| meadows and a stream for playground; having since her marriage lived in somewhat less comfort and much uncertainty, though never in a place without trees, she was utterly unprepared for the desolation viewed from the train window. Even the companionship of her piano could not keep back the tears. |
| The lackluster autumn landscape was like an old gray carpet spread to the far, far circling horizon. There was nothing more to see. This was an empty land. A primordial loneliness was on it; the train carried us backward in time. |
| Our Grandfather Alonzo lived here, somewhere in that gray waste. He was "proving up" a government claim, 160 acres, a quarter of a section, all to be his for improving it, which meant building a dwelling, paying taxes, and living on it five years. After its hard-won possession he lost it to taxes ten years later, unable to raise crops without water. The government had opened these margin lands for settlement, and so powerfully inviting is the ownership of land that people came; many left, a few remained. Grandfather Alonzo, a silent, inward man, impractical and visionary, so taken with the future that he had failed to write of the present in his letters to Papa, had convinced him that he should sell his bakery and invest in 320 acres of grazing land for sale. Finally, Papa had bought the land sight unseen through his father, spending all his cash, banking on the next summer's crops to launch us into agricultural prosperity while enjoying the wonders of pioneering again. We were to live with Grandfather Alonzo until we could build a sod house after the first crops were in. While other parts of the United States moved swiftly ahead, the hopeful or desperate people who filed claims on these high western grazing lands were plunged a hundred years backward in our history, to live and struggle again like the early settlers in other states. |
| As we watched from the train windows, we did not know this, but I am sure my mother felt that her young life had come to a dismal end. She was twenty-four, my father thirty-two; I was seven and my sister four. We were well-dressed and rounded with good food and health. Whatever deprivations we had known, they were not material. |
| The bell rang, the train slowed, and we looked out into great pens of whiteface cattle driven in from the range, waiting to be |
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