All ages and sexes came to take claims. Old men, alone and feeble,
school teachers from the East, young girls from the towns of the older
counties, boys not yet of age--everywhere incoming claimants were
setting stakes upon the green and beautiful sod.
Each day the grass grew more velvety green. Each day the sky waxed
warmer. The snow disappeared from the ravines. The ice broke up on the
Moggason. The ponds disappeared. Plover flew over with wailing cry.
Buffalo birds, prairie pigeons, larks, blackbirds, sparrows, joined
their voices to those of the cranes and geese and ducks, and the prairie
piped and twittered and clacked and chuckled with life. The gophers
emerged from their winter-quarters, the foxes barked on the hills, the
skunk hobbled along the ravines, and the badger raised mounds of fresh
soil as if to aid the boomer by showing how deep the black loam was.
Everybody was in holiday mood. Men whistled and sang and shouted and
toiled--toiled terribly--and yet it did not seem like toil! They sank
wells and ploughed gardens and built barns and planted seeds, and yet
the whole settlement continued to present the care-free manners of a
great pleasure party.
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