The American Country Girl

by Martha Foote Crow

Another girl who taught in a sod schoolhouse told how one day she discovered a large snake coiled around the rafters of the little room. She and the larger pupils got sticks and drove it out. She then modestly added, "We certainly would have killed it had it not been a bull snake, but bull snakes kill the deadly rattlers, you know, so we let it live."

But are you not afraid to stay in your cabin alone on your lofty butte? "No, I do not believe that I am afraid. When I first came here the bigness of the hills frightened me, but now some of the best times I have are when I am walking over the hills and through the trees at night. I have a bull terrier and a collie that are always with me so I am not so much alone as it might seem. I have also a beautiful big Morgan saddle horse; I ride over the country alone and I have never been frightened."

Another homesteader girl has learned how to overcome fear. She says: "It takes some courage to stay alone on one's claim night after night. But perhaps that is a foolish fear, for there is really nothing to be afraid of. I positively love to hear the coyotes howling and barking among the hills as I lie on my little bed in my little house. One night last winter I heard the creaking and groaning of heavy wagons laboring through the snow. I had been in bed for some time and the noise of the wagons mingled with the voices of the men awakened me. I rose, threw on a cloak, and opening the door a few inches, I looked out. The foremost wagon had stopped just in front of the door. 'What is it?' I called. 'Which way do you go to get to Grassville?' I told him, he thanked me, and I shut the door. The wagons creaked and moved away. I had not been afraid. Perhaps it is faith in God which keeps us out here. If that is so, then this life is favorable to moral development, is it not?"

"Homesteading," says one college girl and successful homesteader, "is not simply one means for leisure, outdoor life and freedom from conventionality—it is an opportunity to test one's caliber in withstanding privations, in braving blizzards, in conquering the fear of rattlers and that greater fear of being alone on a seemingly limitless prairie. It is also a chance to recognize in those sturdy men and women of the West their big heartedness and clean mindedness. A girl too timid to stay alone over night in a city apartment may feel a sense of safety alone in her shack in the West that the civilized East would not understand. It does not take long to realize that the old cow-boy courtesy of protecting women holds good still. As a result of it all we might say that besides gaining a new view point on life, besides the moral strength attained in conquering that desire to return to the ease of civilization, comes that mental and physical vigor which seems to be inherent in the girl who has held down a claim for fourteen months and who has successfully proved it up."

To take a place like this in the community such as homesteading involves, requires the assumption of responsibility, and responsibility always develops. Cases are mentioned where a young woman has been strengthened morally by the evident necessity for rectitude. Young women who have not before been interested in church work have been drawn into it, for they saw that somebody must do this between the times when the circuit preacher could come around.

A well-balanced judgment comes from Elinore Rupert Stewart, whose homesteading experience has been detailed in a delightful book and whose record of a working day has been shared with us in an earlier chapter.

To her homesteading offers one solution of poverty's problem; but she adds, if the would-be homesteader is afraid of coyotes and work and loneliness, she had better let ranching alone. Nevertheless, any woman who can endure her own company, who can see the beauty in a sunset, who loves growing things, and is willing to put in as much time at hard outdoor labor as she has done over the washtub, will certainly succeed. Her reward will be in independence, enough to eat all the time, and a home of her own in the end.

This homesteader with her power of literary expression has given us vivid pictures of the possibilities in the cabin life of the new country. Her claim lies sixty miles from a railroad. There is no rural delivery of mails, no doctor, no preacher. To the west the Rocky Mountains lift great gorge-scarred masses of rock and to the east stretch bad lands and desert and interminable uninhabited space. Her "community" includes all the ranches for fifty miles around. And how interesting are those neighbors! So good, so queer, so like folks! She has brought Christmas cheer into every camp of sheep-herders within reach. She is nurse and doctor to every sick woman. She has been guardian angel to the lone rancher, Zebulun, finding his friends for him "back home," and to a pair of abused young lovers, for whom she gave a wedding dinner, providing the elegance of drawn-work paper napkins and inviting the guests to wash dishes—a compliment that they did not in the least consider a breach of decorum. She is community companion to her neighbors in hours of joy and in hours of sorrow. A missionary could scarcely ask for a more needy, a more vital or a more responsive "field."

In the circle of her ministrations was found a young girl whom she calls Cora Belle. This little person, half child, half grown woman, so unconsciously brave, so pathetically buoyant, asking little of Fate and receiving so little from the hand of that close-fisted autocrat—forms an appealing figure and may be thought of as the typical young Country Girl in the realm of the ranch and the cabin.

Cora Belle lived with her grandparents, two useless old people who drank up each other's medicines just to save them, and frightfully neglected the poor little granddaughter. The description of the child brings her vividly before us. "She was a stout, square-built little figure with long flaxen braids, a pair of beautiful brown eyes, and the longest and whitest lashes you ever saw, a straight nose, a short upper lip, a broad full forehead,—the whole face, neither pretty nor ugly, plentifully sown with the brownest freckles."