearing the restless whinny of the horses, we stopped to untie them. They would not go far from shelter.

Naturally the fence posts were much too long to go into the stove, and we had no way of chopping them up. So we lifted up a cap of the two-hole stove and stuck one end of a post into the fire, propped the other end up against the counter, and fed the fire by automatic control. When one post burned down to the end, we stuck in another. It seemed to us that they burned awfully fast, and that the store was getting colder and colder. We put on our heavy coats for warmth and finally our overshoes.

Storm or no storm, however, _The Wand_ had to be printed. We pulled the type-case into the store, close to the stove. In those heavy coats and overshoes we went to work on the newspaper--and that issue was one of the best we ever published. In those two long nights, shut off from all the world, we talked and planned. We dared not take the risk of going to bed. If we should sleep and let the fire go out, we were apt to freeze, so we huddled around the stove, punching fence posts down into the fire, watching the blaze flicker.

At least there was time to look ahead, time to think, time to weigh what we had done and what we wanted to do. So that week _The Wand_ came out with ideas for cooperative action that were an innovation in the development of new lands, a banded strength for the homesteader's protection. It seemed logical and simple and inevitable to me then--as it does now. "Banded together as friends"--the Indian meaning of Lakota--was the underlying theme of what I wanted to tell the homesteaders. The strength and the potentialities of one settler counted for little, but--banded together!

Our enthusiasm in planning and talking carried us through most of that day. But toward evening there were more immediate problems. It began to turn bitter cold. The very air was freezing up. It was no longer snowing, but the wind had picked up the snow and whirled it over the prairie into high drifts that in places covered up the barbed-wire fences against which it piled.

And under the piling snow our fuel lay buried; a long windrow drift had piled high between the posts and the shop. And the shop was growing colder and colder. Even with the heavy coats and overshoes we stamped our feet to keep out the chill and huddled over the dying fire. It would soon be freezing cold in the store, as cold as the icy shack which we had abandoned. No wonder people worshiped fire!

There was no sense of snug protection against the storm now. It seemed to have invaded the store, although the west wall still held. "We'll have to go somewhere for warmth," Ida Mary decided. Margaret's shack was the nearest, but even so we knew the grave risk we took of perishing on the way there. Action, however, is nearly always easier than inaction. A time or two we stuck our heads out of the door and the cold fairly froze our breath. Once I went outside, and when I tried to get back into the shack the wind, sucking between the few buildings, blew me back as though an iron hand held me.

"If we stay here," we thought, "we may be walled in by morning by the fast-drifting snow." So we decided on Margaret's, a quarter-mile down the draw. The chief difficulty was that the trip must be made against the storm, and we did not know whether we could make it or not. We each wrapped up tightly in a heavy Indian shawl, tied ourselves together with a light blanket, picked up the scoop shovel, and started down the buried trail.

Out through the side door and the narrow space between the buildings which had been protected against the drifts, we made our way; then, facing the full strength of the storm, we dug our way, shoveling as we went, through a drift that had piled in front of the buildings, and on through the deep level of snow.

It was getting dark now--the sudden steel-gray that envelops the plains early on a winter night and closes in around the white stretches, holding them in a vise. The only sign of life in the whole blanketed world was the faint glimmer of light in Margaret's window. We knew now how the light in the print shop must have looked many a night to strangers lost on the prairie in a storm.

Such lightweights were we that, at every step we took, the wind blew us back; we used all our force, pushing against that heavy wall of wind, until we struck drifts that almost buried us. For all our clumsy tying, the blanket held us together or we would have lost each other. We could not speak, because if we so much as parted our lips they seemed to freeze to our teeth, and the cold wind rasped in our throats and lungs as though we had been running for a very long time.

Had the snow been tightly packed we could never have dug our way out of some of the drifts. But it had been picked up and swirled around so much by the wind that it was loose and light. It blew up off the ground, lashed against our faces like sharp knives, and blinded us. "How horrible," we had thought from the shelter of the store, "to be out in the storm." But we hadn't tasted then the malignant fury of the thing, battling with us for every step we made.

At last we turned and walked backwards, resting on the shovel handle for fear we would fall from exhaustion. Every few steps we looked around to see whether we were still going in a straight line toward the dim light that shone like a frosted glimmer from the tiny shack which now looked like a dark blur. We realized that if we were to swerve a few feet in either direction, so that we lost sight of the lamp, we would not find Margaret's shack that night.

It was quite dark now, and no sound on the prairie but the triumphant howl of the wind and the dry crunch of our overshoes on the snow, slipping, stumbling. We were pushing ourselves on, but our feet were so numb it was almost impossible to walk. We had been doing it for hours, it seemed; we had always been fighting our way through the deep snow. The store we had left seemed as unreal as though we had never known its protection.

Ida Mary, still walking backwards, stumbled and fell. She had struck Margaret's shack. I pushed against the door, too numb to turn the knob.

The door opened and Margaret, with a cry, pulled us in. Swiftly she unbundled us, taking care not to bring us near the fire. She took off our gloves and overshoes, then ran to the door and scooped up a basin of snow for our numb hands and feet, snow which felt curiously warm and comforting. While the snow drew out the frost, she hastened about, making strong, hot tea.

