It was about Christmas time in 1883 when E. A. Partridge was twenty-one. The place was near Sintaluta, District of Assiniboia, North-West Territories, and homesteading there in the days before the Rebellion was no feather bed for those who tackled it. A piece of actual money was a thing to take out and look at every little while, to show to one's friends and talk about. Season after season the half starved agricultural pathfinders lost their hard-earned crops by drouth and what was not burned out by the sun was eaten by ubiquitous gophers. The drouth was due, no doubt, to the frequent prairie fires which swept the country; these found birth in the camp-fire coals left by ignorant or careless settlers on their way in. Under the rays of the summer sun the blackened ground became so hot that from it ascended a column of scorching air which interfered with the condensation of vapor preceding the falling of rain. Clouds would bank up above the prairie horizon, eagerly watched by anxious homesteaders; but over the burned area the clouds seemed to thin out without a drop falling upon the parching crops. Forty-three acres, sown to wheat, was the first crop which the Partridge brothers put in. The total yield was seven bushels, obtained from around the edges of a slough! One by one discouraged settlers gathered together their few belongings and sought fresh trails. Lone men trudged by, pack on back, silent and grim. Swearing at his horses, wheels squealing for axle-grease, tin pans rattling and flashing in the hot morning sun, a settler with a family stopped one day to ask questions of the two young men. He was on his way--somewhere--no place in particular. "I tell ye, boys, this country ain't no place fer a white man," he volunteered. "When y'ain't freezin' ye're burnin' up, an' that's what happens in hell!" He spat a stream of tobacco juice over the wagon wheel and clawed his beard, his brown face twisted quizzically. "God A'mighty ain't nowheres near here! He didn't come this fur West--stopped down to Rat Portage![1] Well, anyways, good luck to ye both; but ef ye don't git it, young fellers, don't ye go blamin' me, by Jupiter!" He cracked his whip. "Come up out o' that, ye God-forsaken old skates!" And, mud-caked wheels screeching, tin pans banging and glaring, he jolted back to the trail that led away in distance to No Place In Particular. But along with some others who confessed to being poor walkers, the Partridge boys stuck right where they were. They set about the building of a more permanent and comfortable shack--a sod house this time. It took more than seven thousand sods, one foot by three, three inches thick; but when it was finished it was a precocious raindrop or a mendacious wind that could find its way in.