Claim Number One

by George W. Ogden

While Dr. Slavens banged away among his rocks, 213 not knowing whether he was a victim of his own impetuosity or the peculiarly favored son of fortune, Agnes Horton, in her tent beside the river, was undergoing an adjustment of vision which was assisting her to see startlingly things exactly as they were. The enchantment of distance had fallen away. When she came to grips with the land, then its wild unfriendliness was revealed, and the magnitude of the task ahead of her was made discouragingly plain.

All over her cultivable strip of land which lay between the river and the hills, the gray sage grew in clumps, each cluster anchoring the soil around it in a little mound. Through many years the earth had blown and sifted around the sapless shrubs until they seemed buried to the ears, and hopeless of ever getting out again, but living on their gray life in a gray world, waiting for the best.

All of this ground must be leveled before it could receive the benefits of irrigation, and the surprising thing to her was how much wood the land yielded during this operation. Each little sagebrush had at least twenty times as much timber under the earth as it had above, and each thick, tough root was a retarding and vexatious obstacle in the way of scraper and plow. Smith said it was sometimes necessary in that country to move three acres of land in order to make one.

But Smith was enthusiastically for it. He kept asserting that it paid, and pointed to the small bit of agricultural land that there was in the whole expanse of that 214 reservation, for an example, to prove his point. There was room for other industries, such as mining and grazing, but the man who could grow food and forage for the others was the one who would take down the money from the hook. That was Smith’s contention.

He told Agnes that she could lift enough water with a wheel in the river to irrigate a garden and more, but there was no need of putting in the wheel until spring. The rains of that season would bring up the seed, and while it was making the most of the moisture in the ground she could be setting her wheel.

“A person’s got to plan ahead in this country,” said Smith. “You must know to a skinned knuckle just what you’ll need a year, or five years, ahead here, if you ever make it go worth havin’. It ain’t like it is back where you come from. There you can go it more or less hit-or-miss, and hit about as often as you miss. Here you’ve got to know.”

Smith was moving to organize the settlers along the river into a company to put in a canal which would water all their land, the chief capital to be elbow-grease; the work to be done that fall and winter. Smith was indeed the head and inspiration of all enterprise in that new place. People to whom that country was strange, and that included nearly all of them, looked to him for advice, and regarded with admiration and wonder his aptness in answering everything.

Agnes was doubtful of the future, in spite of her big, 215 brave talk to Dr. Slavens in the days before the drawing. Now that she had the land, and a better piece of it than she had hoped for, considering her high number, she felt weakly unfit to take it in hand and break it to the condition of docility in which it would tolerate fruit-trees, vines, and roses.

It cheered her considerably, and renewed her faith in her sex, to see some of the women out with their teams, preparing their land for the seeding next spring. More than one of them had no man to lean on, and no money to hire one to take the rough edge off for her. In that respect Agnes contrasted her easier situation with theirs. She had the means, slender as they might be, indeed, to employ somebody to do the work in the field. But the roses she reserved for her own hands, putting them aside as one conceals a poem which one has written, or a hope of which he is afraid.

In the first few days of her residence on her land, Agnes experienced all the changes of mercurial rising and falling of spirits, plans, dreams. Some days she saddled her horse, which she had bought under the doctor’s guidance at Meander, and rode, singing, over the hills, exalted by the wild beauty of nature entirely unadorned. There was not yet a house in the whole of what had been the Indian Reservation, and there never had been one which could be properly called such.