Life in the Old West

"There are two times in a man's life when he should not speculate: when he can't afford it, and when he can." -- Mark Twain

Pardon my absence from the blog in recent weeks. I've been just too caught up in, first, the big presidential election, and, secondly, the horrendous economic contraction/melt-down we're currently going through.

I think we all can conclude that we are in the End of Days with such economic disasters. First, we'll all go broke. Then, we'll all be booted out of our houses, our children will be pulled away from their mothers, we will have our clothes torn off our backs, and we will finally starve to death in the bleak, cold streets of the city.

Or -- maybe not. Probably not.

Shucks, folks, if you're one of those people out there adding to the panic, you really need to take a deep breath, step back away from the stock market before you hurt us all, and just RELAX a little bit.

Take a long look at the history of the U.S. Or at least take a look.

If you look at our history, you'll find some terrible economic downturns, often referred to as "Panics," and a few serious depressions along the way. There was the Panic of 1819, Panic of 1837, Panic of 1857, Panic of 1873, Panic of 1893, Panic of 1907, and of course the "biggie," the Great Depression of the 1930s. Now there's much more grim news than that which checkers our economic and financial history. Heck, those were just a few of the index entries in my trusty, old, moldy copy of "The American Pageant," a college U.S. history textbook I still have around from the '60s. (The 1960s, of course. Ain't THAT old!)

In all cases, our nation survived. Our economy really did bounce back. Folks who suffered certainly did suffer, just as many are suffering job losses and home losses today. No getting around that. In some cases, we bring that suffering upon ourselves by short-sighted, bad decisions. In other cases, we just get smacked hard by the falling economy.

But, please, my friends and readers, don't continue to panic. The quicker we put panic and fear behind us, the quicker investors can get back to investing, employers can get back to employing, and we can all get back on track to living that "happily ever after" life.

I recently ran onto a short article my great-grandmother wrote in response to a call for stories of life in Custer County Nebraska by the pioneers who lived it. I just ran onto it recently, but the article itself appeared in a collection of accounts of early life in the Nebraska Sand Hills region which was published in 1936. I was fortunate enough to find a copy through an inter-library loan system. While I had the book, I scanned a copy of the article by my great-grandmother: "Early Experiences Leave a Thrill," by Mrs. Wilber Speer.

For the record, "Mrs. Wilber Speer" was a feisty, tiny woman named Caroline "Katie" (Owens) Speer. The "Mr. Speer" she was wed to was Wilber Speer, one of the pioneers who homesteaded land in Custer County back in the late 1880s. I remember as a very small child seeing Great-Grandma Speer. I must have been less than 5 or 6 years old; she appeared to my eyes to be about 1,000 years old. I haven't found a genealogy for her or any record of when she died, so I can't even guess how old she was. I do know she was born in 1867, so she was probably somewhere around 85-90 when I remember her. I recall only that she was tiny even to me, and that she seemed happy and laughed a lot.

In reading her account of pioneer homesteading on the Plains, I marvel again at how life amounted to finding shelter, growing and foraging for good food, trying hard to raise a few animals (the cows were good for food AND fuel; hence the title about cow chips), and putting up first a dugout home then a sod house. At one point, Katie says she was so happy to have boards for flooring in their sod house -- until it rained and the sod roof leaked: " ... when I wished the boards were on the roof."

Despite her accounts of battling a flea infestation, spending countless hours alone miles away from any other living person while she raised her family (ultimately 6 kids) with her husband working as a teamster, and despite the time they had a drought (1894) that forced them to turn their stock out on the prairie to find whatever food and water they could, despite all that, Katie ends her 1936 account with this statement:

"After all, it is a thrill to think of the good, old, happy days in Custer county."

Sort of makes you feel silly, doesn't it, when life's problems get us down, to think about what the real pioneers went through with hardly a blink, and came out the other side looking back at "the good, old, happy days"?

True stories, tall tales, and memorabilia of America’s West

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