The Letters, 1916-1921 - Letters from the Claim

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Letters from the Claim
The Letters, 1916–1921
Introduction · 1912–1915 · 1916–1921

Sunday, August 27, 1916

Dear Mary,

We are in the middle of harvest and I am writing this at the table with Myrtle asleep in the basket at my feet. She is four months old today and fat as butter and has never once been cold, which is more than her brother can say.

It is another big crop. Lon thinks twenty bushels to the acre on the new ground. The price is the highest anybody has seen and Mr. Wooster says it will go higher if the war keeps on. Lon has bought a Ford car in Tullis. I said what do we want with a car when we have a team, and Lon drove me to town in forty minutes, and I have not said anything about it since.

We have a real house now. Lon and Ted built two rooms onto the shack this spring and shingled it and the old shack is the kitchen. I have curtains. I have a rag rug in the front room that I made out of every worn-out thing we brought from Ohio, and some of it is Mother's old blue dress, so I walk on Mother every day and think of her.

Flora is eight and reads everything. Miss Metcalf lends her books. She read Little Women in a week and cried for two days and now wants to be Jo.

The hollyhocks came up red this year. Eleven of them.

your loving sister
Ruby

Susan: Myrtle is my great-aunt, born in April 1916. She is eighty-three and lives in a retirement home on the West End, and she is the only person left who remembers the claim at all. She says she remembers the rag rug, and the smell of the coal stove, and nothing else. The prices really were extraordinary during the war years. A lot of families on the bench borrowed against their land to buy more of it, and cars, and machinery. You can see where this is going. They couldn't.

Sunday, June 10, 1917

Dear Mary,

I have your letter about the boys from home going to the army. We will pray for them.

On Tuesday every man on the bench from twenty-one to thirty went into Tullis to register for the draft. Ted Vowell went in with Lon, though Lon is too old and only went to keep him company. They came home quiet. Ted says he will not wait to be called, he will go and enlist after harvest. He has asked Lon to look after his place. I said that is a great deal to ask, and Ted said he knew it was, and Lon said of course we would, so that is that.

It has not rained since the middle of April. The wheat came up fine and now it has stopped and is standing there short and blue-green, waiting. Every afternoon the clouds pile up in the west like they mean it and every evening they go on by. Mrs. Wooster says it is only a dry spell. She has been here longer than us so I am believing her.

I keep the hollyhocks alive with dishwater.

your loving sister
Ruby

Susan: The United States had declared war that April, and the first draft registration day was Tuesday, June 5, 1917, for men 21 through 30. Lon was 33. This is the first letter where Ruby mentions dry weather. It was not a dry spell. It was the beginning of the drought that emptied the bench.

Sunday, November 17, 1918

Dear Mary,

I am sorry it has been so long. We have had the sickness here and I could not write.

It came to the bench the second week of October. The school was closed and church too and nobody went to town. Lon took it first and was in bed nine days and very bad, and then Irving and Myrtle, and Flora and I nursed them and then Flora took it too. I did not get it. I don't know why. Miss Metcalf came every day and left soup on the step and would not come in because of her pupils. The Lord spared us all and I can't think why we were spared when others were not. The family on the north road lost their oldest girl, she was fifteen. I went to sit with her mother. There was nothing to say.

Lon is up now and thin and very weak but he went to town Monday for the first time, and while he was there the news came that the war is over, and the depot man blew the whistle on the engine until it ran out of steam, and Lon said grown men were crying on the platform. We have a letter from Ted Vowell in France written in September. He was well then. We will not know more for a while.

The crop was nothing again this year. I will write about it another time. I am too tired tonight.

your loving sister
Ruby

Susan: The influenza of 1918 reached Montana in the fall, and towns all over the state closed their schools, churches and theaters for weeks. The Armistice was signed on Monday, November 11. I have read this letter more times than any other. When I think about how close it came, how easily I wouldn't be here typing it, I have to get up and walk around the house.

