goods across,
and with the heavy rains that season many settlers had been delayed in
getting on their land or in getting their crops planted in time.

_The Wand_ referred to the railroad report that this was the biggest
immigration period of the state's history, with 537 carloads of
immigrant goods moved in during the first twelve days of the month. For
several years the small towns west of the Missouri had been making a
fight for a new bridge. "The Lower Brule settlers want a new bridge," I
wrote. "And if the Milwaukee does not build one we are going to do our
shipping over the Northwestern regardless of longer hauls." I had not
talked this matter over with the settlers, but they would do it, all
right.

A flea attacking an elephant! But a flea can be annoying, and we would
keep it up. I was encouraged when civic leaders of several small towns
sent for copies of the article to use in their petitions to the company.
It was the voice of the Lower Brule, and already the Lower Brule bore
weight.

In practical ways the paper also tried to serve the homesteaders,
keeping them posted on other frontier regions and the methods employed
there to bring the land into production. It made a study of crops best
adapted to the frontier; it became the Strip's bureau of information and
a medium of exchange--not only of ideas but of commodities.

In new country, where money is scarce, people resort from necessity to
the primitive method of barter, exchanging food for fuel, labor for
commodities. There is a good deal to be said in its favor, and it solved
a lot of problems in those early, penniless days.

We had started the post office mainly as a means of getting the
newspaper into circulation, and it had developed into a difficult
business of its own which required more and more of Ida Mary's time.
Friday was publication day. On Thursday we printed the paper so as to
have it ready for Friday's mail, and on Thursday night the tin
reflectors of the print-shop lamps threw their lights out for miles
across the prairie far into the night, telling a lost people the day of
the week. "It's Thursday night--the night the paper goes to press," more
than one homesteader said as he saw it.

It was a long, tedious job to print so many newspapers on a hand press
one at a time, fold and address them. It took the whole Ammons force and
a few of the neighbors to get it ready for the mail, which must meet the
McClure mail stage at noon. While one o