ack dwellers lived out of tin cans like city
apartment dwellers.

But for the most part the land was inhabited by coyotes and prairie
dogs, with a few herds of range sheep and cattle. Few of the
homesteaders were permanent. They stayed their eight months--if they
could stick it out--and left at once. Their uneasy stay on the land was
like the brief pause of migratory birds or the haphazard drifting of
tumble weeds that go rolling across the plains before the wind, landing
against a barbed-wire fence or any other object that blocked their way.

The empty shacks reminded one of the phantom towns which men had thrown
up breathlessly and abandoned when the search for gold had proved
illusory. Only permanency could dig the gold of fertility from the
prairie, and thus far the people who had made a brief attempt to cope
with it had been in too much of a hurry. Those abandoned
quarter-sections had defeated the men who would have taken them.

The main movement over the plains was that of hauling water from the few
wells in the country, or from one of two narrow creeks that twisted
through the parched land and vanished into dry gulches. They were now as
dry as a bone.

"I'd have a well," Huey Dunn said, "if I could stop hauling water long
enough to dig one." That was the situation of most of the homesteaders.

Most of these migratory homesteaders wanted the land as an
investment--to own it and sell it to some eastern farmer or to a
rancher. Some, like Huey Dunn, came to make a permanent home and till
the land. These few dirt farmers raised patches of corn, and while the
farmers from Iowa and Illinois were scornful of the miniature stalks,
the flavor of the sweet corn grown on the dry sod was unsurpassed. The
few patches of potatoes were sweet and mealy. But the perfect sod crop
was flax. Already the frontier was becoming known for its flax raising.

We saw no large range herds, though there were no herd laws to keep them
off private property. One could drive straight as the crow flies from
Pierre to Presho, forty or fifty miles, without stopping to open a gate.
If one struck a fence around a quarter-section here or there he either
got out and cut the wire in two, or drove around the corner of the
fence, depending upon how he felt about fences being in the way.

No wonder sheep-herders went crazy, we thought, swallowed up by that sea
of brown, dry grass, by the endless monotony of space.

I think what struck us most those