Vermont phÅ“nix. [volume] (Brattleboro, Vt.) 1834-1955, 1894-12-14
The Prairie SOdhOuse.
The Labor and Loneliness Of the Modern
Cave-DweIlers on the Great Plains.

house is a very inconspicuous object. The
eye wanders over immense grain fields,
perhaps a large timber claim of young box
elders and cottonwoods, garden, roomy
stOckyard and the sod roofs of many sheds
for poultry, stock and machinery; but ex-
cept for a wreath of smoke or the chance
reflection of a window-pane, the dwelling
would be overlooked.
1t is often of the half dugout, half sod
house, order of architecture, the back part
followed out of the side of a low hill, and
the front of the squares of sod, merely
placed together and all upheld by slight
frame of wood, with a door and one or
two window-casings, and perhaps a few
rafters overhead. 1t is very small and low,
and serves the single purpose of shelter.
There is possibility even of its failure in
this, and the trapdoor aslant at one sile of
the house proclaims the cyclone cave-or-
dinarily, the receptacle for milk and but
ter.
Life in one of these prairie dwellings is
certainly getting close to nature and the
primitive; closer, perhaps, than the Arab
tribes of the desert, who, on the whole, oh
serve more laws, religious and secular, and
have less solitude and social deprivation
To realize this, one has only to fancy a
man and wife in a sodhouse, fifteen miles
from the nearest village, in one Of the
sparsely settled districts of western Ne
braska For days, and in some seasons
for weeks, they see no human beings out
side of their own household. Even beg
ging Indians and tramps are almost I'M
known in this country. Prairie dogs cast
up their mounds and found towns in the
unmolested spots about the place; gophers
and field mice burrow through the sod
walls of the house; not infrequently,
snakes swing themselves down from the
rafters inside, or crawl in at the door to
get at any milkpans standing about. At
night coyotes and some of the gray wolves
come up through the canon and skulk
about the poultry-yard or howl close to the
windows Through the day, while the
man is in the fields, the herding usually
falls to the womans lot. Probably each
takes noon luncheon in paper, to save
coming back to the house until night.
The woman attends to her necessary
household duties, throws gunny-sacl
over her bronco's back, jumps astride,
rounds up her cattle, and drives them down
the canons to Craze on the steep sides, or
in a low strip beside a creek Cahons
are not sociable places; one can scarcely
have a conception of the primeval unless
he has walked through a canon; he
thinks of the dawn of creation, of the races
Of extinct mammoths, and wonders if cen
taurs have not merely retired into the in
ners Caverns. What the sodhouse woman
thinks about all day long in solitude like
that it is hard to tell-the mortgage on the
farm, diseases among the stock the pros
poets of crops the time when they can
put up their frame dwelling, the hard, I'M
adorned facts in the treadmill of her life;
she makes new plans for the work, work,
work, which is her sole law of existence.
Perhaps she has memories of another
time, other surroundings, but they must
seem vague and far away. Even the
weather is monotonous; there is practically
always the cloudless sky, the brilliant sun,
the strong dry wind, that curls the leaves
of the young corn, and turns the Buffalo
grass brown.
Women, and men, too, become withered
and prematurely old. Hair and skin take
on the general dun tint of things about
them. Their teeth drop out without a
comes a certain feverish look in their
eyes-a look of intensified expectation, a
straining into the future. They lose all
thought of appearance; it gets TO mean
vanity rather than self-respect to them.
Such life must have its inevitable mental
and moral effect. All the sensitive, the
aesthetic, sometimes the moral sense itself,
becomes atrophied. The tragedies of a
city are unearthed and brought to light,
but the silent tragedies of these desolate
lives are swallowed up and lost in the re-
moteness and immensely of the prairie
wastes.
1t is a motley assortment of humanity
that takes the claims and homesteads on
the opening up of country like this. AT
ter the first rush, a sitting process se.s in,
which soon separates them into three
classes: Those who stay through every
thing and make the prosperity of the coun-
try; the progressive, who never get
beyond the original sodhOuse; and the
shifting transients, who move at a sign of
trouble, and come back in time of pros
perity. There is, however, no sitting
social process during these first years.
The sodhOuse levels all ranks and at the
rare intervals when any of the people are
brought together socially, it is on terms of
perfect equality; they simply take one
another for granted, with no question of
antecedents, family history or social adj
vantages. They are people who are start
ing life anew, and living on hopes of the
future, with forgetfulness of the past, and
endurance of the present. A woman's lot
is the harder; she misses more things in
such life than man does.
The real pioneers, who survive every
thing, in the end have comfortable homes,
and have created some advantages for
their children. They have lived in the
sodhouse until the year of a good crop and
few household necessities to be bought,
and have had the small, bare frame cottage
built. The next season, if good fortune
continues, porch and an l. are added,
and in a few years it is enlarged and COM
fortably fitted up. Often the old sodhouse
is left standing near the new one for some
purpose, or sometimes, as matter of senti-
ment
The transients are an anomalous class.
An old plainsman says: "You take one o.
these here men that gets this mOyin' craze,
an its JUS like the intermittent fever-it
comes back on him just oncet in so often
forever after"
In the spring and fall the covered wagons
are always to be seen. Ask one of the
drivers where he's bound for, and the
usual reply will be: "Well, we're calc'la-
tin to jus look roun' frs, for we settle