prairie to which we had come
eight months ago. Here the earth was a soft green carpet, heavily
sprinkled with spring flowers, white and lavender hyacinths, bluebells,
blossoms flaming red, yellow and blue, and snow-white, waxen flowers
that wither at the touch and yet bloom on the hard desert.

Huey Dunn squared the migratory shack and rolled the wheels from under.
And there in the Land of the Burnt Thigh, the Indians' name for the
Brule, I filed my claim and started a newspaper. The only woman, so it
was recorded, ever to establish a newspaper on an Indian reservation.
And if one were to pick up the first issues of that newspaper he would
see under the publisher's name, "Published on Section 31, Township 108
North, Range 77W, of the 5th Principal Meridian," the only way of
describing its location.

Ida's claim had seemed to us at first sight to be in the midst of
nowhere. Compared to this, it had been in a flourishing neighborhood.
For here there was nothing but the land--waiting. No sign of habitation,
no living thing--yes, an antelope standing rigid against the horizon.
For a terrified moment it seemed that there could be no future
here--only time. And Ida Mary and I shrank from two very confident young
women to two very young and frightened girls.

But there was work to be done. Our tar-covered cabin sat parallel to and
perhaps ten feet from the drop-siding print shop--a crude store building
12 x 24 feet, which we called the Brule business block. We had a side
door put on near the back end of each building so that we could slip
easily from house to shop. We did a little remodeling of our old shack.
Befitting our new position as business leaders, we built a 6 x 8
shed-roof kitchen onto the back of the shack and a clothes closet in one
end of it; we even bought a little cookstove with an oven in it.

One morning we saw a team and wagon angling across the Strip toward our
place. Upon the top of the wagon there perched a high rectangular
object, a funny-looking thing, bobbing up and down as the wagon jolted
over the rough ground. It was Harvey with the outhouse. There was
nothing left now on Ida Mary's claim but the mortgage.

Confronted suddenly by so many problems of getting started, I stood
"just plumb flabbergasted," as Coyote Cal, a cowpuncher, always remarked
when unexpectedly confronted by a group of women.

And yet I knew what I wanted to do. I had known since the day I heard
myself telling the New York b