Sod-House Days: Letters from a Kansas Homesteader, 1877-1983

University Press of Kansas, 1983. Softcover. Like New. 5x0x8. Howard Ruede was twenty-two years old in March of 1877 when he rode on a freight wagon into Osborne City, a community in west-central Kansas. A young man of courage, common sense, and independence, Ruede was filled with the optimism and determination typical of the men and women who took up the challenge of homesteading on the prairie.Brought together by economist John Ise and first published in 1937, Sod-House Days is a collection of the letters Ruede wrote to his family in Pennsylvania chronicling his first year in Kansas. In minute detail these letters show the hard, wearying work faced by homesteaders in the 1870s, their almost unbelievable poverty, the hardships of poor food, inadequate clothing, crowding, unsanitary conditions, the lack of decent drinking water, the bedbugs and fleas, flies and mosquitoes. We see Ruede struggling to stay out of debt, walking miles to pick up the mail or to visit a neighbor, working until his bare feet are rubbed raw by the wheat stubble of the fields, going without meat because he hasn't been able to kill a jackrabbit, cooking biscuits in a kettle over his sod fireplace. Taken together, his observations constitute a careful and graphic picture of the pioneer community in which he lived, one that joins recent studies such as Sandra Myres's Westering Women and the Frontier Experience in presenting an accurate, if brutal, picture of life on the western frontier.