How romantic it sounded. A family out on the prairie
working together to survive and having fun doing it.
They had respect for each other, and all worked hard
at their assigned jobs. There was a bit of music,
but not all the time. It took a couple of years to build
a 400-square-foot house with three windows, which
was unusual at the time. It took time to ready the fields
and crops of wheat were planted along with the usual
vegetable gardens which were needed for food.
They had a few animals. Then the locusts hit and wiped
out the wheat crop. The father tried to smoke them out
to no avail, and the next year, they lost the wheat crop
again as the eggs of the locusts buried in the ground
hatched and devastated their corp. He then did odd
jobs and helped neighbors, and then they had to move
and continued to move from place to place trying to
find something which would allow them to settle down
again. The television show produced by Michael Landon
presented a glamorous life compared to the reality
they lived. This was the life on the prairie. People lived
in carved-out mounds of the earth while building and trying
to make a go of it. There was very little communication
between them and their relatives and once they said
goodbye, it was probably the last time they would ever
see them. It makes our misgivings seem mild in comparison.
The children grew and drifted away to start their own lives.
Sadness and heartache had to be a normal thing.
As towns developed there was some social life, but
this, too, was limited. Our complaints today are about
conditions which would have been luxurious to them.
They went on until they no longer could and death
seemed to be a welcome respite from their misery.
Their virtues were courage and steadfastness.
Life on the prairie, hundreds of miles from nowhere.
Stanski
January 21, 2023, ^
Steve Haarman 