The new settler is too poor to build of brick or stone. He hauls a few loads of lumber from the nearest railway station, and puts up a frail little house of two, three or four rooms that looks as though the prairie winds would blow it down. Were it not for the invention of tarred building-paper, the flimsy walls would not keep out the wind and snow. With this paper, the walls are sheathed under the weatherboards. The barn is often a nondescript affair of sod walls and straw roof.
Lumber is much too dear to be sued for dooryard fences, and there is no inclosure about the house.
A barbed-wire fence surrounds the barnyard. Rarely are there any tress, for on the prairies trees grow very slowly and must be nursed with care to get a start. In this cramped abode, from the windows of which there is nothing more cheerful in sight than the distant houses of other settlers, just as ugly and lonely, and stacks of straw and unthreshed grain, the farmer's family must live. Each family must live mainly to itself, and life, shut up in the little wooden farmhouses, cannot well be very cheerful. A drive to the nearest town is almost the only diversion.