Sunday, August 3, 1919

Dear Mary,

No crop. I don't mean a short crop Mary, I mean no crop. It never rained. The wheat came up in May and died in June and the grasshoppers ate what was left, and then they ate the garden, and then they ate the handle of the hoe where it was smooth from Lon's hands. I would not believe that if I had not seen it.

Lon has cut Russian thistle for the cows. That is a weed, a terrible spiny thing that rolls across the country in the fall, but it is green when nothing else is and the cows will eat it if they must. Everybody is doing it. We have sold all but two cows and the team.

The Woosters are going back to Iowa in September. Their son has a place for them. Mrs. Wooster came over Tuesday and we sat on the step and did not say much. Six families have left the bench since spring. You can see their houses standing empty with the doors open and the wind going through.

The dust is the worst. It comes in through every crack and lies on everything, the table and the beds and the baby, and you wipe it off and an hour later it is back.

I am not sorry we came. I said I would tell you when I was, and I am not, yet. But I am tired, Mary. I am so tired.

your loving sister
Ruby

Susan: 1919 was the worst year of the drought in eastern Montana. The grasshoppers really did eat tool handles; I found two other accounts that say the same thing, for the salt from people's hands. And people really did feed Russian thistle to their stock to keep them alive. There is no letter from Ruby to Mary for the next fourteen months. I don't know if there were letters that were lost or if she just couldn't write them.

Sunday, March 13, 1921

Dear Mary,

The bank in Tullis closed its doors in January. We did not have much in it, thank God, but the Swede family on the north road had everything in it, and so did others. Wheat is worth less than it cost to grow it. Lon says the war prices were the worst thing that ever happened to this country, because everybody borrowed on them.

So I will tell you what we have decided. Lon is going to Billings in April to work for wages, at the sugar factory or the railroad, whatever he can get, and send money home. If it rains by June we will stay. If it does not we will go to Billings in the fall, all of us.

Ted Vowell came home from France well and stayed one month on his place and then sold it to a man from Minneapolis for almost nothing and went to Washington state to work in the woods. He sent the children each a dollar. Miss Metcalf married a widower from Great Falls in December. The school has seven pupils and a new teacher who cries.

Flora is thirteen. She will be glad to go. She wants a high school and a library. Irving cries when we talk about it. Myrtle doesn't remember anywhere else.

Pray for rain.

your loving sister
Ruby

Susan: Dozens of small banks in Montana failed in the early 1920s, when the price of wheat collapsed after the war. It did not rain in June.

Sunday, November 20, 1921
Billings, Montana

Dear Mary,

Here is our new address at the top. We are in Billings since the 1st of October in a house on a street with sidewalks. It is a rented house, four rooms, with water that comes out of a faucet in the kitchen and electric lights that you turn on with a button, and Myrtle turns them on and off until I make her stop. Lon is working at the sugar factory and likes it all right. The children are in school. Flora is in the high school and walks there with a girl from next door.

There are trees here, Mary. Real ones, big cottonwoods along the street and down by the river, and in October they were yellow as butter. I stood under them the first day and could not see the sky, and I was surprised to find that I minded.

We left the house on the claim standing. Lon wanted to take it apart and haul the lumber to town and sell it, but I would not let him. Somebody may need it.

On the last morning I walked out to the corner stake again by myself. The rocks were still piled up around it where Lon put them. I didn't stay long. There wasn't anything to say that I hadn't said to it before.

I am not sorry we went, Mary. I am not sorry we came away either. I think a person can be both.

Kiss everybody for me, and Mother most.

your loving sister
Ruby

Susan: Ruby lived in Billings for the rest of her life, thirty-eight more years, most of them in the same house on the same street, under the cottonwoods. She wrote to Mary every month until 1959. Those letters are in the box too, and someday I'll type them, but they are a different story: church suppers and grandchildren and the price of coal. This is the one I wanted to finish on.

« The Letters, 1912–1915 · Introduction

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Last updated September 12, 1999