There are two Christian Science churches, located in Dillon and in the city of Sheridan, both organized in 1919. The Dillon church meets in an office, but the Sheridan church has a building valued at $2,500. The church membership is about 170. Both churches have Sunday schools, with an enrollment of about thirty in Dillon and about fifty in Sheridan.
Theosophical
The city of Sheridan has a Theosophical Society which meets in a real estate office. The membership is seventeen. Six new members were taken in last year. Meetings are held every Friday night. Two meetings a month are for members only, and two are public lectures.
CHAPTER IX
Seeing It Whole
The Range, our last real frontier, has grown up. Round-ups are miniature and staged. All the land is fenced. The cowboy is passing, if not gone. Even “chaps” and a sombrero are rare, unless worn by a “Dude” from the East. The last 100 years have seen a remarkable growth and change in this country. The cattleman and the cowboy have largely given way to the homesteader, and he in turn has become a regular farmer or, as he prefers it, “rancher.”
The Land of the Homesteader
The cowman used to insist that no one could make a living on the semi-arid Range. For many years “there was no sign of permanent settlement on the Plains and no one thought of this region as frontier.” Then the Homesteader came. “And always, just back of the frontier,” says Emerson Hough in “The Passing of the Frontier,” “advancing, receding, crossing it this way and that, succeeding and failing, hoping and despairing, but steadily advancing in the net result—has come that portion of the population which builds homes and lives in them, and which is not content with a blanket for a bed and the sky for a roof above.”