Part 44

She was right, of course. I began to see what this trek back en masse would mean. What if the land horde went marching back? Tens of thousands of them milling about, homeless, penniless, jobless. Many of them had been in that position when they had stampeded the frontier, looking to the land for security. With these broad areas deserted, what would become of the trade and business; of the new railroads and other developments just beginning their expansion?

We were harder hit than most districts by the lack of water, but if that obstacle could be solved the Brulé had other things in its favor. The words of the Register came back to me: "Don't start an emigration movement."

The Wand came out with an editorial called, "Beyond the State Line, What?" It was based on Ida Mary's terse comment, "Back to the wife's kinfolk," and concluded with my own views of the economic disaster which such a general exodus would cause.

It took hold. Settlers who were ready to close their shacks behind them paused to look ahead--beyond the state line. And they discovered that their best chance was to fight it out where they were--if only they could be shown how to get water.

No trees. No shade. Hot winds sweeping as though from a furnace. And what water one had so hot and stale that it could not quench thirst.

We could ask our neighbors to share their last loaf of bread, but it was a bold, selfish act to ask for water. I have seen a gallon bucket of drinking water going down; have seen it get to the last pint; have held the hot liquid in my mouth as long as possible before swallowing it.

The distances to water were so long that many times we found it impossible, with all the work we had on hand, to make the trip; so we would save every drop we could, not daring to cook anything which required water.

One of the girl homesteaders came over with an incredible tale to tell. She had visited one of the settlers outside the reservation gate who had a real well. And his wife had rinsed the dishes when she washed them.

Ma prophesied that she would suffer for that.

Heine said one day, "My Pa don't wanta leave. We ain't got no moneys to take us, Pa says."

There were many families in the same position. Get out? Where? How?

One day when Chris Christopherson came in I asked him why he thought the water supply would be better in a year or so.

"We can dig better dams. If they bane twice so big this year, they be full now from the snows and rains. We would yet have water plenty."

"We could dig cisterns, couldn't we?"

"Cost money, but not so much like deep wells. Trouble bane we not have money yet nor time to make ready so many t'ings."

"Some of the farmers say," I told him, "that when we cultivate large areas, loosening the soil for moisture absorption, they will be able to get surface wells, especially in the draws. They say the tall, heavy grass absorbs the surface and underground water."

Chris nodded thoughtfully. "Water will be more comin' in time," he declared. "The more land plowed, the more moisture will go down in the soil. It all the time costs more money to move and settle yet than to stay where you are. And nobody knows what he find somewhere else again."

And we got thirstier and thirstier. "I've got to have a drink," I would wail.

"You'll get over it," Ma would assure me.

But we did not always get over it. I remember trying to go to bed without a drink one night and thinking I could not stand it until morning. In the middle of the night I woke Ida Mary.

"I'm so thirsty I can't stand it any longer."

"Let's hitch up and go for some water."

So off we went in the middle of the night, driving over to McClure, where we drank long and long at the watering troughs.

With few water holes left, some of the settlers went over the border, hauling water from outside--from McClure, even from Presho, when they went to town. Somehow they got enough to keep them from perishing.

Men cleaned out their dams "in case it should rain." But there was no sign of the drought breaking. Except for the early matured crops, the fields were burned; the later crops were dwarfed. Our spirits fell as we looked at our big field of flax which had given such promise. Seed which had had no rain lay in the ground unsprouted. Some of the farmers turned their surplus stock loose to forage for themselves.

Public-spirited men like Senator Scotty Phillips and Ben Smith, a well-to-do rancher living four miles from the settlement, dug down into the bowels of the earth for water. Ben Smith went down 1200 feet. There was no sign of water. Despondency gripped the people. "You can dig clear to hell and you won't find water," one of them declared.

"All right, boys," Ben Smith told them, "dig to hell if you have to, and don't mind the cost." Slowly the drill bored on down the dry hole. Ben Smith's Folly, they called it.

The Wand urged the people to put their resources together--water, food, everything--so that they might keep going until water was found or until--it rained. Today pooling is a common method of farm marketing. We have great wheat pools, milk pools, and many others. At that time there were cooperative pools in a few places, although I had never heard of one, nor of a farm organization. But it was the pooling system that was needed to carry on.