ut with
little result. My letters written from the border line did not inspire
confidence in the School Boards of "the East." Then winter came.

Winter! No man knows what winter means until he has lived through one in
a pine-board shanty on a Dakota plain with only buffalo bones for fuel.
There were those who had settled upon this land, not as I had done with
intent to prove up and sell, but with plans to make a home, and many of
these, having toiled all the early spring in hope of a crop, now at the
beginning of winter found themselves with little money and no coal. Many
of them would have starved and frozen had it not been for the buffalo
skeletons which lay scattered over the sod, and for which a sudden
market developed. Upon the proceeds of this singular harvest they almost
literally lived. Thus "the herds of deer and buffalo" did indeed
strangely "furnish the cheer."

As for Charles and myself, we also returned to Ordway and there spent a
part of each month, brooding darkly over the problem of our future. I
already perceived the futility of my return to the frontier. The
mysterious urgings of a vague yet deep-seated longing to go east
rendered me restless, sour and difficult. I saw nothing before me, and
yet my hard experiences in Wisconsin and in New England made me hesitate
about going far. Teaching a country school seemed the only thing I was
fitted for, and there shone no promise of that.

Furthermore, like other pre-emptors I was forced to hold my claim by
visiting it once every thirty days, and these trips became each time
more painful, more menacing. February and March were of pitiless
severity. One blizzard followed another with ever-increasing fury. No
sooner was the snow laid by a north wind than it took wing above a
southern blast and returned upon us sifting to and fro until at last its
crystals were as fine as flour, so triturated that it seemed to drive
through an inch board. Often it filled the air for hundreds of feet
above the earth like a mist, and lay in long ridges behind every bush or
weed. Nothing lived on these desolate uplands but the white owl and the
wolf.

One cold, bright day I started for my claim accompanied by a young
Englishman, a fair-faced delicate young clerk from London, and before we
had covered half our journey the west wind met us with such fury that
the little cockney would certainly have frozen had I not forced him out
of the sleigh to run by its side.

Poor little man