The dwellings were of three main types. There was the dug-out, usually in a side-hill, with a sod roof, a few studdings and boards being used to support the roof. The walls and floor were usually the native earth. The sod house was a more advanced and perhaps more stylish dwelling. Closely related to the sod house was the mud house where the walls, about two or three feet thick, were made of well tramped mud and straw. These mud houses were at times whitewashed and were both comfortable and sightly. As for comfort in the cold winter the dug-out and sod house were not so bad when properly built. But do not imagine that they were equal to your furnace-heated, modern house. They were, after all, a temporary hole in the ground to preserve life until houses could be had. A house made of lumber was a luxury which many an early settler had to look forward to for many a hard, long year, and often he had to die in the dug-out or sod shanty. Finally, there was the story-and-a-half frame house of two or three rooms with a possible lean-to. This type of house put one in the class of the most well-to-do; and such a habitation was the hope and dream of years for many a pilgrim mother of those days. We have turned aside from our main narrative for a look at the country as it appeared to our band of pilgrims as they looked about them on that first morning of their arrival in the Turkey Creek Valley. And the view was not all that they had hoped for. What could these men--farmers and men of trades--do in this howling wilderness of grass, grass and nothing but grass? Yes, there was something else--mosquitoes--and oh, how they stung! Also flies, and how incessantly and mercilessly they attacked the fair soft skin of these pilgrims from the Norseland! Finally, there was the heat, which literally took the fair skin off their faces in flakes and put on a tan which made them almost unrecognizable. Moreover, what could these shoemakers, masons, painters or even farmers do here? Shoes were bought; houses were of sod or earth and needed no paint; years would be required to make cultivated fields out of this sea of grass, and meanwhile they and their families must somehow live. The kind hosts did all they could to encourage and make comfortable the newcomers, sharing with them what accommodations they had. But we must remember that these first comers had not been here long themselves. The dwellings were small, without cooling porches, and in summer necessarily hot, and they had no screens to protect the inmates from the blood-thirsty fly and mosquito. So there was but little rest or comfort by day or night, especially for those unused to these conditions. This together with the unaccustomed food, which at first completely upset them, made some of the newcomers very discouraged with the new country.