Vermont phÅ“nix. [volume] (Brattleboro, Vt.) 1834-1955, 1904-12-16
Life In a Prairie Sod HnIsa

Life in sod house away out on the
plains, where for months at a time there
Is not a thing in nature to cheer the eve
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 something to interest the sod house
| dwellers, but from October to Nav no
| class of intelligent Americans live more
/ dreary lives than these. One wonders
| what livelihood what future prosperity or
! pleasure can repay 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 q 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 surroundings and dead soli-
tude for years
To realize in how primitive and solitary
a fashion people can live and be happy,
! one has only to imagine n man and wife
/ in sodhouse. fifteen miles from the near
/ est village 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 their
own household Even begging Indians
and tramps are almost unknown i'm this
country. Prairie dogs cast up their
mounds and found towns in the unmo-
/ 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 milk pans standing about. At night
coyotes and some of the gray wolves come
up through the cafons and skulk about
| the poultry yard or howl close to the win
dows. Through the day, while the man is
in the fields the herdng usually falls to
the womans 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 bronchos back, jumps astride
rounds up her cattle, and drives them
down the cafons to Craze on the steep
sides or in low strip beside a creek.
Cahons are not sociable places; one can
scarcely have conception of the pri-
meval unless he has walked through a
canon; he thinks of the dawn of creation,
of the races of extinct mammoths, and
wonders If centaurs have not merely re-
tired into the inner caverns. What the
sodhouse 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
Z 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 memories of another time. other sur
roundings, but they must seem vague and
far away. Even the weather is monot-
onous there is practically always the
cloudless sky; the brilliant sun, the
strong. dry vino that curls the leaves of
the young corn, and turns the buffalo
grass brown.
Living on the dreary plains and amid
such monotony, with never a thing to ap-
peal to ones aesthetic, social or literary
nature. is wearing upon most settlers,
even if they are contented The life
makes women, particularly, prematurely
I old. few years of residence apart from
their sex usually makes them careless of
their appearance. dulls their ambitions
and creates n sordidness. Such a life
must have its inevitable mental and NOR
al 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 remote
ness and immensely of the prairies.
-[Stanley Raymond in the Pilgrim