aw new, crude houses thrown
up, saw the first furrows broken in the stubborn soil, saw men and women
pit themselves against the frontier and shape it to their purpose and
their needs.

Among these people there were many more dirt farmers than had settled
around McClure, but at least 50 per cent of the immigrants were young
men and women from various walks of life, business and professions, who
had come for health or adventure; or because the land, through sale or
mortgage, would give them a start in life. While it is doubtless true
that these latter contributed little to the permanent building of the
West, the zest with which they enjoyed its advantages, the gallantry
with which they faced its hardships, contributed no small part to
increasing the morale of the settlers as a whole.

Almost every settler scooped out a dam at the foot of a slope for water
supply. We had Chris Christopherson plow one for us. These dams were
nothing but waterholes twelve to fifteen feet in diameter and two or
three feet deep. There should be late spring rains to fill them for the
summer. There were! While the settlers were still plowing and planting
and making their dams it began to rain. And when the frontier is wet,
it's wet all over. Dry creeks swelled to overflowing, and small ravines
became creeks, and it kept on raining. Both Ida Mary and I were caught
in one of those downpours and had to swim the horses across swift-rising
Cedar Creek.

Much of those first days were like chapters from Genesis, and to add to
the similarity we now had the Flood! The seed shot out of the ground and
the fields were green. The gardens grew like Jack's beanstalk. The thick
grass stood a foot high. And the dams were full of water.

And Ida Mary and I were literally in the center of this maze of
activity, this mushroom growth of a country. And Ammons was actually on
the map!

My sister wrote to the Postal Department for a mail carrier and found
out she would have to solve that problem for herself.

"We aren't cut out to cope with the plains," I said.

"How did you happen to find that out?" asked Ida Mary.

"I didn't. A New York broker told me."

We had to find some way to get mail in and out. We couldn't back up on
the trail, once we had started. There was no place to back to. So we
bought a team and started a U. S. mail route, hauling mail three times a
week from the stage line at McClure.

It was the thing that had to be done, but sometimes, wh