Prairie Tales: South Dakota’s Fairy Tale Legacy

South Dakota has a rich literature for children, which includes its own Aesop, Hans Christian Andersen, and Lewis Carroll. Early state authors such as L. Frank Baum, Zitkala-Ša, Eva Katharine Gibson, and Charles and Elaine Goodale Eastman set their stories for young people in the region they knew best—the Northern Great Plains. To showcase this almost forgotten fairy tale heritage, the South Dakota State Historical Society Press began its Prairie Tale Series in 2006, using modern illustrators to bring classic fables and fairy stories back to life.

The first book in the series, The Discontented Gopher, is a short work by L. Frank Baum, who is often called the Hans Christian Andersen of America. Baum, who lived in Aberdeen, South Dakota, from 1888 to 1891, grew up reading stories set in Europe, the fairy tales of Andersen and the Grimm brothers. When he wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), he decided that there was no reason that such stories should not be set in the United States. After all, he wrote in 1908, “fairies are not peculiar to any one locality, and every race has its own fairy legends.” His Wizard, which features a Kansas farm girl and a confidence man from Omaha, Nebraska, is considered the first truly American fairy tale.

But it is not the only such tale that he wrote. The Discontented Gopher, first published as a short story in 1905,follows the adventures of Zikky, a South Dakota gopher who encounters gopher fairies who offer him wealth or happiness. He chooses wealth and is soon awash in golden corn grown by area farmers. Wealthy but not happy, Zikky ignores the fairies’ advice to stay close to home and searches for adventure. Two young boys from Aberdeen waylay him and cut off his tail for a gopher bounty, one of the ways in which the farmers of the early 1900s tried to even the score between the crops and the wild animals. Zikky survives and learns that contentment is more important than riches.

The youngsters in this story are based on the author’s son and a nephew who lived in North Dakota. During the summers, the young Baum and his cousin trapped gophers and took them to the county farm extension office for a two-cent bounty. Baum first published The Discontented Gopher in the Delineator, a woman’s fashion magazine that contained in each issue a story for mothers to read to their children.

To revitalize this tale for modern readers, the South Dakota State Historical Society Press asked children’s book illustrator Carolyn Digby Conahan to interpret the gopher and his adventures. Conahan, who is also the staff artist of Cricket magazine, transformed Baum’s short fiction into “a wonderful American fairy tale,” according to the Rapid City Journal. The book, which also contains an introduction that sets the scene, a word list, and bibliography, won awards from both the Mom’s Choice Foundation and the Moonbeam Children’s Book Awards.

For the second volume in the Prairie Tale Series, the South Dakota State Historical Society Press wanted to showcase the state’s American Indian story tradition. Dance in a Buffalo Skull is a traditional tale retold by Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, whose Indian name was Zitkala-Ša.

Zitkala-Ša, who grew up on the Yankton Indian Reservation in the 1870s, worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs in several western states, an experience that led her to become an activist on behalf of native peoples and their cultures. In 1901, she published a book of short pieces based on the campfire stories of her own reservation childhood. These folktales grew out of the oral history tradition of the Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota (Sioux) peoples, and, like Aesop’s fables and the traditional tales of other cultures, they convey lessons to listeners.

In Dance in a Buffalo Skull, field mice come out at night to feast and dance in an old buffalo skull. The small creatures become completely involved in the celebration and forget about possible dangers as a wild cat crawls up on them in the dark. The prairie children who listened to their elders telling this story a hundred years ago would have understood that they needed to be alert and not get too caught up in what they were doing.

Lakota artist S. D. Nelson’s illustrations for this second Prairie Tale in the State Historical Society Press series mix traditional Lakota Indian art with modern styles to provide visual drama to the old tale. Nelson, a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, is the author and illustrator of numerous children’s books, including Crazy Horse’s Vision.

Dance in a Buffalo Skull received the Aesop Accolade Award for 2007 from the American Folklore Society. One of the judges wrote: “For someone writing over a hundred years ago as an indigenous author, trying to present her culture to an outsider audience, I think she did an incredible job—and I love the way Nelson’s illustrations enhance the language for a modern audience and make it clear how well-done her telling really is.” The Mom’s Choice Awards judges also chose Dance in the Buffalo Skull as the Most Outstanding Children’s Book of 2007.

