Part 20

"I didn't. A New York broker told me."

We had to find some way to get mail in and out. We couldn't back up on the trail, once we had started. There was no place to back to. So we bought a team and started a U. S. mail route, hauling mail three times a week from the stage line at McClure.

It was the thing that had to be done, but sometimes, when we had a moment for reflection, we were a little aghast. Carrying a mail route in homestead country was a far cry from life in St. Louis. It began to seem as though we rarely acted according to plan out here; rather, we were acted upon by unforeseen factors, so that our activities were constantly shifting, taking on new form, leading in new directions. The only consistent thing about them was that they never back-trailed!

Now and then we hired boys to help us with heavy jobs which were beyond our strength, and occasionally a young prairie girl, Ada Long, fourteen years old, went for the mail. It was against the law to let anyone who happened to be handy carry the mail, but the settlers had to have postal service.

Ada was fair, with long yellow braids, strong and accustomed to the hard ways of the prairie. She could hitch up a team and drive it like a man. There was only one drawback to Ada. On Saturday when we were busiest she went home and to church; and on Sunday she hung out the washing. Ada was a loyal Adventist.

Settlers meeting on the trail hailed one another with "Hello! Where you from? I'm from Illinois"--or Virginia--or Iowa. "You breakin'?" They had no time for backgrounds. It didn't matter what the newcomers might have been. That was left beyond the reservation gate. One's standing was measured by what he could do and what kind of neighbor he would make. And always the question, "Where you from?" Missouri, Michigan, Wisconsin.

Bronco Benny, riding through one day, said, "I never seen so many gals in my life. Must be a trainload of 'em. Some pretty high-headed fillies among 'em, too." Bronco Benny knew no other language than that of the horse world in which he lived.

Not only dirt farmers but many others became sodbreakers. The sod was heavy, and with the great growth of grass it took all the strength of man and teams, four to six horses hitched to a plow, to turn it. Steady, slow, furrow by furrow, man and beast dripping with sweat, they broke fields of the virgin earth.

How deep to plow, how to cultivate this land, few of them knew. The more experienced farmers around the Strip, like Huey Dunn, would know. Here was a service the newspaper could perform by printing such information for the newcomers. Subscriptions for the paper began coming in before we were ready to print it. We named it The Reservation Wand, and how it ever was accepted in that man's country with a name like that is beyond me. The first issue was distributed by homesteaders passing by and two carriers.

Subscriptions came in rapidly at a dollar a year. Not only did most of the settlers subscribe, but they put in subscriptions for friends and relatives, so that these might know something of the country and its activities. And in their rush of getting settled it was easier to have the printer set up the news and run it off on a press than to take the time to write a letter. Outsiders could not send in subscriptions by mail until the newspaper had an address other than a section number of the claim on which it was printed.

Food, shelter, fuel were still the pressing problems. An army had peopled a land without provisions. Trade was overwhelmed and the small towns could not get supplies shipped in fast enough. New business enterprises were following this rush as lightning does a lightning rod. There was bedlam. One could not get a plowshare sharpened, a bolt, or a bushel of coal without making the long trip to town. One could not get a pound of coffee or a box of matches on the whole reservation.

The settlers began to clamor for a store in connection with the newspaper and the post office. Their needs ran more to coffee and sugar and nails than to newspapers. They had to have a store for a few essential commodities at least.

A store? I objected strenuously. We had already embarked on enough enterprises, and running a store had no place among them. But practical Ida was really interested in the project. It wasn't such a bad idea, she decided. Our money was dwindling, the newspaper would not become a paying proposition for some time, and the only revenue from the post office was the meager cancellation of stamps.

We could hire the hauling done, she pointed out, grappling at once with the details. And it would be a real service to the settlers. That was what we had wanted to provide--the means didn't matter so much.

So we planked down a cash payment at a wholesale-retail store at Presho for a bill of goods, got credit for the rest of it, threw up an ell addition on the back of the shop for the newspaper, and stuck a grocery store where the newspaper had been.

All this time we had been so submerged in activities connected with getting settled, starting and operating a newspaper, a post office, and now a store, that we had overlooked a rather important point--that on an Indian reservation one might reasonably expect Indians. We had forgotten the Indians.

And one afternoon they came. On horseback and in wagons, war bonnets and full regalia glittering in the sun, the Indians were coming straight toward the Ammons settlement. Neither of us had ever seen an Indian outside of a Wild West show.

We were terrified. Into the shack we scurried, locked doors and windows, and peeped out through a crack in the drawn blind.

The Indians had stopped and turned their horses loose to graze. We could hear them walking around the store and print shop--and then came savage mutterings outside our door and heavy pounding. We crawled under the bed. A woman we knew had escaped being scalped once by hiding behind a shock of corn. But there was no such refuge here.

"How! How kill 'em?" an old Indian was bellowing. No use trying to escape. This was the end.

Trembling, hearts pounding, we opened the door. Two big savage-looking creatures with battered faces stood there motioning toward the shop where a group of them were sauntering in and out.

"How kill 'em?" they still muttered. Dazed, we followed them. They had taken possession of the shop. Women were sitting on the floor, some with papooses strapped to their backs. Men with hair hanging loose, or braided down their backs, tied with red string, were picking up everything in the print shop, playing like children with new toys.

They led us into the store, muttering, "Shu-hum-pah; she-la," as they pointed to the shelves. At last we found they wanted sugar and tobacco, and we lost no time in filling the order.

At sunset they rode away toward the Indian settlement, and we discovered that we had been misled by the talk of "segregation." To us that had meant that the Indians were behind some high barricade. But there wasn't a thing to separate us from the tribe but another barb-wire fence, with the gates down.

For several days after the red men came we moved in a nightmare of fear. The Sioux had cherished this tall grass country as a hunting ground, and we had invaded it. Suppose they were intent upon revenge!

Then, absorbed in our many duties, we almost forgot about the Indians. But a week after their first visit they came again. They arrived shortly before sundown, adorned in beads and feathers, stopped across the trail, and to our horror pitched camp. Pinto commenced to neigh and kept it up, a restless whinny, eager for his own people.

It looked as though the whole Sioux tribe had moved over to Ammons. While the men unhitched and unsaddled, the squaws--for the most part large shapeless creatures totally unlike the slim Indian maid of fiction, and indescribably dirty--started small fires with twigs they had brought with them. By now Ma Wagor, the gray-haired woman from Blue Springs, was in the store every day, helping out, and she was as terrified as Ida and I. It seems there were no Indians in Blue Springs. They were among the few contingencies for which Ma Wagor was not amply prepared.

By chance a strange cowboy came through about sundown and stopped for a package of tobacco. While he dexterously rolled a cigarette with one hand we surrounded him, three panic-stricken women. Did he think the Indians were on the war path, we asked, our teeth chattering.