rriage, would eke out a bare
existence. And, as Ma Wagor complained, the Brule was becoming so
settled "it would be havin' a Ladies Aid before long with the women
servin' tea and carryin' callin' cards around." That would be no place
for me.

For a long time I sat gazing out of the window over the open spaces.
What would this mean to the people whom I was to bring west? It was
they, not I nor any other individual, whose future must be weighed. The
tidal wave of western immigration would reach its crest in the next two
or three years, and break over Wyoming, Montana, Colorado--those states
bordering the Great Divide. It was to reach its high peak in 1917, when
the United States entered the World War.

I remembered the shaking hands, the faces of the men and women who had
lost at the Rosebud Drawing. There was still land for them. Land of
their own for tenant farmers, land for the homeless. The Land of a
Million Shacks--that was the slogan of the frontier.

"Where is this land?" I asked, finally.

"In Wyoming. Across the Dakota-Nebraska line. Reaching into the Rawhide
Country," Mr. West explained.

Rawhide country. Lost Trail. "A short-grass range, but rich," Lone Star
had said--"an honest-to-God country, bigger'n all creation."

I turned to Mr. West and faced him squarely. "Has it got water?"

He smiled at the sudden vehemence of the question and was ready for it.
"Yes, it has water. The finest in the world." Water clear and cold, he
told me, could be obtained at two to three hundred feet on almost any
spot. Out on the scattered ranches, in the middle of the range, one
found windmills pumping all day long. There would be plenty of water for
stock and for irrigating small patches.

"All right," I said, "I'll go."

The cartoonist was going back to Milwaukee. "Being here has done
something for me," he said. "Seeing so much effort given ungrudgingly
for small results, I think. I'm going back and do something with my art.
But it's odd--I don't really want to go back."

One by one the prove-up-and-run settlers had left the country, but Huey
Dunn, Chris Christopherson and others like them were learning to meet
the country on its own terms and conquer it. They were there to stay.

A young man appeared who was willing to run the newspaper, and I turned
the post office over to Ma Wagor. Amid the weird beating of tom-toms and
the hoo-hoo ah-ah-ahhh of the Indians across the trail, I set up my
farewell message in _The W