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Updated: June 20, 2025
In another corner a rusty, two-hole oil stove stood on a drygoods box; above it another box with a shelf in it for a cupboard. Two rickety, homemade chairs completed the furnishings. We tried to tell ourselves that we were lucky; shacks were not provided for homesteaders, they had to build their own but Ida Mary had succeeded in finding one not only ready built but furnished as well.
"I understand," Horace Carey said, looking out toward the purple notches now more clearly outlined against the sky. "How this country has changed since that cold day when Mrs. Aydelot came almost to the old Crossing after me. The sand dunes narrow and the river deepens a little every year. The towns come and go on the prairies, but the homesteaders build better.
"I've got the law back of me," was what he said; and what he said was true. Around the old cow camps of the trails, and around the young settlements which did not aspire to be called cow camps, the homesteaders fenced in land so much land that there came to be no place near any of the shipping-points where a big herd from the South could be held.
Our frantic haste to arrive while the land lasted seemed absurd now. There was land enough for all who wanted it, and few enough to claim it. All that weary day we saw no people save in the distance a few homesteaders mowing strips of the short dry grass for hay. Now and then we passed a few head of horses and a cow grazing.
You'll be away maybe long before that and I'll not see anybody but Indians and cowboys from year's beginning to year's end. Oh, it will be so dreary and lonesome here!" "There's work up the river in the homesteaders' settlement, Nola; there's suffering to be relieved, and bereaved hearts to be comforted.
She trusted that it might not be that Alan Macdonald was involved in it, for it was her constant thought to hope well for that bold young man who had heaved the homesteaders' world to his shoulders and stood straining, untrusted and uncheered, under its weight. True, he had not died in defense of her glove, but she had forgiven him in her heart for that.
Homestead entry, term of residence, proof and title, all exhibited fraud on the face of the records; and there wasn't a man in the Government Service who did not know that. What unseen hand had juggled entries, title and proof through? The homesteaders had sold out long ago for a song, some for as little as ten dollars a hundred and sixty acres.
The stream of immigration was flowing in to the south and west of us, into country which was talked of as more arid and more barren than this tall grass country. The barb-wire told the story. The United States had entered an era of western development when the homesteaders not only settled the land, but moved together, acted together, to subdue the land.
The cowboys gave as reasons winter-kill, and lions, and perhaps some head stolen since the thaw. Wade emphatically denied this. Very few cattle had fallen prey to the big cats, and none, so far as he could find, had been frozen or caught in drifts. It was the young foreman who stunned them all. "Rustled," he said, darkly. "There's too many loafers and homesteaders in these hills!"
To-day, the Homesteaders are enjoying their Sunday afternoon outing along the town shore nurses pushing baby carriages, self-absorbed lovers holding hands upon riverside benches, merry-makers rowing in skiffs or crossing the river in crowded ferries; the electric cars, following either side of the stream as far down as Pittsburg, crowded to suffocation with gayly-attired folk.
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