men keep strong and
healthy, and that our ancestors kept strong and healthy on even a
still simpler diet. Why, my father fought battles--and the mental
strain must have been terrific--and did more actual labor every day in
carrying a rifle and marching than I do in a week, and slept out doors
under a blanket--all on a diet that the average tramp of to-day would
spurn. He did this for four years and if the sanitary conditions had
been decent would have returned well and strong as many a man did who
didn't run afoul typhoid fever and malaria. Men who do such things
have something in them that the men back East have lost. I call it the
romantic spirit or the pioneer spirit and I say that a man who has it
won't care whether he's living in Maine or California and that
whatever the conditions are he will overcome them. I know that we
three would have lived on almost rice alone as the Japanese do before
we'd have cried quit. That was because we were tackling this problem
not as Easterners but as Westerners; not as poor whites but as
emigrants. Men on a ranch stand for worse things than we had and have
less of a future to dream about.

So I repeat that to my mind the house details don't count here for any
more than they did in the lives of the original New England settlers,
or the forty-niners, or those on homesteads or in Alaska to-day.
However, I'll put them in and I'll take the month of May as an
example--the first month after I was made foreman. It's fairer to give
the items for a month. They are as follows:

Oatmeal, .17
Corn meal, .10
About one tenth barrel flour, .65
Potatoes, .35
Rice, .08
Sugar, .40
White beans, .16
Pork, .20
Molasses, .10
Onions, .23
Lard, .50
Apples, .36
Soda, etc., .14
Soap, .20
Cornstarch, .10
Cocoa shells, .05
Eggs, .75
Butter, 1.12
Milk, 4.48
Meats, 1.60
Fish, .60
Oil, .20
Yeast cakes, .06
Macaroni, .09
Crackers, .06
Total $12.75

This makes an average of three dollars and nineteen cents a week. With
a fluctuation of perhaps twenty-five cents either way Ruth maintained
this pretty much throughout the year now. It fell off a little in the
summer and increased a little in the winter. It's impossible to give
any closer estimate than this. Even this month many things were used
which were left over from the week preceding and, on the other hand,
some things on this list like m