aid, "but damn poor homesteaders.
Beats the devil the kind of people that are taking up land. Can't
develop a country with landowners like that. Those girls want to go
home. Already. I said you wanted 'em to come over to dinner tomorrow
noon. Maybe you can fix up something kinda special."

"I'll drop a few extra spuds into the pot and bake a pan of
cornbread--they'll eat it," Mrs. Dunn predicted cheerfully. She was
right.

Bringing us back to the claim the next afternoon Huey suddenly
remembered that he had promised a neighbor to help string barb-wire the
following day. But--sure--he could take us to town 'most any day after
that.

The next day we began to discover the women who were living on
homesteads and who, in their own way, played so vital a part in
developing the West. One of our nearest neighbors--by straining our eyes
we could see her little shack perched up against the horizon--put on her
starched calico dress and gingham apron and came right over to call. The
Widow Fergus, she said she was.

She sat down, laid her big straw hat on the floor beside her (no, just
let it lie there--she always threw it off like that) and made herself
comfortable. Her graying hair, parted in the middle and done up in a
knot in the back, was freshly and sleekly combed. She was brown as a
berry and just the type of hard-working woman to make a good
homesteader, with calloused, capable, tireless hands. She was round,
bustling and kind. The Widow Fergus had taken up a homestead with her
young son.

She looked at the unopened baggage, the dirty shack. Now that was
sensible, she said, to rest a few days--it was so nice and quiet out
here. Homesick? My, no. There was no time to get homesick. Too much to
do getting by on a homestead. Women like the Widow Fergus, we were to
discover, had no time for self-pity or lamenting their rigorous, hard
lives. They did not, indeed, think in terms of self-pity. And they
managed, on the whole, to live rich, satisfying lives and at the same
time to prepare the way for easier, pleasanter lives for the women who
were to follow them.

When she left she said, "Now, come over, girls, and anything you want,
let me know...."

A little later that same day we saw three riders galloping across the
plains, headed straight for our shack. They stopped short, swung off
their ponies, three girl homesteaders.

They rode astride, wore plain shirtwaists and divided skirts. Two of
them wore cheap straw hats m