Page:Women of the West.djvu/137



The people of Idaho have a rich heritage on which to build their cultural life.

Across the silver screen of the past vivid and picturesque figures move in quick succession. The Indian, trader, United States soldier, trapper, prospector and cowboy swing into sight and disappear to make way for the covered wagon.

Here is the beginning of family life in the new land. Beside the wagon strides a stalwart man, children laugh and call in its depths, on the seat is a woman, looking out on the frontier plain with grave, courageous eyes.

Presently the wagon halts and the man, sweeping the country with a keen gaze, says simply:

"This is the place. Here we will make our home."

Silently the woman descends from the wagon and stands beside him.

The children hush their voices, awed for the moment by the sense of a tremendous crisis.

What does she see, this gallant pioneer woman?

Burning under the heat of summer's sun, a vast, sage-clad desert sweeps away to the wide horizon. In the appalling stillness, it is as if the sound of a human voice had never broken the heated silence.

Rank clumps of sagebrush, gray with dust, stir idly in the hot wind, that comes and goes in sudden, fitful gusts. Far overhead an eagle soars, the only visible life in all the arid, empty waste.

"When this soil is irrigated," the man says slowly, "it produces in abundance almost past belief. We'll clear the sage-brush, put up a shack and get the ditches made this season. We'll water from the Snake River. Another spring we'll be ready to start farming."

"It's a big task," the woman's face is grim and resolute, "but we can do it."

Into her dauntless eyes flashes the light of prophecy.

"We'll make the desert blossom as a rose!"

Her clear voice rings like a trumpet's call.

How well the people of the covered wagon era accomplished their task of starting the great work of reclamation is told