crops and gardens were gone. For four years the grasshoppers left the new settlers with only a handful of food. Then the men again had to leave the settlement and seek work.
The entire county was almost bankrupt. There was nothing left. The County Commissioners of Murray County, in the annual fiscal report of 1875, stated—Funds in Treasury —NOTHING—$00.00.
According to the early settlers, Hans Simonson, who arrived in June 1872, was the first settler. The next was Christian Christiansen who arrived in October, the same year. Then came Gilbert Johnson and Theodore Knutson, closely followed by the others. The settlers on the east of the township were located by Pete Peterson, who had settled near Badger Lake the year before and was acquainted with the government survey marks. In the western part of the township, J. H. Low assisted in the work. Peterson later became County Treasurer and Low the County Auditor. B. M. Low, the first surveyor, located many of the settlers.
While most of the settlers "took up" homesteads, some of the new arrivals were compelled to take up tree claims, as they had used their rights in the eastern part of the state before they had the urge to take the westward move.
"THE PRAIRIE MOTHER"
What a wonderful part the prairie mother played in the drama in the development of the new West!
She was the real bulwark of the frontier; she was the first and the last line of defense. She made the homes and made the community. Hard and bitter toil was the price exacted by the virgin soil. Think of the long, long nights she spent alone in the sod shanty or log cabin, listening to the howl of the blizzard and the coyote, with perhaps a sick child lying on a humble tick of straw with no medicine or help available. Just herself and God who soothed and comforted her in the lonely vigil and when death came, as it sometimes did, she struggled over the snow drifts to a nearby neighbor. There were no doctors, no nurses, no cemeteries, no preachers. The neighbor would gather what boards he could find and fashion them into a rough
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coffin. With a handful of neighbors, sometimes only the family, a muttered prayer filtered through the bitter cold as the little one started on her last long sleep. And the lonely mother, whose heart was filled with bitter anguish, turned to the humble home not to weep, not to pity herself, but to soothe, ease and comfort the other members of the little family.
And then there was the prairie mother whose husband was away from the little settlement, and in whose ears echoed the cries of the massacred settlers of a bare ten years before, who would turn and see a group of Indians entering the only door in the little home. They would beg for something to eat. They were a shock to the prairie mother, but not a muscle quivered. The same staunch spirit with which she met the hardships of the pioneer life did not forsake her. There was but little argument. If she had, she gave; if not, she would open the door as she would for a stray cat and tell them to go. The bitter winters, while the men were gone to earn groceries for the summer, should have broken the heart and the spirits of the women, but they would not be cowed; there are the two mothers who gave birth to their babies, without the aid of a doctor, midwife, nurse, neighbor or husband, just themselves and that unbreakable spirit.
Her part was hard and bitter, but it was one of love. She made the children's clothes from wool that she had carded and spun. She cooked and baked in a tiny cast iron stove fired with "buffalo chips" or twists of hay; she took care of the oxen and the cow, no matter how severe the weather, hauling the water from the well with a rope solidly coated with ice. She dug herself out of the house and the stock out of the straw shed after the snowstorms, and in the evening she sewed and knitted with hands wrinkled and swelled by the intense cold, by a tiny coal oil lamp, often with a piece of rag in a saucer of lard.
Life was a stern reality for the pioneer mother, whose faith was in God and how bravely and nobly she met life.
The Indian woman who helped lead an expedition across the Rockies is remembered by statues and monuments in many states. How many have been erected to the memory of the
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