Sunday, April 21, 1912
Tullis, Montana

Dear Sister Mary,

We are here and all well and hope this finds you the same. Flora and I came into Tullis on the Wednesday train after four days on the cars — Lon met us at the depot with the wagon and a team he bought off a man going back to Minnesota. He has been here three weeks with the emigrant car and the cow and has filed at the land office. Mary I wish you could see it. There is Nothing. I do not mean there is not much — I mean nothing, grass and sky and wind, and the sky comes down to the ground on every side like a bowl turned over us. Flora asked where the trees were and Lon said they had all been shipped to Ohio.

Our claim is nine miles from town on a high flat they call the bench. Lon has the shack half up — it is twelve by sixteen with a tar paper roof — and we are sleeping in the wagon till it is done. The grass is short and curly and gray green and smells sweet when you walk on it. At night the coyotes sing. Flora thought it was children crying the first night and I did not sleep much either.

The Woosters on the next claim south are from Iowa and have been here since last summer. Mrs. Wooster walked over the first morning with a loaf of bread and a jar of chokecherry jelly. She is about Mother's age and I could have cried.

In town they were all talking about the big ship that went down. Lon read it to me out of the paper. All those people and the water so cold. I keep thinking of it out here where there is no water at all.

Tell Mother I am not sorry we came. Tell her I am not sorry yet. Kiss the babies for me —

your loving sister
Ruby

Sunday, July 14, 1912

Dear Mary,

Your letter came Thursday and I read it three times standing in the road. The shack is done and we are in it. It is one room with a curtain across for the bed. Lon and Ted Vowell put it up in four days. Ted is a bachelor from Wisconsin who filed the same week as Lon a mile west of us. He eats Sunday dinner with us and talks about nothing but wheat and [?].

Lon has been breaking sod since May with the team and the walking plow. The sod turns over in long strips like a carpet rolled back, all roots underneath, and it is the hardest work I have ever seen a man do. He has forty acres broke and in flax. Mr. Wooster says flax is what you put in the first year on new breaking because it will grow where wheat will not.

We haul our water from the Woosters' well, two barrels in the wagon every other day. Mary you would not believe how careful you get with water. I wash the dishes, then I wash the floor with the dishwater, then I throw what is left on my hollyhock seeds by the door. They are up two inches. I will have one flower in Montana if it kills me.

Mr. Wooster read in the paper that Congress has passed a new law so you can prove up in three years now instead of five, and be away five months of the year to work for wages. Lon says that means 1915. Three years Mary. I can do anything for three years.

The wind has not stopped blowing since the day we came. Lon says it will. Mrs. Wooster says it won't.

your loving sister
Ruby

Sunday, January 19, 1913

Dear Mary,

It was thirty two below on Tuesday by the thermometer Ted gave us for Christmas. I did not know air could hurt. The snow is fine as flour and comes in around the window and under the door and in the mornings there is a little drift of it across the foot of the bed. Flora calls them her snow kittens.

We burn coal. There is no wood here at all but there is coal in the cutbank down by the creek, soft brown coal that Lon and Ted dig out with a pick and haul up in the wagon. It burns hot and quick and smells like a wet cellar and it makes a terrible lot of ashes. We are warm. I want you to tell Mother we are warm.

The cow is in the lean-to Lon built on the north side, and the hens are in with her, and on the very coldest nights the hens come in the shack with us in a box by the stove. You may imagine what Flora thinks of that.

I am teaching Flora her letters at the table in the evenings. She is reading out of the Ward's catalogue, which is the only book we have besides the Bible and the almanac, so she can spell "corset" and "cream separator" but not "cat."

Now Mary I will tell you what I have not told Mother. I expect to be confined in March. Mrs. Wooster has brought eleven children into the world, four of them her own, and she says she will come. Don't you worry and don't let Mother.

your loving sister
Ruby

Sunday, April 6, 1913

Dear Sister,

You have a nephew. Irving Lon Wachter was born on Monday the 24th of March at four in the morning in a snowstorm and weighed eight pounds on the cream scale. Lon rode for Mrs. Wooster at midnight and could not see the road for the snow and let the horse find it. She came in with her bag and her apron already on under her coat and took charge of everything and of Lon too. I am well and up and around. The doctor from Tullis came out on Wednesday when the road was open and said Mrs. Wooster had done better than he would have.

He is a good baby and loud. He has the Wachter ears, tell Mother. Flora wants to know when he will be big enough to help with the chickens.

I had thought I would be frightened out here so far from anybody and I was not. When it was over and the baby was washed Mrs. Wooster sat down by the stove and drank a cup of coffee and said, Well Ruby, now you are a Montana woman. I don't know if that is true but I liked hearing it.

Your loving sister
Ruby

Sunday, September 20, 1914

Dear Mary,

The threshers have come and gone and we have a crop. It is not a big crop but it is ours, eleven hundred bushels of wheat off of eighty acres and the flax besides, and Lon walked around the granary three times after the machine left like he did not trust it to stay.

I cooked for fourteen men for two days. Mrs. Wooster and Miss Metcalf came to help. We made eleven pies and Mary they ate every one and one man ate a whole one by himself and was sorry.

I must tell you about Miss Metcalf. She is twenty-three and has a claim of her own two miles north and lives on it alone in a shack no bigger than ours with a dog and a rifle. This fall the families on the bench put up a schoolhouse on a corner of the Woosters' land and she is teaching it, nine pupils, Flora one of them. Flora comes home every day with something new. Yesterday it was the capitals of all the states.

Lon reads us the paper about the war in Europe. Mr. Wooster says it means the price of wheat will go up. It is a terrible thing to be glad about. I am trying not to be.

your loving sister
Ruby

Sunday, May 16, 1915

Dear Mary,

We have proved up.

I have been waiting three years to write that down. The notice ran five weeks in the Tullis paper like it has to, and on Tuesday Lon and I drove to the land office in our best, with Mr. Wooster and Ted Vowell along for the witnesses. They had to swear we had lived on it and broke it and built on it. Ted told the man we had built a house "with a real floor" and said it like it was a palace. Then Lon signed and paid the fee and the man stamped the paper and that was all. Three years and it took about twenty minutes.

We drove home in the rain. It has rained all spring, Mary. Everybody says they never saw a spring like it. The wheat is up green as Ohio and the buffalo grass is full of little flowers I don't know the names of, purple and yellow, and the sloughs have water in them and ducks.

After supper I walked out to the corner stake by myself. It is just a stake in the ground with a pile of rocks around it. I stood there a long time. It is ours now. Not the government's and not the bank's and not anybody's but ours and the children's.

I know you think we are foolish to be so far away. Maybe we are. But I wish you could have stood there with me.

your loving sister
Ruby