Radio broadcast .. (1922-30)

Static Days and Nights 509 went across with the First Division. He was among the first to fall. Except for an occasional grunt, " Was-Tay" (good), "Waw-wee" (the Hawk) never made himself prominent. He seemed to be glad of the warmth and the company, but otherwise was merely a blur in the smoky background. Bob, our foreman, was our best entertainer. He had grown up in the saddle. He had known cattle and horses all his life. He had been in on the last of the buffalo running. In his youth he had drifted over many ranges. He told tales of "The Panhandle," Montana, Idaho, and the "Ute" country near Carson Sinks. The Dakotas were as familiar to him as his own quarter sections. His kriowlege of cattle ways and ponytricks seemed un Where It Drips Boredom canny. When the mood was on him he could recount thrilling experiences in a stilted matter-of-fact way. He had been in Spotted Tail's tepee when Crow Dog had ridden up and shot "Old Spot" as a traitor to the tribe's best interests. A moment later, sharp knives were slicing the tepee to ribbons while stone mauls were smashing the poles down about his ears. The uproar and excitement following the slaying, he told of as if he had been but a guest at a tea party. Yet in actual fact, he barely escaped alive by jumping his horse down a cut bank and riding across a narrow swift river on a one log bridge. SO FOR a month or two we had good entertainment. But as the snow banked up around our log houses, and blizzard and snow storm followed each other in steady procession, sweeping down on us over hundreds of miles of treeless prairie from distant Saskatchewan, we gradually got worn to a frazzle. We tried by superhuman efforts to hold the herd from drifting too far with the blizzards, then worked them back on to our range with painful effort, almost carrying in the weak Remington Schuyler, who is well known to readers of this magazine through the many excellent covers he has done for us, spent considerable time among a certain type of real Westerners to whom we all attach a great deal of "romance". And most of us have thought of the life of the cow-puncher and Indian as something resplendently virile and somehow romantic. We think most often of radio in the city or small town and on the farm, but here is a view of what radio is doing in the genuine "open spaces." The sketches accompanying this story were made some years ago by Mr. Schuyler on the ground, and our cover this month shows one of the typical ranch houses in this country with radio holding its new sway. — THE EDITOR. ened steers. Now and then we rescued some snow-blind, snow-bound freighter. And again when a windless snowfall had buried even the ridges, we fared forth with the pony herd. All day we let them paw through to the grass and then drove them on to another pawing contest. The cattle herd followed, and once having smelled the grass exposed by the ponies they nosed out a meagre meal. At night the tired hungry ponies were given some hay and then set adrift to shift for themselves. The prairie wind seldom ceased. All day it buffeted one. The drifts in the gullies smothered any one who got off the ridges. It was struggle and fiendish toil. Then an evening as pictured in the beginning — monotonous in its sameness. But once a month came a rift in our clouded horizons. The Rosebud, a four page newspaper, printed at the Agency School by I ndians would arrive by some circuitous hand to hand route. But bedraggled and mussed though it was, it brought news from the outside world. We had new things to talk about. In memory I can see Old Bob, leaning back in an old broken backed chair, following the text with one finger and laboriously reading and gloriously mis-pronouncing such interesting items as "John Comes-Out-Holy" has been visiting in Cut Meat with his old friend "B rings-White" or "Bill Bates and Mack Marsten have been out gunning for antelope in the Bad Lands, or "Doug" McChesney, Agency Brand: Inspector, was down near Olaf Nelson's ranch checking up on Olaf's report of too many strays from the settlers down in Nebraska, or perhaps these bits of Agency humor: "The stork has left a new Annuity Baby at Mrs. Chased-by-Bears. Louis Ribideau will have one more papoose by next Annuity Payment Day. Good luck to you Louie. We hope it will be twins." And so the wonderful news of the outside world dribbled in to us. Except for The Rosebud and an occasional