between our father's home--he had married
again and had a second family to take care of--and the home of his
sister. As a result my sister and I came to depend on ourselves and on
each other more than two girls of our age usually do.

By the time we were old enough to see that things were not going well
financially at home, we knew we must make our own way. Some of the girls
we knew talked about "going homesteading" as a wild adventure. They
boasted of friends or relatives who had gone to live on a claim as
though they had gone lion-hunting in Africa or gold-hunting in Alaska. A
homestead. At first thought the idea was absurd. We were both very
young; both unusually slight, anything but hardy pioneers; and neither
of us had the slightest knowledge of homesteading conditions, or
experience extending beyond the conventional, sheltered life of the
normal city girl in the first decade of the century.

We were wholly unfitted for the frontier. We had neither training nor
physical stamina for roughing it. When I tried to explain to an uncle of
mine that I wanted to go west, to make something of myself, he retorted
that "it was a hell of a place to do it." In spite of the discussion
which our decision occasioned, we made our plans, deciding to risk the
hazards of a raw country alone, cutting ourselves off from the world of
everyone and everything we had ever known. And with little money to
provide against hardships and emergencies.

At that time the country was emerging from the era of straggling
settlers. Immigration was moving west in a steady stream. The tidal wave
which swept the West from 1908 to the World War was almost upon us
although we could not see it then. But, we thought, there would be new
people, new interests, and in the end 160 acres of land for Ida Mary.
Perhaps for me the health I had sought so unsuccessfully.

Primarily a quarter-section of land was the reason for almost everyone
coming west. As people in the early pioneer days had talked of settling
in Nebraska and Kansas and the eastern Dakotas, they now talked about
the country lying farther on--the western Dakotas, Wyoming, Montana,
Colorado. Over the Midwest the homestead idea was spreading rapidly to
farm and hamlet and city. One heard a great deal about families leaving
their farms and going west to get cheap land; of young college men who
went out to prove up a quarter-section. The land would always be worth
something, and the experience, even f