While we drank the tea and felt warmth slowly creeping over us, "Why on earth did you attempt to come here on a night like this?" she demanded. "You might have frozen to death."

"We were out of fuel," we told her. "We had to take the chance."

The shack was cheerful and warm. There was a hot supper and fuel enough to last through the storm. Only a refuge for which one has fought as Ida Mary and I fought to reach that tar-paper shack could seem as warm and safe as Margaret's shack seemed to us that night. In a numb, delicious lethargy we sat around the stove, too tired and contented to move.

Safe from the fury of the wind, we listened to it raging about the cabin as though cheated of its victims. And then, toward midnight, it died away. There was a hush as though the night were holding its breath, and then the sky cleared, the stars came out.

The next day Margaret's brother took up a sack of coal on his bronco, so we made our way back over the trail we had broken the night before, to the store, and he built a fire for us. Later that same morning Chris rode over with a sack of coal tied on behind the saddle.

"Yoost in case you should run out once," he said as he brought it in. "My wife she bane uneasy when she see no light last night."

When we told him what had happened he shook his head in concern and went to work. He scooped a path to the barn and attended to the horses. From under the snow he got some fence posts which he chopped up while Charlie excavated an opening to the front door--in case anyone should be mad enough to try to reach the store on a day like that.

About noon a cowboy came fighting his way through the drifts in search of lost cattle which the storm must have driven in this direction--the only soul who dared to cross the plains that day.

It was Sourdough. I never knew his real name. I doubt if those with or for whom he worked knew.

He stopped at the print shop to rest his horse, which was wringing wet with sweat, though the day was piercing cold. He threw the saddle blanket over the horse and came in.

We begged him to go and find out whether or not the Wagors were all right. After Ida Mary and I had got straightened out, it occurred to us that they had sent in their order for coal with ours. Like us they might be imprisoned in their shack and low on fuel; but, unlike us, there would be no question of their battling their way across the prairie to shelter.

"Sufferin' sinners," grumbled Sourdough. "Think I got time to fool around with homesteaders when a bunch of critters is maybe dead or starvin' to death? Godamighty!"

We argued and insisted, telling him that he knew better how to break a trail than the tenderfeet around here, that his horse was better trained for it.

"This country warn't made for no humans--just Indians and rattlesnakes and cowhands is all it was intended for."

I agreed with him. I was ready to agree with anything he might say if he would only go to the Wagors' shack. At last, after we had exhausted all the wiles and arts of persuasion at our command, Ida Mary told him that, come to think of it, she had seen a bunch of cattle drifting in the direction of the Wagor claim. He started out, saying he might stop in if he happened to drift by and it "come handy."

Sourdough found the Wagors covered up in bed. They had been in bed two days and three nights. The fuel had given out, as we had feared--cow chips and all. They had burned hay until the drifts became so high and the stack so deeply covered that the poor old man could no longer get to it. The cow and the blind horse had barely enough feed left to keep alive.

Not daring to burn the last bit of hay or newspaper--which would not have warmed the house anyhow--the old couple had gone to bed, piling over them everything that could conceivably shut out that penetrating dead cold, getting up just long enough to boil coffee, fry a little bacon and thaw out the bread. They dipped up snow at the door and melted it for water. The bread had run out, and the last scrap of fuel. They tore down the kitchen shelf, chopped it up, and the last piece of it had gone for a flame to make the morning coffee. The little snugly built shack was freezing cold. A glass jar of milk in the kitchen had frozen so hard that it broke the jar.

When Sourdough walked in and learned the situation he bellowed, "Sufferin' sinners!" and tore out like a mad steer. He cut into the haystack, cut up a few posts from the corral fence and made a fire--and when a range rider makes a fire it burns like a conflagration.

He fed the two dumb animals (meaning the cow and horse, he explained, though they weren't half as dumb as anyone who would go homesteading) while Ma stirred up some corn cakes and made coffee for them all. Milk the cow? What the hell did they think he was, a calf? Sourdough, like most cowboys, had never milked a cow. The only milk he ever used came out of a can.

Mid-afternoon he reported. When we wondered what could be done next, he said carelessly, "Godamighty! Let 'em stay in bed. If they freeze to death it will serve 'em right for comin' out here."

Grumbling, ranting on, he slammed the door and strode out to the barn, saddled Bill--the stronger horse of the brown team--and led him to the door.

"What are you going to do?" I demanded.

"Ride this no-count plug of yourn to hunt them critters. You never saw a bunch goin' that way," he accused Ida Mary. She smiled at the ruse she had used to start him out.

He jumped on Bill, leading his cow pony behind--a range rider knows how to conserve a horse's strength--and followed the trail he had broken, straight back toward the Wagor shack. Now we knew. He was going after Ma and Pa. They would be warm and nourished, with strength for the trip, and good old Bill could carry them both.

