he winter
already in progress.

Never had a raw primitive land seen such progress in so short a time.
And _The Wand_ had played a substantial part in this development. It was
swamped with letters of inquiry.

Fall was roundup time on the range. The Indian lands were so
far-reaching that there were no nearby ranches, but the herds ranged
over miles of territory around us.

And across the fence, on the unceded strip, the great herds of Scotty
Phillips's outfit roamed over his own and the Indians' holdings. Across
the plains came the ceaseless bawling of thousands of cows and calves
being separated. That wild, mad, pitiful bawling rent the air and could
be heard through the stillness of night for miles around, and the
yelling and whooping of cowboys, the stamping of cow ponies and herds,
the chanting and tom-toms of the Indians.

And enveloping it all, the infinite plains, unmoved, undisturbed by all
that was taking place upon them.

So the homesteaders gathered their first harvest, and the goose hung
high. There was hay--great stacks and ricks of it. Piles of yellow corn
stacked like hay in barbed-wire enclosures or in granaries. To
commemorate that first golden harvest, the pilgrims of the Lower Brule
celebrated their first Thanksgiving.

Seeing the stacks of grain that stood ready for threshing or for feeding
in the straw, old man Husmann pointed to the field. "Mein Gott in
Himmel! Vat I tell you? Das oats made t'irty bushels an acre. And flax.
Mein Gott! She grow on raw land like hair on a hog's back. Back in Ioway
we know notings about flax for sod crop." Dakota taught the United
States that flax was the ideal sod crop.

The average yield of oats with late and slipshod sowing had been around
fifteen bushels to the acre. Some fields of spring wheat had run fifteen
bushels. And potatoes had fairly cracked the ground open. One settler,
an experienced potato grower, had four acres that yielded 300 bushels.
_The Wand_ played that up in headlines for easterners to see.

Late-ripened melons lay on the ground, green and yellow--watermelons,
muskmelons, golden pumpkins ready for the Thanksgiving pie. Over the
Strip women and children were gathering them in against a sudden freeze.
The reservation fairly subsisted on melons that fall. Before the harvest
the rations had been getting slim, with the settlers' money and food
supply running low.

Women dried corn, made pumpkin butter and watermelon pickles, and put up
ch