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Updated: May 15, 2025
The commodities handled at the store had increased from coffee and matches to innumerable supplies. The faithful team, Fan and Bill, were kept on the road most of the time. We made business trips to Presho and Pierre. Help was not always available, and there could be no waste movements in a wasteland.
Slim and straight and absurdly small, in trim shirt waists, big sombreros tilted over our heads, we bounced along on the wagon, trying to look as mature and dignified as our position of business women demanded. "Those are the two Brulé girls who launched an attack on the Milwaukee railroad," Presho people remarked. "Well, I'll be damned!"
And that led, logically enough, to Ida Mary's being appointed a notary public. "Want to sell your land, girls?" a man from Presho asked us one day. "That's what I drove out for. I have a buyer anxious to get a claim on the Brulé and I believe he would pay $1200 for this relinquishment. A quick profit." "Sell? No!" we declared.
"Move on," came the endless chant. "Move on!" It didn't matter where, so long as they kept moving, making way for new mobs of restless people. "Move on!" Wires were clicking with news from the other registration points. Presho, to its fury, couldn't compare with some of the other towns. The little town of Dallas had gone stark mad.
In the fight he sunk his own profits until he had to sell most of his newspapers, emerging from it almost penniless. It was this doughty warrior whose printing press I had strewn widely over the prairie. When he entered the hotel in Presho where I was awaiting him my courage almost failed me. He was wise enough not to ask me what was wrong.
With few water holes left, some of the settlers went over the border, hauling water from outside from McClure, even from Presho, when they went to town. Somehow they got enough to keep them from perishing. Men cleaned out their dams "in case it should rain." But there was no sign of the drought breaking. Except for the early matured crops, the fields were burned; the later crops were dwarfed.
I boarded a returning special which was packed like a freight train full of range cattle, men and women travel-stained, tired and hollow-eyed, but geared up by hope. I got off at Chamberlain. The rumors had been correct. That seething mob at Presho was only the spray cast by the tidal wave. At Chamberlain long, heavily loaded trains pulled in and out.
Remembering the money I had made with the little verses printed on a postcard at the Brulé Opening, I prepared another on the Rosebud, with the cartoonist from Milwaukee helping me by making drawings to illustrate it. Then, armed with the postcards, I set off for Presho and the Rosebud.
The settlers came that day with their widow's mite of food and clothes; the women's clothing too large, the children's too small. But it covered us after a fashion. The store at Presho sent out a box of supplies. Coyote Cal and Sourdough rode up. "Beats tarnation, now don't it," Coyote Cal consoled us. "I told you this country wasn't fit for nothin' but cowhands," growled Sourdough.
The Rosebud had been opened up and swallowed by the advancing wave of people westward. But there was more land! Fred Farraday drove me home from Presho, weary to the bone, and content to ride without speaking, listening to the steady clop-clop of the horses over that quiet road on which we did not meet a human being. And in my pocketbook $400, the proceeds from the sale of the postcards.
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