The 1870s and early 1880s were unusually wet years in the West.

The prairies plowed and planted for the first time, yielded bumper crops.

Promoters made the most of it.

The plains might once have been desert, like they said, but no longer.

The climate itself, the promised, had changed for good, and it was the very presence of settlers that had changed.

It.

The plow will go forward.

God speed the plow by this wonderful provision, which is only man's mastery over nature.

The clouds are dispensing copious rains.

The plow is more powerfu in peace than the sword in war.

The instrument which separates civilization from savagery and converts a desert into a farm or garden.

To be more concise.

Rain follows the plow.

Charles Dana Wilbur.

Within ten years, nearly 2 million people migrated farther onto the plains.

The populations of Colorado and Nebraska doubled.

South Dakota's, Montana's, and Wyoming's tripled.

But as it turned out, rain did not follow the plow.

The wet years came to an end.

Many places on the high plains emptied just as quickly as they had filled with homesteaders.

But some stubbornly hung on.

There's no question in my mind that the settlers are the real heroes.

Yes.

Yes, indeed.

In this harsh country, much of it harsh and forbidding and demanding tough country.

The fact that people could g there and establish communities and make a living for themselves and and build up society is I think that's that was a real triumph.

In a year's time, a homesteader would encounter a catalog of meteorological disasters in the springtime, and there'd be the the floods and the tornadoes that would make it difficult to get into the fields to plant a crop.

Once the crop was planted, you might go for six, eight weeks at a time with no rain at all.

And then it was bad enough that the rain was half of what the homesteader might have expected in his homeland.

Here it would fall all in one day and flood out that which had manage to survive through the drought.

There were the grasshopper storms and the windstorms.

Hailstorms would pound a cro into the ground, in some cases freezing a crop.

In July, when you thought there was no chance of anything happening like that at all in the fall, at harvest time, fire could take it.

As the fire swept across the grass lands.

Through the winter it would be a matter of surviving the cold.

And then in the spring, just started the whole mess all over again.

We look at these people sitting in front of their sod houses, and we think, what squalor?

Living in a dirt house.

We see women in maybe an elegant dress but without shoes on, an we think these people were poor.

But what I see is pride.

What they're really saying is, look how rich we are.

We are stinking rich.

Our musk melons are this big.

We have two horses.

We have a cow.

And there she is, pegged right back there.

They're showing us that they made it.