Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1904-12-15
LIFE IN A PRAIRIE SOD HOUSE.
It Goes Forward in Primitive and Soil
tary Fashion.

Stanley Raymond in the Pilgrim.
Life ina sod house away out on the
plains, where for months at a time there is
not thing in nature to cheer the eye or
vary the silent monotony is certainly close
to first principles. When the corn waves on
thousands of acres or when the plain Is
green with growing wheat. there is some
thing to interest the sod house jewellers, but
from October to- May no class of Intelligent
Americans live more dreary lives than these.
One wonders what livelihood, what future
prosperity or pleasure can repay a man and
wife to live In such huge sameness. The
shifting clouds by day and sky of fine
stars at night are for weeks at time the
only sights to be seen. Yet some of the
most contented and aspiring people we have
ever seen are men and women who live amid
such fiat surroundings and dead solitude
for years.
To realize in how primitive and solitary
fashion people can live and be happy. one
has only to imagine a man and wife in
sod house, fifteen miles from the nearest viii
lage. in one Of the sparsely settled districts
OF western Nebraska or Kansas. For days,
and in some seasons for weeks, they see no
human. beings outside of their own house
hold. Even begging Indians and tramps are
almost unknown in this country. Prairie
dogs cast up their mounds and found
towns In the unmolested spots about the
place; gophers and field mice burrow
frequently snakes swing themselves down
from the rafters inside. or crawl in at the
door to get at any milk pans standing
about. At night coyotes and some of the
gray wolves come up through the canyons
and skulk about the poultry yard or howl
close to the windows. Through the day,
while the man is in the fields. the herdfng
usually falls to the woman's lot Probably
each takes a noon luncheon in a paper, to
save coming back to the house until night.
The woman attends to her necessary
household duties. throws a gunnysack over
her bronchO's back jumps astride, rounds
up her cattle, and drives them down the
canyon to Craze on the steep sides, or in
low strip beside creek. Canyons are not
soc1able places; one can scarcely have a
conception of the primeval unless he has
walked through canyon; he thinks of the
dawn OF creation, Of the races of extinct
mammoths, and wonders If centaurs have
not merely retired into the inner caverns.
What the sod house woman thinks about all
day long in solitude like that is hard to tell
probably the mortgage on the farm, dis
ease among the stock, the prospects of
crops, the time when they can put up their
frame dwelling, the hard, unadorned facts
in the treadmill of her life, new plans for
the work, work, work, which Is her sole
law of existence. Perhaps she has MEM
cries 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
curiS the leaves of the young corn and
turns the buffalo grass brown.
Living on the dreary plains and amid
such monotony, with never thing to ap-
peal to ones aesthetic, social or literary
nature, is wearing upon most settlers, even
II they are contented. The life makes wo-
men, particularly, prematurely old. A few
years of residence apart from their sex
usually makes them careless of their ap-
pearance. dulls their ambitions, and creates
sordidness Such life must have its in
evlta'ble mental and moral effect All the
sensitive, aesthetic, sometimes the moral
sense itself becomes atrophied. The TRACE
dies of a city are unearthed and brought to
ilght, but the silent tragedies of these DESC
late lives are swallowed up and lost In the
remoteness and immensely of the prairie
wastes.