Along with Dance in a Buffalo Skull, the third and fourth volumes in the State Historical Society Press’s Prairie Tale Series begin to reveal how culturally blended the literary heritage of the South Dakota truly is. The third volume, The Prairie-Dog Prince, is set in the western part of the state on the edge of the Black Hills. The author, Eva Katharine Gibson of Chicago, had visited the Hot Springs area in 1895 with her husband, Charles B. Gibson, who was a metallurgist examining mining properties for investors. He later did the chemical analysis of Evans Plunge. During her stay in Hot Springs, Eva Gibson visited Wind Cave and probably heard the Sioux legend that it was the passageway through which their nation came to earth.

Gibson also traveled extensively in Germany, studying folktales, and when she returned to Chicago, she used all the raw materials from her various trips for a series of plays and novels for which she could not find a publisher. After the success of the Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1900, she recast the material as a children’s book, calling it Zauberlinda, the Wise Witch, which was published in 1901.

For its third Prairie Tale, the South Dakota State Historical Society Press condensed and adapted Gibson’s 1901 novel into a thirty-two-page picture book that follows the adventures of Annie, a young girl who lives on a farm near the Black Hills and befriends a gnome prince disguised as a prairie dog. Making some unwise wishes about her father finding gold in the Hills, Annie is whisked underground like Alice in Wonderland to the home of the gnomes, where she learns some important lessons in the style of all fairy tales. Meeting up with her prince once again, she returns home through Wind Cave. Again, Carolyn Digby Conahan’s wistful illustrations give The Prairie-Dog Prince a modern character that earned the book the 2008 Mom’s Choice Award for Most Distinctive Illustration.

The Racoon and the Bee Tree, the fourth Prairie Tale, will come off the press this fall in time for the South Dakota Book Festival. Written in 1909 by Charles Eastman and Elaine Goodale Eastman, it combines a traditional American Indian story with the style of Aesop’s fables. Eastman, whose Indian name was Ohiyesa, was born in Minnesota in the 1850s among the Santee Sioux, or Dakota, Indians. He later became a doctor and worked on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, where he met Elaine Goodale, a teacher from Massachusetts. The two married and started a successful writing career that included a collection of American Indian stories called Wigwam Evenings, in which this story first appeared.

The Raccoon and the Bee Tree opens one evening as a raccoon sallies forth to find his supper. Discovering a honey cache in a bee tree, he helps himself and earns nothing but trouble as he encounters angry bees, a family of skunks, chattering squirrels, and a hungry bear. Rapid City artist Susan Turnbull’s illustrations bring the charm and humor of the story vividly to life. Turnbull studied at the American Academy of Art in Chicago and has illustrated five other books.

For the fifth and final Prairie Tale, which will appear in 2010, award-winning Lakota artist Donald F. Montileaux will turn L. Frank Baum’s short story The Enchanted Buffalo into a picture book for modern readers. Once again, Baum set his fable on the American Great Plains, and this time he invoked American Indian legends to tell a darker moral tale. The story opens with the buffalo king Dakt, who leads the Royal Tribe of the Okolom. A rival soon kills the king and takes control of the buffalo tribe. Having a powerful spirit guide, the usurper thinks he is invincible, but a young, brave-hearted challenger proves him wrong.

Baum’s inspiration appears to have been Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book (1894), which set animal fables in the jungles of India, where Kipling had grown up. Baum, who lived in South Dakota during the Ghost Dance movement, had not been sympathetic to the Lakotas’ plight at that time, but his 1905 story conveys an authentic American Indian flavor and a strong empathy for the culture that he had observed close-up in the late 1880s.

Grounded in Lakota tradition, Montileaux’s artwork will bring new energy to Baum’s Enchanted Buffalo while at the same time underscoring the story’s blended cultural roots. The artist’s earlier book, Tatanka and the Lakota People: A Creation Story, published by the South Dakota State Historical Society Press in 2006, earned multiple awards, including the Aesop Accolade from the American Folklore Society and the Spur Award from the Western Writers of America.

In choosing to publish the five Prairie Tales, the South Dakota State Historical Society Press hoped to remind state and regional residents that authors, both immigrant and indigenous, had been at work here almost from the beginning of statehood. The Press also hoped to give modern illustrators an opportunity to work on children’s books that featured the Great Plains locale—the prairies and plains, the tall and short grasses, the wildlife and wildflowers of South Dakota. Some of the artwork for each book has become part of the state’s permanent collection at the Cultural Heritage Center in Pierre.