A few days later when we asked Ma about the harrowing experience she laughed and said, "Oh, it wasn't so bad. Pa and I talked over our whole life in those three days, telling each other about our young days; Pa telling me about some girls he used to spark that I never woulda heard about if it hadn't been for that blizzard.... I told him about my first husband ... he's the one who left me the ant-tic broach ... we did get pretty cold toward the last.

"I burned up every old mail-order catalog I had saved. I always told Pa they would come in handy.... What? Afraid we would freeze to death? Well, we woulda gone together."

* * * * *

The blizzard was over, but the snow lay deep all over the prairie and the great cold lasted so that few of the settlers ventured outside their shacks. For days there was no hauling done. The trails that had been worn since spring were buried deep and the drifts were treacherous. There were many homesteaders over the Reservation who were running out of fuel.

Now, if ever, was a time for cooperation, and _The Wand_ printed a list of those who could spare fuel; they would share with those in need of it. They brought what they could to the settlement and pooled it, chopping up all the poles and posts they could find into stovewood, and taking home small loads to tide them over.

With the fury of that storm, one of the hardest blizzards the frontier had experienced, the winter spent itself. Under the soft warm breath of a chinook the snow disappeared like magic, melting into the soil, preparing it for the onslaught of the plow.

XII

A NEW AMERICA

Ida Mary and I came through the winter stronger than we had ever been before, but we welcomed the spring with grateful hearts. Only poets can describe the electric, sweet quality of spring, but only the young, as we were young that year, receive the full impact of its beauty. The deep, cloudless blue of western skies, the vivid colors after the dead white of winter, were fresh revelations, as though we had never known them before.

One spring day I was making up the paper, while the Christophersons' little tow-headed boy watched me.

"Are you going to be a printer when you grow up, Heine?"

"Nope. I don't want no little types," he replied. "I like traction machines better--they go. My Pa's got one."

A tractor coming on the Strip! I ran to tell Ida Mary.

As it chugged and caterpillared from town through the Reservation, Chris Christopherson's tractor caused almost as much excitement as the first steamship up the Hudson. Men, women and children gathered about and stared wide-eyed at the new machine as its row of plows cut through the stubborn sod like a mighty conqueror. He was plowing a hundred acres.

A few cattlemen from the open country rode into the Strip to see it and bowed their heads to this evidence of the coming of agriculture.

Old Ivar Eagleheart, Two-Hawk, and others of the Indian braves looked on. This mystic power sealed their fate. It was in a last desperate attempt to save territory for his race that an old Indian chief had stood indomitable, contending with the White Fathers. "Wherever you find a Sioux grave, that land is ours!" In this plowing up of the Indians' hunting grounds no one thought of Sioux graves.

The McClure homesteaders had filed on their claims, proved up and gone, many of them, leaving empty shacks. Here on the Strip were increasing signs of permanency. Many Brulé settlers went back home and disposed of whatever property they had in order to make permanent improvements on their claims. Other machinery came. Within a radius of three miles of Ammons three tractors ran all day. All night one could see their bright headlights moving and hear their engines chug-chugging over the dark plain, turning under the bluebells and anemones as they went, and the tall grass where buffalo had ranged. Fragrant scent of wild flowers blended with the pungent odor of new-turned earth and floated across the plain. When those owning tractors got through breaking for themselves they turned over sod for other settlers.

In every direction on the Brulé and all over the plains which had been settled, teams went up and down, making a black and green checkerboard of the prairie.

Ida Mary and I had Chris break and sow sixty acres of our land to flax. It cost $300, and we again stretched our credit to the breaking point to borrow the money. Try out fifteen or twenty acres first? Not we! If we had a good crop it would pay for the land.

The winners in the Rosebud Drawing were swarming onto their claims, moving their families and immigrant goods in a continuous stream. Towns for many miles around were deluged with trade. It was estimated that the Rosebud alone would add 25,000 new people to the West, with the settlers' families, tradesmen and others whom the Rosebud development would bring. A few groups of settlers from Chicago and other cities came with a fanfare of adventure new to the homestead country. But many stolid, well-equipped farmers, too, went into Tripp County, in which the Rosebud lay.

I got a letter from the Chicago reporter saying: "I did not draw a Lucky Number, but I came in on the second series to take the place of those who dropped out. Am out on my land and feeling better. It was sporting of you to offer to find a claim for me. Things are moving fast on the Rosebud."

Word spread that homesteaders were flocking farther west in Dakota--to the Black Hills--and on to the vast Northwest. That inexorable tide was pressing on, taking up the land, transforming the prairie, forcing it to yield its harvest, shaping the country to its needs, creating a new empire.

We peopled and stocked the West by rail--and put vast millions in the hands of the railroads. Wagon caravans moved on from the railroad into the interior, many going as far as fifty, sixty, a hundred miles over a trailless desert. Homesteaders who had no money and nothing to haul, came through in dilapidated vehicles and lived in tents until they got jobs and earned money to buy lumber. A few came in automobiles. There were more cars seen in the moving caravans now.

It was not only settlers the railroads carried west now, it was tools and machinery and the vast quantities of goods needed for comfort and permanent occupation; and the increasing demand for these materials was giving extra work to factories and businesses in the East.