64

VI "Utopia" 83

VII Building Empires Overnight 99

VIII Easy as Falling Off a Log 120

IX The Opening of the Rosebud 143

X The Harvest 164

XI The Big Blizzard 185

XII A New America 199

XIII The Thirsty Land 214

XIV The Land of the Burnt Thigh 238

XV Up in Smoke 253

XVI Fallowed Land 268

XVII New Trails 282

[Illustration]

A WORD OF EXPLANATION

_I have not attempted in this book to write an autobiography. This is
not my story--it is the story of the people, the present-day pioneers,
who settled on that part of the public lands called the Great American
Desert, and wrested a living from it at a personal cost of privation and
suffering._

_Today there is an infinite deal of talk about dust bowls, of prairie
grass which should never have been plowed under for farming, of land
which should be abandoned. Yet much of this is the land which during the
crucial years of the war was the grain-producing section of the United
States. Regiments of men have marched to war with drums beating and
flags flying, but the regiments who marched into the desert, and faced
fire and thirst, and cold and hunger, and who stayed to build up a new
section of the country, a huge empire in the West, have been ignored,
and their problems largely misunderstood._

_The history of the homesteaders is paradoxical, beginning as it does in
the spirit of a great gamble, with the government lotteries with land as
the stakes, and developing in a close-knit spirit of mutual
helpfulness._

_My own part in so tremendous a migration of a people was naturally a
slight one, but for me it has been a rewarding adventure, leading men
and women onto the land, then against organized interests, and finally
into the widespread use of cooperative methods. Most of that story
belongs beyond the confines of the present book._

_Over thousands of acres today in the West men and women are still
fighting to control that last frontier, and