6 HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH 



and stayed there until the gale was over, not daring to 

 return to the house. Still others found their barns, fed 

 their stock, and lost their lives on the way back to the 

 house. There were also stories of lightly built farm 

 shanties that had been blown away by the wind, exposing 

 the occupants to the blizzard or killing them in the wreck. 



At that time I agreed with all our neighbors (we called 

 each other neighbors though we were fifteen miles apart), 

 that gales such as I have described were exceedingly dan- 

 gerous to life and limb. That was because we did not 

 know how to deal with them. I have since learned from 

 the Eskimos how to get along in a blizzard and should 

 feel ashamed of myself if I suffered anything as serious 

 as a frost bite from a day out in it. 



During my cowboy days our neighbors were of the 

 regular American type, but the farming community in 

 which I passed my earlier years came from countries 

 in Europe where literary ambitions take the place of the 

 money making dreams that are nowadays more common. 

 Fully half our neighbor boys talked of going to college. 

 Their ambitions were to become lawyers and authors 

 and statesmen. For my part, I had decided to become a 

 poet, and for this I considered a college education as the 

 first requirement. Through circumstances into which I 

 cannot go, but which hinged upon the Thanksgiving bliz- 

 zard I have just described, I failed in my initial busi- 

 ness venture (that of establishing a cattle ranch of my 

 own) and so turned to the earlier college dreams. When 

 I left for the Slate University I boarded a railway train 

 for the first time in my life, although I had seen railway 

 trains perhaps two dozen times before. I had fifty-three 

 dollars, wore a seven-dollar suit of clothes, and felt no 

 doubt of my ability to work my way through college. 