Not least, the Press published these books as a way of sharing the history of the region with young readers. Each of the Prairie Tales features an introduction that fills in the historical background behind the stories—the reasons for gopher bounties, the oral storytelling tradition of the Sioux, the background of Wind Cave and Black Hills settlement, and the blending of storytelling traditions. Complete with bibliographies and word lists, the Prairie Tales are designed to educate and entertain.

Nancy Tystad Koupal

Sunshine Always, part 11

After Alice’s long diary entry, the correspondence between her and Joseph picks up again in May 1881.

Vermillion, Dak.
May 15th ‘81
Jos. B. Gossage
My Dear Sir:
Yours of some time ago received. Since its receipt I have passed through so many varied scenes that not until today have I felt that I might obey the last injunction of your note, which, if I remember rightly, asked me to “keep you posted as to my whereabouts.”
I am thankful to be able to say I am alive.
To one visiting Vermillion for the first time the sight would be peculiarly interesting. In Vermillion-under-the-hill one can see nothing but desolation and ruin. Of the few buildings left there are but two or three which can be made at all comfortable for summer weather even. In Vermillion-on-the-hill everything is different. On every hand there are being erected buildings for temporary use and many substantial ones also. Business is good and in a very short space of time we will have a city of which we may well be proud. There couuld be no finer site for a city and great hopes are entertained for its growth and welfare.
But although there is perhaps a bright future ahead it is hard to know that most of us have lost our homes. The numberless little treasures that people gather about them in their homes have been destroyed. As long as I live I know I shall feel the icy water as it came pouring in on the floors; shall see the acres of moving ice as it rushed on carrying before it the house in which I have lived so many years, carrying with everything we had but the bedding and some clothes. We saved our stock which is more than many others did and we do not feel as badly as might.
If everything went well with all of there would be no need to show the stuff of which we are mae, so I say send along your floods, tornadoes, etc. and we’ll put up with them the best we can. I greatly miss my organ–coming home from church today I saw the only remaining part of the organ-stool lying where the waters had left it as they subsided. I haven’t cried over the flood yet and I am as ambitious as ever so I don’t think the flood did me much harm.
I have received your paper quite regularly of late, for which favor accept my thanks.
If you don’t approve of this size of writing paper blame the flood. If you still think of sometime visiting Vermillion don’t neglect calling on me–my residence is West Upper Vine Street, Junction of High Water and Side-of-the-Bluff–(not down on gude book). Getting to the end of my paper so nothing more from
Yours, etc.,
Alice Bower

DeadCuckoo

Living with Irony

 

I should pitch my tent in the woods, or maybe go live in a cave. Something to reduce my negative impact on the ecosystem of which I am part. But in the woods I’d likely have to kill animals to eat, and in the cave I’d disturb the life ways of bats. It seems that however hard we try, we humans can’t escape being a liability on Earth, a negative force on fellow creatures.

 

Today as I worked at my desk, a sharp thud reached my ears. What was that, I vaguely wondered, but turned back to the task at hand. Only later when I went outside did I find the fine long body of a black-billed cuckoo, lying dead on the lawn. The thud was the bird flying smack into our solar-fronted house. Apparently it saw the reflection of trees and flew full speed into a death trap of glass. It was the only black-billed cuckoo I’ve ever seen in our yard.

The human impact on the ecosystem—especially in advanced industrial countries such as ours—derives principally from the mechanical and technological innovations which make our lives comfortable and convenient. For example, we power climate-controlled homes, modern transportation and all the high-tech wonders of modern life principally by burning fossil fuel, even though we know we are altering our climate and polluting our planet in perhaps irreconcilable ways. But even solar homes require energy and resources to build, and they too can harm other life.

 

Our negative impact on fellow animals is driven partly by our evolved position in the food chain. As omnivores, humans have always eaten other creatures as well as plants to survive. It’s such a part of our history that the writer of Genesis attributes to God the injunction that we are entitled to “dominion” over fellow creatures. Some of us now reject that “God-given right,” believing as American Indians traditionally believed that we are all related—that we have ethical obligations to fellow creatures, even if we choose to eat them. Others eschew the very act of eating animals, choosing to nourish their bodies solely with fruits, vegetables and other plants.

 

I have not evolved past my inherited position as an omnivore. I still eat meat with my vegetables. But I do respect fellow creatures, and it pains me when, through carelessness or through some action of mine, another living thing needlessly dies. I remember the birds and mammals I shot as a youthful hunter. I grieve for the birds, mammals and butterflies I’ve accidentally struck with my car. But in fact, every lifestyle choice, even building a geo-solar house, has repercussions for other species.

