Land of the Burnt Thigh

by Edith Eudora Kohl

"At first," he said, little crinkles breaking around his eyes, relieving the sternness of his face, "I read The Wand (how I did laugh at the name you gave it) with refreshing amusement, out of a personal curiosity you had aroused. I wanted to see how long you would hold out. Later I became deeply interested in this western activity."

I knew in what mood he must have reached the shack, after that drive from Pierre, across parched earth, seeing the ruined crops, passing settlers' homes which from the outside looked like the miserable huts one sees along waterfronts or in mean outskirts of a city where the flotsam of humanity live. And cluttered around them, farm machinery, washtubs, and all the other junk that could be left outdoors, with countless barrels for hauling water, and the inevitable pile of tin cans. It was dreary, it was unrelievedly ugly; above all, it looked like grim failure.

Earnestly I faced him. "We aren't done," I told him. "We've just begun—badly, I know, but we can fallow. Make reservoirs. Put down artesian wells." I completely forgot, in putting these possibilities of the Strip before him, to mention the gas and oil deposits which we had discovered during our frantic search for water. I did not think of saying, "We have natural gas here—let's go and look at the Ben Smith ranch with all its buildings piped with gas. And over on the Carter place a drill came up from a shallow hole sticky with oil." But the minds of the settlers were so focused elsewhere that little had been said about these things. With an investment broker interested in mining projects under my very roof, many of us might have become rich and the Brulé prosperous in no time.

Development of agriculture, to my mind, was of broader importance than oil strikes, anyhow. "Men do put money into undeveloped things," I said. "Eastern capitalists risk millions in undeveloped mines and oil fields in the West. This is different. Land is solid."

He answered thoughtfully: "As an investment, land is not so precarious as mines, but there are no big profits to be reaped from it. That's the difference, my girl."

He must have known that even for investors, western land was going to be a big thing. He must have known that the railroad companies were buying it up—that the Milwaukee had gone into a spree of land buying in Lyman County.

I poured him some water from the can we kept in a hole in the ground back of the shack for coolness. He took a swallow and set it down. "Good Lord, how can anyone drink that!" he exclaimed.

"We get used to it," I told him. "And we'll have a better water supply in time. It will rain—it's bound to rain, sooner or later."

He looked out at the blazing sky, the baked earth, a snake slithering from the path back into the dry grass which rustled as it moved. "So this is the land you want to save," he exclaimed. "The incredible thing is that people have managed to stay on it at all!"

"They will stay," I assured him. "Remember that these builders have had nothing to work with, no direction, no system or leadership. What would business men accomplish in such an undertaking under the circumstances? If they had experienced leaders—men like you—"