Land of the Burnt Thigh

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This new home was larger than the regulation shack, and it had a gable--a low-pitched roof--which in itself was a symbol of permanence in contrast to the temporary huts that dot...

It was a frontier saying that homesteading was a gamble: "Yeah, the United States Government is betting you 160 acres of land that you can't live on it eight months." Ida and I...

The land so lavishly disposed of was the white man's last raid on the Indian. The period of bloody warfare was long past. The last struggle against confiscation of Indian land w...

On October 14 the "Drawing" started. The registrations were put into sealed envelopes, tossed into boxes, shuffled up, and drawn out one at a time, numbered as they were drawn o...

When the weather grew milder and I could ride back and forth again almost daily, it was Mr. Randall who had one of the boys on the ranch wrangle me a range pony which, he said,...

But there was work to be done. Our tar-covered cabin sat parallel to and perhaps ten feet from the drop-siding print shop--a crude store building 12 × 24 feet, which we called t...

Joe Two-Hawk had come as a sort of emissary from the Brulés. They wanted us, he explained, to make Ammons an Indian trading post. Looking at the corral, we felt, to our sorrow,...

One of the first public issues the paper took up was an attack on the railroad company in regard to the old bridge spanning the Missouri River at Chamberlain. "Every time a show...

Free land! Free land! It was like the tune piped by the Pied Piper. "This is the chance for the poor man," I wrote in _The Wand_. "When the supply of free land is exhausted the...

Motion pictures ran day and night, their ballyhoo added to the outcries of the other barkers. And the registration never stopped. Clerks and others employed as assistants by the...

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 proceed...

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...

But no matter what hard luck a homesteader had or how much he had paid the government, unless he could meet the payments and all other requirements fully he lost the land and al...

But I was not a tea-cup saver by nature. Could the time and scheming of those pioneer women to save water have been utilized in some water project, it would have watered the who...

Prairie fires began to break out all around the Strip. The homesteaders began to be afraid to leave their shacks for fear they would find them gone on their return. Ammunition f...

How the fire got such a start before we detected it was a mystery. With the shack walls already burning hot and the strong wind, it had been like spontaneous combustion. Ma Wago...

Earnestly I faced him. "We aren't done," I told him. "We've just begun--badly, I know, but we can fallow. Make reservoirs. Put down artesian wells." I completely forgot, in putt...

A young man appeared who was willing to run the newspaper, and I turned the post office over to Ma Wagor. Amid the weird beating of tom-toms and the hoo-hoo ah-ah-ahhh of the In...