XII[ToC]
A NEW AMERICA
Ida Mary and I came through the winter stronger than we had ever been before, but we welcomed the spring with grateful hearts. Only poets can describe the electric, sweet quality of spring, but only the young, as we were young that year, receive the full impact of its beauty. The deep, cloudless blue of western skies, the vivid colors after the dead white of winter, were fresh revelations, as though we had never known them before.
One spring day I was making up the paper, while the Christophersons' little tow-headed boy watched me.
"Are you going to be a printer when you grow up, Heine?"
"Nope. I don't want no little types," he replied. "I like traction machines better—they go. My Pa's got one."
A tractor coming on the Strip! I ran to tell Ida Mary.
As it chugged and caterpillared from town through the Reservation, Chris Christopherson's tractor caused almost as much excitement as the first steamship up the Hudson. Men, women and children gathered about and stared wide-eyed at the new machine as its row of plows cut through the stubborn sod like a mighty conqueror. He was plowing a hundred acres.
A few cattlemen from the open country rode into the Strip to see it and bowed their heads to this evidence of the coming of agriculture.