Legacy

It was 1857 and Samuel Gilbert and his wife Mary along with there two small boys Jack and Todd were heading west to homestead fifty acres of Kansas Prairie out in the middle of no where.  And nowhere may be an understatement, as it was at least fifty miles from the last small trading post.  And as barren as could be except for lush prairie grass.  Not a tree with in eyesight, except for a few scrawny ones along a creek bed about three miles from their homestead site.  What water they would have would be hauled by barrels from that creek until a well could be dug.

Digging a well was a tedious labor intensive time consuming thing to do, and with no guarantee of finding water.  It was however not the first order of business.  Marking boundaries was the first order and building a shelter the next. Their covered wagon had provided some protection from the rain as they came west, but it would not sustain them during the winter.  That would take a shelter a fire could be built in.

Now out on the prairie there was a great scarcity of wood.  Stone was also hard to come by.  That is why that most trading posts and towns one would pass through had as one of its main businesses a lumber yard.  That was nice except for two things. One would need an extra team and wagon to haul an adequate amount and two it was expensive beyond belief.  That’s why most didn’t have any lumber to use in their sod houses. Dugouts became the first thing they would try, usually caved in with the first heavy rain.

In a nutshell, cut sod blocks were somewhat held together with prairie grass roots, not as good as an adobe brick by any means.

Yet it could be a somewhat usable material if one really knew what he was doing when he used it.  Sadly most did not. And rain ruined more shelters than one could count which is why so many gave up and went back east.  Yet new and gullible about a little work assuring success were in no short supply.  They just kept coming.  By sheer numbers, enough succeeded to make a foothold, survive, thrive, and build a life.

Sam Gilbert was no exception nor a rich man by any means, he sold his gold watch inherited from his father just to buy a small amount of lumber that he could fit in his already overloaded wagon.

Sam’s wagon was loaded alright, he had a plow taking up much of the space, a chest of hand tools, two each, one hundred pound sacks of seed corn.  A small bag of assorted vegetable seeds, several coils of rope, a trunk full of assorted clothing, two each folded squares of canvass, each about fifteen by twenty feet.  And two small piglets, a sow and a boar, caged.  Potential breeding stock.

Now Sam was a step or two ahead of the average homesteader inasmuch as he’d heard about the sod house business and the failures of such structures. He’d done his homework and thought he might have a way around some of those problems.

Sam and family arrived in the early spring, took care of boundary marking and started building the sod house.  Later on as neighbors came from miles away just to have an occasional whing ding, it was noted Sams soddy was a bit different.  Indeed it was.

The prairie was littered with buffalo bones.  A bit curved, but stout and durable.  Sam would take a Buffalo rib bone and break it into two pieces each with out too much curve and about fifteen inches long on the average.  Leg bones were also usable after having the knurled ends chipped off and made more pointy.

Sam took those bone pieces and used then to pin the sod blocks together.  The idea being that even if rain soaked and drippy that would prevent the blocks from turning into a soggy dissolving mess and collapsing.  Then Sam cantilevered the walls to  lean outward a bit as they went up.

The idea of that was to keep rain off of them as much as possible and also away from the foundation or wall bottom point. Now the roof was very important also.  That’s why some wood was needed even if one had to tear the sides off his wagon to get some.  It would support the sod roof.  Unfortunately, a lot of those became a soggy mess and fell in.

Now this is where Sam was one savvy homesteader.  He brought that little bit of lumber with him for a reason, it was to be rafters and support for a roof, but not just a regular soddy roof.

Sam had brought that extra canvass with him for a reason.  He stretched it tight over the rafters.  Then having been a boy in old England until the age of fourteen, he knew all about thatched roofs.  Something the average homesteader never heard of. Sam also knew that the tall prairie grass while not as heavy as long straw; could be dried and used to make a fine thatched roof.  He cut and tied and bundled and placed until he had a good thick thatched roof.

Not to stop there, Sam then cut some thinner sod blocks and covered the thatch with them.  Sam thought and he was right, that such would provide good insulation for helping keep cool in the summer and warm in the winter.  The rain?  It would merely soften the sod layer a bit allowing it to blend with and adhere to the thatch.

Word got around somehow, and neighbors whose places had fallen in came around to see how to make one that would last.  Sam as King of the Soddies, became a bit of a local legend.

When asked about raising corn instead of wheat?  Sam’s reply was, it was economics initially because the corn seed was cheaper.  And he continued with it because of the by product of the cobs.  Sam said as the Buffalo chips become less plentiful for fireplace fuel, corn cobs take their place.  True they didn’t give as much heat as the Buffalo chips, but they were a renewable resource.  Sam added with a grin, also nice to use in the outhouse.

Over the next few years, Sam’s crops were good, the piglets performed as expected, and now Sam has a dozen fine hogs, and plenty of ham.  What’s ham without eggs?  Sam being an innovator without regular chickens, managed to snare some female (hens) Prairie Chickens and cage them in the cage he had transported the piglets in back when.  They provided a few eggs, albeit on the small side, tasty enough.

Prairie Chickens and Jack Rabbits provide much of the day to day meat.  An occasional antelope who showed his face at the wrong time and place, always got invited to dinner.

Sam had depended on the rain the last few years to water the crop.  He didn’t mind filling the barrels from the creek two miles away for water. That took care of their drinking needs.

The came a bit of a drought. Sam could barely haul water fast enough to keep his crops alive.  And on top of that the creek was getting low.

Sam said I guess I’ll have to try and dig a well.  Now that’s just an expression, because without rocks to line one, digging would be very dangerous and a waste of time as the well side would cave in, not while one was digging one always hoped.

Technologies were changing even then.  Drilling instead of digging was becoming the thing to do.  Sam had to go fifty miles to find a drill.  He brought it home and rigged up one of his horses to do the labor of turning the drill.

That went well enough for the first eight feet, when the drill head hit something harder than sand or soil.  It started making a grinding sound. Sam was just sure he was close to ruining the drill head.  He pulled the drill out and looked at the head, it was Okay, it had only penetrated about ten inches into that somewhat harder stuff.

Then Sam eyeballed the end of the drill head real good, his eyes almost popping out at what he saw.  It was salt.  Sam had struck a huge thick vein of salt.  Now in those days, while salt was not like finding gold, it was still a fine valuable find.  Salt was a very scarce commodity and much desired.  Sam got to digging with a fury.  The more he dug the more he saw.

Sam started cutting blocks of salt from that vein.  When he had a wagon load he took off.  Right on past the trading post fifty miles away and all the way to the first small town, a total of eighty miles from home.

Needless to say his wagon load got a whole lot of attention.  Sam sold that salt for enough to buy two more teams and two more wagons.  He loaded one of the wagons with enough lumber to go back and build his family a right fine small house.

Sam being the innovator he always was, figured away to tie together all three teams and wagons.  That truly was a Wagon Train in the strictest sense of the word.  Sam and his two sons hauled many, many loads of salt from that vein.  Sam was getting to be somewhat well to do.  But it was back breaking work.

So when some capitalistic investors found out about the salt, they wanted in on it.  In fact they wanted all of it without really knowing how much of it there was.  But their imaginations told them it was probably a mother lode, salt wise.  At least they must have had a big hope of that being the case, because they bought Sam out almost, Sam decided to retain a twenty percent interest in all future profits.

However the one hundred thousand dollars Sam got up front allowed him to move back east.  He only went as far as St. Louis.  He said he liked that area just fine.  Sam and family lived a life of ease and plenty.  The twenty percent of course passed down from one generation to the next.

And to end this story, there is only one more thing to say. That salt was the initial discovery of what is now known as the Hutchinson, Kansas Salt mine.  It goes today over a thousand feet down and a few miles every which way.  It is close to being the largest salt mine in the world.  It is also used in the mined out portions as secure storage for government items and private valuables.  It has a six hundred feet down Museum and is a very popular tourist attraction. One never knows what might come from what.