I wish I could restore life to the black-billed cuckoo, hear its long descending cackle once more, let it return to its life work of consuming insects and worms. But this beautiful bird has fallen victim to my effort to reduce my negative impact on Earth. That’s an irony from which I see no escape. 

 

Jerry

 

Read more of Jerry’s thoughts about birds and other wildlife in his book, Waiting for Coyote’s Call: An Eco-memoir from the Missouri River Bluff.

Sunshine Always, part 10

Alice’s long diary entry from Sunshine Always: The Courtship Letters of Alice Bower and Joseph Gossage of Dakota Territory continues:

May 13th. I had no idea it was so long since I wrote in my Journal. Since my last writing we were drivem from the log house for three days but after much trial and anxious waiting we at last are somewhat settled. The floor is fixed in the large part and I made a partition for me, a small room downstairs. I have been to Sarah’s several times and we have had grand times. She takes lesson of me. Maston’s district wants me to teach there but I don’t want to for I hate teaching and they don’t give very good wages. I think Father will do well this summer. The twon is rapidly rebuilding and good times are coming. As I said somewhere back, I intended to write on the 11th inst., it being six months on that day since the Doctor and I became engaged. To look back it hardly seems possible. We have been so very cool and he has not been down to see me. Yet the whole six months have been passed with scarcely a doubt in my mind but that all would be right. I dread Father some. The strange part is to come. Yesterday, just the day after the 11th, I learned accidentally that he went to or started for the Pacific Coast the first of this week. I knew that he intended to go some time this spring but in his letters he has often mentioned that he was coming to visit me before he went. It is very strange and I do not like it at all. If it proved impossible for him to come now he might easily have dropped me word that he was going but instead of that he went without giving me the least intimation that he was going. It may be that he will drop me word at Yankton or Sioux City or he may come unexpectedly to call on his way there. If he does it is all right but if not I am very angry about it. I am no little fool. He may do just what he sees fit. If he goes he may go forever and if he comes, all right. I do not expect him but surely I will hear soon. If not, very well. I am not one to wear my heart on my sleeve and no affair of the heart will ever bring a tear to my eye. There is much of trouble and deceit in the world and I begin to think I am to be made a target block for wholesale shooting. It is well that I have been selected for I can stand it. I do not deny that I am sorry, but if he is that kind of man it is better that I have found him out now. I hope I may be wrong in my thoughts of him now but it may be that I am not.

Sunshine Always, Part 9

Part 9 of the serialization of Sunshine Always.

April 5th. I just wrote April 4th but I just thought it is now August 5th for I am watching now at 1 o’clock. Oh, Journal, last night at about 5 o’clock I watched from the top of the hill, the last timber of our house go floating on toward the Missouri. It was the worst sight I ever saw; first the kitchen went, then the other part. Everything in it just as we left it the day we got the one boat load. I was so sorry to see the organ go. All my music of ten year’s collection. Every picture we possess. In short our home is gone and we are homeless. I was making the best of it this afternoon, no, yesterday afternoon, and laughed with the children over the shanty and surroundings in which we would have to live. Here we are in the old log house—two chairs, a few plates and knives and forks, a few other dishes, part of our clothing and bedding. No stove, no table, no organ, no bureau, no carpets. Not a bedstead nor a table-cloth. Oh, how hard it is. So much went that I had saved for and bought with my own money—all gone. I have nothing to show for all my work but a few cloths and my three cows. And together the barest necessities of life. But he takes it very good and we will go ahead without a murmur if possible and build up what the water in a few hours carried away. A man caught my feather bed and several pillows. They saw the organ and sofa go into the whirlpool. I would like to see Dr. John. But I have no place now for company. Sidney lost his gun and feels bad about it. I lost my scrap book and in it was my first story—and all I had of Harry’s writings which I hated much to lose. I saved the manuscript to my new one. Oh, what will be the end? I don’t believe there will be a building left in town on the bottom. Today I suppose the barn will go. Father said we would have to have a new organ. I hope he will do well this summer.

Sunshine Always, part 8

Back to the story with more from Alice Bower’s diary, taken from Sunshine Always: The Courtship Letters of Alice Bower and Joseph Gossage of Dakota Territory.

