ve 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.

Of one thing there was no doubt. The grass on the Indian lands _was_
greener than the grass on the settlers' lands. Through their land ran
the Missouri River, and they had water to spare. While the homesteaders
were famishing and their stock dy