led information, facts
and figures to help us prepare for what was to come, we got only printed
pamphlets of rules and regulations which were of no real help at all.
Land Offices were so busy in those days that all they could do was to
send out a package of printed information that no one could understand.

Armed with our meager array of facts, we talked to our father--as though
the information we gave him so glibly had any real bearing on this
precarious undertaking of his two young daughters. Whatever his doubts
and hesitations, he let us decide for ourselves; it was only when we
boarded the old Bald Eagle at St. Louis one summer day in 1907, bound up
the river, that he clung to our hands as though unable to let us go,
saying, "I'm afraid you are making a mistake. Take care of yourselves."

"It will be all right," Ida Mary told him cheerfully. "It is only for
eight months. Nothing can happen in eight months."

The first emergency arose almost at once. We started up the Mississippi
in high spirits, but by the time we reached Moline, Illinois, I was
taken from the boat on a stretcher--the aftermath of typhoid fever. It
was bad enough to be ill, it was worse to have an unexpected drain on
our funds, but worst of all was the fear that someone might file on the
claim ahead of us. For a week or ten days I could not travel, but Ida
Mary went ahead to attend to the land-filing and the buying of supplies
so that we could start for the homestead as soon as I arrived.

The trip from Moline to Pierre I made by train. Ida Mary was at the
depot to meet me, and at once we took a ferry across the river to Ft.
Pierre. The river was low and the ever-shifting sandbars rose up to meet
the skiffs. Ft. Pierre was a typical frontier town, unkempt and
unfinished, its business buildings, hotel and stores, none of more than
two stories, on the wide dirt road called Main Street. At one end of
Main Street flowed the old Missouri, at the other it branched off into
trails that lost themselves in the prairie.

Beyond Main Street the houses of the little town were scattered, looking
raw and new and uncomfortable, most of them with small, sunburned,
stunted gardens. But there was nothing apologetic about Ft. Pierre.
"We've done mighty well with what we've had to work with," was its
attitude.

Section 18, Range 77W--about thirty miles from Pierre. It seemed more
real now. The hotel proprietor promised to find us a claim locator to
whom that cryp