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Updated: May 20, 2025
Worse than grasshoppers; at least the grasshoppers leave, and the homesteaders appear to be here to stay." He rode off, a strange, solitary figure, topped the ridge and dropped out of sight as swiftly as he had appeared that first morning, stopping the eagle in its flight. When he had gone I turned back to my article.
It seemed to me there never was a time when at least one of the Randalls wasn't riding horseback over the prairie with an urgent message or errand for the homesteaders. Pay? Hell, no! Weren't these newcomers funny! I remember one evening in January with a storm raging. I had run to the Randalls' house from the print shop. They sent the sleigh to pick up Ida Mary and Wilomene.
The main movement over the plains was that of hauling water from the few wells in the country, or from one of two narrow creeks that twisted through the parched land and vanished into dry gulches. They were now as dry as a bone. "I'd have a well," Huey Dunn said, "if I could stop hauling water long enough to dig one." That was the situation of most of the homesteaders.
Ida and I weren't betting; we were holding on, living down to the grass roots. The big problem was no longer how to get off the homestead, but how to keep soul and body together on it. If one were in a country where he could live by foraging "We can live on jack rabbits next winter," homesteaders would say. But Ida Mary and I would have to depend on someone to get them for us.
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.
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.
If the mines were worthless, or worth only the five, ten, and three-hundred dollars that the Ring had paid the "dummy" homesteaders for each quarter section, these shifts of a hundred men at a time, and trucks and tramways would have offered a puzzle to any one but the downy-lipped youth, who had come to examine them.
Other homesteaders were ready to start out: a farmer and his wife from Wisconsin, who were busy sandwiching their four children into a wagon already filled with immigrant goods, a cow and horse tied on behind. At a long table in the fly-specked hotel dining room we ate flapjacks and fried potatoes and drank strong coffee in big heavy cups.
"This community was settled by homesteaders and pioneers in the early days of the West. Many of them came from Pennsylvania and some of them were of Scotch descent. The history of the community has been but the history of the development of a fertile Western Prairie country. It was settled by strong Presbyterian men, and their descendants are now the backbone of the community.
Of course, he had heard the chop and slash at the settlers' cabins, but homesteaders don't farm on the edge of a vertical precipice unless they are a lumber company; and logs tossed over that precipice to the River were destined for only one market, Smelter City.
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