We are very lucky so far having lost nothing yet, but the chickens are over in the barn and will be dead before we can get there with food. Things are covered with mud and water but some maybe can be cleaned. I sent invitations to the teachers to tea for Tuesday but when the day came it was not practicable for them to come, ha ha, one may as well laugh as cry and better, though it is hard to know that one’s plans have been frustrated. When the water does go down it will never do to move there again and then the house will not dry very soon. All my little things are spoiled but what of that when lives have been lost. On the bottom where there are no bluffs, there must be people. Vermillion is about to give up the ghost. Mrs. True’s printing office has gone down the river. Many lives lost–untold property destroyed and hearts saddended. We will have to have aid for the poor sufferers. The railroad is gone and what will be done I don’t know. And the end is not yet. I am watching now. every few minutes I go out and watch the river. It is midnight now. At one o’clock I will go to bed and let Father watch. I have not taken off my clothes for a week. A wail of agony goes up from hundreds of heart-broken suffering ones and no answer seems near. Is there no one to hear and answer prayer that there be no more destruction of lives and property? Friday we were frightened again by a gorge breaking but fortunately no harm was done. What tomorrow will disclose is now the question. MAy God exercise his power in our behalf!

For more from Alice and Joe, check out Sunshine Always.

Sunshine Always, part 7

Alice Bower continues her diary entry about the Vermillion flood as we continue to bring you a serialisation of Sunshine Always: The Courtship Letters of Alice Bower and Joseph Gossage of Dakota Territory.

Since then the water commenced or rather continued to raise and got far above the high water mark. Each night was one of prayer and anxiety. Thursday morning the water seemed determined to get in closer proximity with the old log house and in the afternoon we heard the water rush into the cellar and shortly after the floor began to settle. Then we hurriedly put everything that was upstairs out on the roof of the lean-to on the back of the house back in the hill. We moved the cookstove in there together with all the things in the big room. At night we concluded it would be safe for us to sleep upstairs if we had watchers so Grandfather sat up. We did not take off our clothes or shoes and were ready to get out on the hill on short notice. At nine the water covered the floor in the big room and we all got up and came down. Father nailed up a platform on which to fix beds and the children went to sleep again. I packed dishes and everything in the room preparatory to leaving the house if the water came on the floor. Mother cooked a lot of fried cakes and then we larger ones ate for Father said we must not go hungry. Father watched the water and at twelve o’clock it was within three inches of the floor. It is marvelous how high the water was for this house is very high. By that time the water was twelve feet high all around our own house.
Let me assure you, old journal, that was not the most cheerful time in life–that waiting for the water to either rise of fall. The night was very cold and to have had to spend the remainder of the night sitting on some bedding on the hill side was anything but a pleasant prospect–the more so that the baby was sick. It was with glad hearts then that we heard from Father that it was falling and so it was. Soon most of us were asleep while a strict watch was kept. Friday I went to town and a sorrier looking town I hope never to see again. The terrible rish of mad waters was sweeping everything before it. One building after another was being swept into the maddest of deep waters. Homes out of which nothing had been taken; water up to the second story of most buildings. In the Methodist church I found Lee and Prentiss selling goods, in the intermediate room of the school house Reeve & King, and in the primary room Grange. In the upstairs hall was a harness shop. Every house was filled with poor homeless people. All those on the hill were doing their very best to make it comfortable for the waery water stricken ones. In the Baptist church the Case people were keeping hotel and in the Episcopal Mr. Ginn. It was heartrending to see the tearful faces as they watched the last remnant of their homes go to make driftwood on the old Missouri. Just below town was a large tract of gorged ice and when a house would lodge there men would get to it and carry out what they could secure. Organs and books, clothes and edibles. Men in boats were going through town in search of goods. With good management three, four, or five men could get across the treacherous waters to a store and get out what was most needed. Mr. Russell lost all his cattle, horses, and hogs.

Sunshine Always, part 6

Alice gave a lot of good history in her diaries, as well as noting her personal thoughts. Today, she continues:

