ked the cost of hauling
altogether--in a country where everything had to be hauled. We had paid
$25 for a stiff old Indian cayuse, the cheapest thing in horseflesh that
we could find.

In order to be safe we had figured on standard prices for commodities,
but we found that all of them were much higher out here. Coal, the only
fuel obtainable, ran as high as $20 a ton, with the hauling and high
freight. Merchants blamed the freight cost for the high price of
everything from coal to a package of needles.

I laid the blame for our predicament on Huey Dunn. But Ida Mary thought
it went farther back than that. It was the fault of the government!
Women should not be allowed to file on land.

Regardless of where the blame lay, we were now reduced to a state of
self-preservation. Had not the majority of the settlers taken this
gambling chance of pulling through somehow, the West would never have
been settled.

It is curious how quickly one's animal instinct of survival comes to the
fore in primitive lands. If we ran out of bacon we stirred flour into a
little grease, added water and a few drops of condensed milk (if we had
it) and turned out a filling dish of gravy. If we ran out of coal we
pulled the dried prairie grass to burn in the little two-hole monkey
stove, which we had bought with the cot. Laundry stoves, some called
them.

To keep the water from becoming warm as dishwater we dug a hole in the
ground to set the water can in. The earth became so cool at night that
anything set down in a shallow hole on the shady side of the house kept
cool all day.

We learned that it took twice as long to cook beans or other vegetables
in that high altitude; that one must put more flour in the cake and not
so much shortening or it would surely fall; that meat hung in the dry
air would keep fresh indefinitely--but we had not tasted a bite of fresh
meat since we came.

Our homestead not only had a cabin, but it boasted a small patch of
sweet corn planted by the first filer on the land. It would make food
for both man and beast--for the Ammons girls and the pinto.

It was a frontier saying that homesteading was a gamble: "Yeah, the
United States Government is betting you 160 acres of land that you can't
live on it eight months." Ida and I weren't betting; we were holding
on, living down to the grass roots. The big problem was no longer how to
get off the homestead, but how to keep soul and body together on it.

If one were in