It cost a lot of money, he used to complain, with investments depreciating like that and the proof business so short-lived, when the settlers filled a section and all proved up at once. And he had to run a paper a year before it became a legal publication.
But the proof sheets soon became gold mines, the plants costing but a few hundred dollars and the expenses of operating only ten to fifteen dollars a week—a cheap printer, the prints, the ink. Established at inland post offices they became the nuclei for crossroad trading points.
At this time he had embarked on another cause, prohibition, which was causing great excitement in South Dakota. A few years later, with his proof sheets extending through the Black Hills, he bought a newspaper in Deadwood, the notorious old mining town which is usually associated in people's minds with the more lurid aspects of the Wild West. He found conditions all that they had been painted, dominated by underworld vice rings, with twenty-four saloons for its population of 3000, and gambling halls, operated as openly as grocery stores, running twenty-four hours a day. Even the two dance halls exceeded all that has been written about similar places.
With his newspaper as his only weapon E. L. Senn set out to clean up Deadwood. In the fight he sunk his own profits until he had to sell most of his newspapers, emerging from it almost penniless.
It was this doughty warrior whose printing press I had strewn widely over the prairie. When he entered the hotel in Presho where I was awaiting him my courage almost failed me. He was wise enough not to ask me what was wrong. He must have been secretly amused by the very small, frightened girl with the determined expression in her direct blue eyes.
To my surprise, he asked no questions. Instead he took me to supper and then to a moving picture, the first I had seen in the West. His kindness so melted my exasperation with the press that I was at a loss to know how to begin the fighting talk I had come to make. But the film ended with a woman driving sheepmen off her claim, and with that example to fortify my ebbing courage, I asked for a new printing press. And I got it!
The "new" press was a second-hand one, but in comparison to the Noah's Ark model it was a mechanical wonder. I did not know that the proof king was facing a financial crisis at that time. But I've always thought the blow of having to buy a press was not half so bad as the shock of having a printer who would ask for one.
While I was enjoying the new press one day the Reeds came by McClure.
"Well, good-by, folks."
"Oh, are you going?"