In half an hour it commenced to fall and by morning was well out of the house. When it was light the cattle went to the hill and we concluded to live upstairs until the water subsided. Sometime in the forenoon the water commenced to rise again and in the afternoon Father said we must get over to Grandfather’s who lives high upon the hillside. When we started over the water was scarecly high enough to permit the boat to pass over the railroad track. But the water was raising fast and we had to wait until we could cross it. We were a sorry looking family; Mother with the baby crying, a few bed clothes, two pigs and the other children looking downcast and tearful. Father had to tow the boat along the track wading in water two feet deep. At last we crossed and with a glad Indian yell I seized the pole and helped get the boat the rest of the way. Then we thought our worst trouble was over and all we would find to bother us was that we must live with Grandmother and be crowded and inconvenienced. The next day the ice commenced to run in large quantities and a great deal collected by the bridge near our house. Faster it came and we knew that unless the bridge gave way our house must go. It was with joy we hailed the sight of the middle of the bridge give way. It had been no pleasant thought to know that all we had was in that house except a part of the bedding, the stock, and what few old clothes we had on. Every picture, all the little treasures we had been eleven years in collecting, our best clothes, which, if not costly were all we had and so was as much to us as though worth a million. The next day, amid many dangers of swift current, floating ice and fence posts, Father, the boys, and myself went over in a small boat and got our a load of the most valuable of our house-hold articles that were upstairs. Clothes, my trunk, a few books, some dishes–whatever we cared most for of the things. We left the pictures hanging on the wall, my mirror, my sofa, my large rocking chair and numberless trinkets in the bureau and on the whatnot. We thought the water would not reach them.

Check out the rest of the book at www.sdshspress.com

Sunshine Always, part 5

We left Alice writing in her diary yesterday, and that is where we pick it up now. Remember to check out all the details of Sunshine Always on the SDSHS Press website.

‘Tis just a week tonight that Father came to my room saying, “The overflow is here.” He & my two brothers waded in water a foot deep and icy cold trying to tuen out and drive to the hill our cattle. Poor frightened animals, they knew not what was wanted–the darkness was awful and most could do nothing but bellow and stand in the water as it rose about them. I hastened downstairs and found mother dressing. Sooner than I can write it I saw water had already risen a foot and a half and lacked but six inches of coming in on the floor. With all the haste of which I was capable I commenced to carry things upstairs. Books, papers, shoes, stockings, dresses, everything I could gather up that I though would be near enough the floor to be likely to be met by the fast rising water I carried upstairs. With Mother’s help I sat the sofa on a barrel and stand in the dining room and commenced to take up the parlor carpet. At that moment I felt the ice cold water touch my feet. Mother was taking up what dishes she though we would need and what edibles she had already cooked. Father came in then and we sat the organ on two chairs. Then, wading in the water, which by this time was up to my ankles, I carried the bedding which was on Mother’s bed upstairs. Back and forth through that awful ice water I waded until everything within two feet and a half of the floor was put up to where we thought the water would not rise. All this was done in 15 minutes and we all then went up stairs.

Sunshine Always, part 4

This morning we continue to work our way through Sunshine Always: The Courtship Letters of Alice Bower and Josephy Gossage of Dakota Territory:

Rapid City, Dak.
March 10th 1881
Miss Alice Bower
Vermillion D. T.
My Dear Miss:
I expected to be in your town before this and have the pleasure of meeting you and making some arrangements in regard to your coming to Rapid City–but the severe weather we have had for the past month has compelled me to abandon the trip for the time being. I will however make the trip as soon as we have weather that it will be safe to make the trip.
Hoping to be kept posted as to your whereabouts and hear from you occasionally,
I am Yours
Most Respectfully,
Jos. B. Gossage

[From Alice's journal]
April 3rd. School closed a week ago Friday. We had some nice exercises and a pleasant time. Oh, how glad, how delighted I was to be through. I dislike teaching above all things. Received a letter from the Doctor. It was satisfactory. He will visit Vermillion as soon as the roads are passable. I received another letter from Mr. Gossage. He wrote to tell me the weather had interefered with his trip but he would make it as soon as possible. He seems quite anxious to make my acquaintance and wishes me to keep him posted as to my whereabouts and to write him occasionally. I wonder what kind of man he is and what he looks like. I am confident he would, if circumstances permit, offer me what hear he has remaining from his first wife but as far as I know now I have decided in favor of a man who has been before the public much more than he has. Here I go on, Journal, writing foolish trash and say nothing of the sad happenings of the previous week. (A wail of agony goes up from the sorrowing ones of Vermillion.) Our once happy, prosperous Vermillion is being tried, not by fire, but by water. The mighty, rishing, rolloing Missouri is upon us. Taking into consideration the amount of snow which fell last winter, the ice formed and we ought to have known that we could expect nothing else. The water comes from away in the mountains, from the high plains, and from the unpretentious valleys and ravines. Our vast country is suffering from a super-abundant supply of the cleansing fluid. Cleansing did I say? Aye, anything but that. Rather ought I to say, grimy, foul, inky and discouraging stuff.

More to come soon!