Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 15, 2025
Once when I was too ill to leave Presho and we stayed for the night in a little frame hotel, Doc Newman came in to look me over. "Do you girls get enough nourishing food?" he asked. "We eat up all the store profits," lamented Ida Mary. He laughed. "Keep on eating them up. And slow down." Pioneer women, old and new, went through many hardships and privations.
I was off to Presho to meet the proof-sheet king. E. L. Senn was a magnate in the frontier newspaper field. His career is particularly interesting because it is, in more ways than one, typical of the qualities which made many western men successful.
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.
Real estate dealers of Presho, Pierre, and other small towns looked to the Brulé as a plum, trying to list relinquishments there for their customers. But I got the bulk of the business! One of the handy men around the place sawed boards and made an extra table with rows of pigeonholes on it, and we installed this in the back end of the print shop for the heavy land-office business.
It had been worth while, because the end of the road was in sight and we had accomplished much that we had hoped to do more, in some respects. It was unbearably hot that morning, and we decided against the trip to Presho. After all, one more day wouldn't matter, and the sun was so scorching we quailed at the thought of that long ride.
Others poured in by every conceivable means of transportation, invading the little frontier town, the only spot of civilization in the vast, bare stretch of plains. Presho woke to find a great drove of tenderfeet stampeding down its little Main Street. They thundered down the board sidewalk and milled in the middle of the road, kicking up dust like a herd of range cattle as they went.
On a Sunday night in early October, 1908, I stood on a corner of the dark main street of Presho waiting for the Rosebud to open. I had appointed agents to handle my postcards and I was free to cover the story. Special trains loaded with landseekers were coming. The confusion of last-minute preparations to receive them was at its height. I found Presho as mad as a hornet.
"It looks as though the Ammons venture is going under," people were beginning to say. I went to Presho and the small towns near by, and, somewhat to my own surprise, succeeded in getting more advertising for The Wand. But it wasn't enough. One night I came home, determined that something must be done. The whole arrangement seemed to me unfair to Ida Mary.
There was no time to plan, no time in which to wonder how one was to get things done. The important thing was to keep doing them. On the whole Strip there was not a vacant quarter-section. Already a long beaten trail led past the print-shop door north and south from Pierre to Presho; another crossed the reservation east and west from McClure to the Indian tepees and the rangeland beyond.
Sedgwick would open his eyes when we walked into the bank with that bag of money. We planned to go to Presho that day. It was hardly safe to have so much money in the shack, and we were eager to put it in a safe place. It represented months of planning and effort and hard work. But the labor didn't seem bad to look back on that morning, not with the reward at hand.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking