We finally left there and went on west where dad filed on a homestead in Perkins County. We were about halfway between Sturgis and Lemmon our closest railroad town. Dad built a sod house and I had to help carry the strips of sod for the building of the walls. Lots of work but yet it was a lot of fun. We only had one room but mother put up some drapes to divide part of the room into two bedrooms. This sod house was nice and warm even in the coldest weather as the walls were two feet thick. As long as we lived in a sod house we boys thought it would be fun if we would build our own small house on our make believe homestead. We could get into our playhouses by crawling through the door.
When summer came along a neighbor boy named Frank and I would drive our cattle together and take them to where ever we could find any grass for them to eat. We would take our lunch with us and be gone all day and then return the cows home before dark. We had a lot of fun herding the cattle in the brakes near the buttes which we would climb pretending they were mountain peaks.
Of course we boys had plenty of other things to do besides playing and make believe. Dad plowed up a lot of the prairie land and I had to help plant corn with a hand planter. Then in the fall of the year I had to harvest the corn stalks by using a short handled hoe to cut the stalks and then put these into shocks. Being that I was so young and naturally short this type of work didn’t bother me as much as it did the ones who were taller. One year dad planted about ninety acres of flax. When the flax was ripe dad harvested it with a regular hay mower with a buncher attachment behind the sickle bar. I had to take my turn following the mower around and around the field with a pitchfork so as to turn each and every bunch of flax over out of the way of the horses and mower on its next round otherwise the horses and mower would shell out a lot of the flax. After the flax was all cut it was hauled up near the buildings and later the flax was threshed out by a horse powered threshing machine. The horse powered threshing machines were manufactured berfore the straw burning steam engines.
During the time we were on the homestead the railroad was built from Mobridge, South Dakota to what is now Faith, South Dakota, the end of the line. As this brought the railroad so much closer to our home we called it our railroad town. On a clear night we could go up to a small butte back of our sod house and see the lights twenty-one miles away. One time when dad was going to go to Faith he took me with him. It was a long journey as horses were the only means of transportation in those days. When we got into town we went to Mulberry’s department store to do the shopping. Mr Mulberry had opened a basket of concord grapes for himself to eat. As he went to wait on dad with his shopping he told me to help myself to the grapes. I sure liked those grapes but I guess I ate a few too many as I had never had grapes of that kind before. To this day I can hardly eat concord grapes. To me they have the wrong kind of sweetness.