The commodities handled at the store had increased from coffee and matches to innumerable supplies. The faithful team, Fan and Bill, were kept on the road most of the time. We made business trips to Presho and Pierre. Help was not always available, and there could be no waste movements in a wasteland. On some of these trips we hitched the team to the big lumber wagon and hauled out barrels of oil, flour, printers' ink and other supplies for all and sundry of our enterprises. It had come to that.
"There go the Ammons sisters," people would say as the wagon started, barrels rattling, down the little main street of Presho, off to the hard trail home.
Slim and straight and absurdly small, in trim shirt waists, big sombreros tilted over our heads, we bounced along on the wagon, trying to look as mature and dignified as our position of business women demanded.
"Those are the two Brulé girls who launched an attack on the Milwaukee railroad," Presho people remarked. "Well, I'll be damned!"
Once when I was too ill to leave Presho and we stayed for the night in a little frame hotel, Doc Newman came in to look me over.
"Do you girls get enough nourishing food?" he asked.
"We eat up all the store profits," lamented Ida Mary.
He laughed. "Keep on eating them up. And slow down."
Pioneer women, old and new, went through many hardships and privations. The sodbreakers' women over the Strip worked hard, but their greatest strain was that of endurance rather than heavy labor. But refreshing nights with the plains at rest and exhilarating morning air were the restoratives.
Hard and unrelieved as their lives were in many respects, gallantly as they shouldered their part of the burden of homesteading, the women inevitably brought one important factor into the homesteaders' lives. They inaugurated some form of social life, and with the exchange of visits, the impromptu parties, the informal gatherings, and the politeness, the amenities they demanded—however modified to meet frontier conditions—civilization came to stay.