Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [232]
His sisters and Nellie will miss him as much as I do. The girls depend on their big brother for all sorts of things from mending a toy to saddling their ponies. As for Nellie, poor thing, she cried as if it were her own boy she was sending off.
The Mesa
November 10, 1889
Dearest Augusta–
. After such a summer of heat, dust, and wind you can imagine how gladly I accept winter, which is at least fairly clean, and with what passion I long for spring. It has been build, build, build, all through the fall, and since we are more than two miles from town, the workmen have had to be boarded. Wan has cooked for the family, many visitors, and an average of seven additional men, though that will now be reduced.
With paint, carpets, and curtains we have done something toward making the house habitable, and in addition have built an icehouse, shop, blacksmith shed, and office, all under one roof, making quite a picturesque little building, with outside stairs leading to a storage loft.
The Big Ditch, after progressing well for a time, has run into infuriating delays, and cannot reach us for perhaps another year. We shall have to depend on the well for one more season, and its forty barrels a day will not stretch to everything we would like to spread them on. The Susan Canal is now nearly twelve miles long. By next summer, water from it will be soaking into many hundreds of acres, and the demonstration of Oliver’s original scheme will have reached the end of its first step.
Two claims on our lower line have been “jumped”–which means that someone has detected some deficiency in the filing, or some failure to complete the “improvements,” and so has “pre-empted” 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