Part 1

+-----------------------------------------------------------+ | Transcriber's Note: | | | | Inconsistent hyphenation in the original document has | | been preserved. | | | | Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. For | | a complete list, please see the end of this document. | | | +-----------------------------------------------------------+

LAND OF THE BURNT THIGH

EDITH EUDORA KOHL

Drawings by Stephen J. Voorhies

New York, London, Funk & Wagnalls Co., 1938.

TO THE MEMORY OF IDA MARY

CONTENTS

A Word of Explanation xxxiii

I A Shack on the Prairie 1

II Down to Grass Roots 16

III "Any Fool Can Set Type" 36

IV The Biggest Lottery in History 46

V No Place for Clinging Vines 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

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.