Land Of The Burnt Thigh: A Lively Story of Women Homesteaders On The South Dakota Frontier

VI

= .:.-~ ..=--==.-. ~~~::f-~-='-=='- :: -- .•-- -. VI "UTOPIA" WITH the first tang of spring in the air we cleaned the shack, put up fresh curtains and did a little baking. Then we grew reckless and went into an orgy of extravagance-we took a bath in the washtub. Wash basins were more commensurate with the water supply. Then we scrubbed the floor with the bath water. In one way and another, the settlers managed to develop a million square miles of frontier dirt without a bathtub on it. For the first time we stopped to take stock, to look ahead. For months there had been time and energy for nothing but getting through the winter. We had been too busy to discuss any plans beyond the proving up. 83 84 LAND OF THE BURNT THIGH "What are we going to do after we prove up?" I asked, and Ida Mary shook her head. "I don't know," she admitted. In some ways it was a relief to have the end in sight. I hated the minute routine of putting a paper together, with one letter of type at a time. I hated the hard mechanical work. Most of our neighbors were proving up, going back. But we realized, with a little shock of surprise, that we did not want to go back. Imperceptibly we had come to identify ourselves with the West; we were a part of its life, it was a part of us. Its hardships were more than compensated for by its unshackled freedom. To go back now would be to make a painful readjustment to city life; it would mean hunting jobs, being tied to the weariness of office routine. The opportunities for a full and active life were infinitely greater here on the prairie. There was a pleasant glow of possession in knowing that the land beneath our feet was ours. For a little while we faced uncertainly the problem that other homesteaders were facing-that of going back, of trying to fit ourselves in again to city ways. But the eagerness to return to city life had gone. Then, too, there was something in the invigorating winter air and bright sunshine which had given me new resistance. There had been a continuous round of going down, and coming back with a second wind; but I had gained a little each time and was stronger now than before. In the midafternoon, after our orgy of spring housecleaning , with everything fresh and clean, Ida Mary said, "Someone is coming-straight across our land." "Who is it?" I asked. We had learned to recognize every "UTOPIA" 85 horse in that part of the country a mile away. But this was not a plainsman. We rushed into the shack and made a mad scramble through the trunk, but before we could get dressed there came a knock at the door. "Will you wait a moment, please?" I called. It was the custom of the plains for a man to wait outside while his hostess dressed or put her house in order, there being no corner where he could stay during the process. If the weather prohibited outdoor waiting, he could retire to the hayshed. A pleasant voice said, ''I'll be glad to wait." But as I whispered, "Throw me those slippers," and Ida Mary said sotto voce, "What dress shall I wear?" we heard a muffled chuckle through the thin walls. When we threw open the door to a slightly built man with brown hair and a polished air about him, I knew it was the cartoonist from Milwaukee. Only a city man and an artist could look like that. "How do you do, Mr. Van Leshout." "How did you know?" he said, as he came in. "So you were a Lucky Number, after all," seemed a more appropriate response than telling him that it was spring and something had been bound to happen, something like the arrival of a cartoonist from Milwaukee. "Are you going to be a settler?" Ida Mary asked doubtfully . He laughed. Yes, he had taken a homestead close to the Sioux settlement so that he could paint some Indian pictures . Odd how we kept forgetting the Indians, but up to now 86 LAND OF THE BURNT THIGH we hadn't even seen one, nor were we likely to, we thought, barricaded as they were in their own settlement. "But they are wonderful," he assured us enthusiastically...