Almost pioneers : one couple's homesteading adventure in the West

Front Cover; Copyright; Table of Contents; Body; Index; Back Cover; Spine.;In the fall of 1913, Laura and Earle Smith, a young Iowa couple, made the gutsy & mdash;some might say foolhardy & mdash;decision to homestead in Wyoming. There, they built their first house, a claim shanty half dug out of the ground, hauled every drop of their water from a spring over a half-mile away, and fought off rattlesnakes and boredom on a daily basis. Soon, other families moved to nearby homesteads, and the Smiths built a house closer to those neighbors. The growing community built its first public schoolhouse and celebrated the Fourth of July together & mdash;although the festivities were cut short because of snow. By 1917, however, the Smiths had moved back to Iowa, leasing their land to a local rancher and using the proceeds to fund Earle & rsquo;s study of law. The Smiths lived in Iowa for most of the rest of their lives, and sometime after the mid-1930s, Laura wrote this clear, vivid, witty, and self-deprecating memoir of their time in Wyoming, a book that captures the pioneer spirit of the era and of the building of community against daunting odds. A really wonderful peek into the lives of a couple who tried the wide open west as homesteaders that reveals ineptitude as well as the usual pioneer bravado.