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By Root 11214 0

” the lands. The original filers in these cases were trying to evade the letter of the law, but they are both poor men, and worked hard, and we feel sorry for them. They have consulted Oliver constantly on their plans, and counted on the Susan Canal, and he feels in a way responsible. Yet there is nothing we can do. One of them lost his claim because his wife would not come and live there six months, but when I think of my months here–only three, and with everything done to make me comfortable–and look at the shanty where she was supposed to live, I hardly wonder she objected. Almost every claim around us has now been jumped except John’s and Bessie’s. On timber-culture and desert claims such as theirs, no residence is required, only “improvements,” which they will take care of when they come out.

We have a poor-white family camped at the well. The husband has taken a contract to plow a hundred acres of our desert at so much per acre, and do such other jobs as will make Mesa Ranch into the showplace of the district. Oliver’s next task is to get them a cabin built near the windmill where presently they live in two sheep wagons–father, mother, daughter, son-in-law, and two children.

They are all the color of gypsies. They have two sons “up on Camas, lookin’ after the stock,” and a full-blooded bull pup worth more than any team they own. Each morning, while the weather holds, the teams are driven afield, four horses hitched to a sulky plow. The double shares rip up the ground in great swaths, sage brush and all, and leave it in a chaotic mess, roots and branches sticking up out of the raw earth. It looks as if the land had been plowed for the sowing of dragons’ teeth instead of the first peaceful wheat crop. Before snow flies, I want to get out and try to sketch that scene of crude ugly power out of which (we hope) this new civilization will rise.

After I had taken down some late squash the other day, the ladies from the plow camp came and called on me. “How comfortable you look, out of the wind,” they said as they walked in. It was an interesting visit in a way. They are Southern, and they have that remarkable command of language that we see in Miss Murfree’s stories, and an equanimity equal to that of a duchess. For all that I was out of the wind, I am sure they would not willingly have changed places. They belong in this crude place. I live here on sufferance, a permanent exile, awaiting the day when all of Oliver’s efforts will have produced in this valley a civilization in which any woman but one of these plowing Malletts would feel at home.

I cannot bring myself to do as Oliver urges me to–go into Boise oftener, make calls, cultivate women friends, attend the “functions” of the place. For one thing, we have put everything we own and everything we can borrow into this ranch, and I have no desire to be known as the engineer’s wife with the darned elbows. For another–how shall I specify that other? I am not of Boise and do not wish to be.

And so I live an interim or preparatory life. Oliver is bent upon making these thousand acres of ours into something that all men can look at and be inspired by, a sort of pledge of what the country can do when it has water. His goal, he told me the other day, is to make something as near as possible to Querendero, one of those grand Mexican estancias at which we stayed when we rode back from Morelia. He will fence our thousand acres and push his improvements clear to the fences–wheat, lucerne, timothy, wild pasture, orchards, berry patches and gardens. He swears he will have a rose garden that will make me forget Milton. He will make father’s roses look like a posy bed! He frightens me, he is so willing to stake everything we have. But when I raise objections, he tells me I can see only what is in front of my nose.

Faith! Faith! he tells me. Faith can reclaim deserts as well as move mountains. When this pioneering enthusiasm takes hold of him, he is not my wordless husband at all. A few days ago, in the last of the Indian summer weather, we rode around the whole place so that he could