Long after she and the children had gone to bed she lay and thought of her girlhood friends, whom she knew would live their prosaic lives without ever having known the joys, miseries, delights and sorrows that enter into the daily life of a pioneer, and she wanted to help them; she went to sleep with visions of herself as a great benefactress distributing happiness to thousands of her kind.
The passing of the blizzard marked the turning point of the winter, and the weather throughout the month of January was nice, and while the snow did not disappear, there was only an occasional flurry added nothing to the quantity on the ground. The social meetings at the school house were not resumed after the Christmas tree, owing to the extreme cold, but the neighbors visited with each other and met frequently at the store in the village. At such times when two or more were together the principal topic was the blizzard. Although the country was comparatively new in its settlement there was always the proverbial "oldest inhabitant" who could recall "Just such another winter," but to those who actually knew, it had been by far the worst blizzard the country had ever known since the advent of the white man.
There was a legend told by the Indians of the Northwest of the winter of the long ago when the snow was so deep in the mountains that the deer, driven from their natural haunts in the mountains, had crossed on the surface of the frozen Columbia river in search of food and died by the thousands on the plain. This, to a certain extent, was verified by the occasional finding of antlers, bleached white by years of exposure to the rays of the desert sun.
The matter of irrigation was now seldom mentioned. That the party of Government surveyors who had worked on the project the summer before had left with their equipment at the first approach of winter was known, but as to whether they were to return, or had completed their investigation, was left to conjecture.
With the arrival of February came the first real spring weather. A chinook wind came, and after blowing for two nights and a day, had melted the snow to such an extent that the only traces of it to be found was where it had drifted into an abandoned badger or coyote den and escaped the warm breath of the chinook. There being no frost in the ground the moisture created by the melting snow sank deep into the soil and was stored away for future use. The sun, as it rose higher with each lengthening day, dispensed its increasing warmth, thereby reviving the earlier varieties of plant life with startling rapidity.
Gully having cleared a number of acres of sagebrush, was anxiously awaiting seasonable weather for plowing, that he might sow his grain early and get it up and well rooted before the spring winds came, thinking that by adopting this method it would survive. There was plenty to do before the ground was in a condition for plowing. Seed grain and feed was to be hauled from the wheat growing district of the Big Bend country, and a supply of provisions procured, that a trip to the village would not be required of the team during the plowing and seeding time. The cistern was to be filled and as much more ground made ready for the plow as was possible before the rush.
Plans for the accomplishment of all this had been carefully made by Gully and his wife, and they were eager to begin. As the roads were in excellent condition while the sand was wet and settled, Gully borrowed a team to work with his own from one of his neighbors and went for his seed grain, the trip requiring two days.
Upon his return from this trip he and his entire family drove to the village. There was no great amount of shopping to be done, as Gully's funds were about exhausted, but one of the merchants in the town had promised to supply him with provisions until the harvest season. The family was taken along that they might enjoy the outing, and as the weather was bright and there was no dust or blistering sun, the trip was often looked back to as one of the most pleasant they had ever taken.